Tiger tales: Two mysteries in The Tiger's Wife

There are two mysteries (at least) in Tea Obreht's novel "The Tiger's Wife": first, why is it that the narrator's (Natalia's) grandfather goes off to a clinic in a remote village of the neighboring Balkan state (Bosnia? Croatia? - Obreht is careful not to identify her narrative with precise geographical or cultural markers, though it's evident that she is writing about the Balkan wars and in particular about the tentative and tenuous peace after the war was resolve by treaty) to die a lonely death? Was he trying to help some patients or war victims? Was he trying to connect one last time with Natalia, who was on her way to deliver medicines to an orphanage relatively close by? Or is there some other reason why he would leave behind his family - who apparently didn't even know or notice that he was mortally ill with cancer? - to die unnoticed and alone? Natalia is expending a lot of energy trying to resolve this mystery - including, what happened to her grandfather's belongings after he died? Why was nothing shipped back home along with his body? The second mystery is: what do all these fables about a tiger roaming through the European landscape signify? The tiger apparently escaped from a city zoo during an air raid in World War II, and then headed north and settled in near a small village, where a deaf-mute butcher's wife began feeding the tiger slabs of pork and other meats. A group of men head off to the woods to kill the tiger, but the episode ends with one of the men shooting himself to death - in what seems to be a suicide, not an accident. I doubt Obreht expects us to take these tiger tales literally - but then what do they signify, as symbol or allegory? I expect the novel to draw these two strands together over the course of the second half, and I expect that the answer to one of the mysteries will be the answer to both.

Realism and magic realism entwin in The Tiger's Wife

I'm cautious not to judge a book too quickly, from the first 2 sections, about 80 pages, of Tea Obreht's "The Tiger's Wife," I'm very impressed - aside from the excellent writing, in which she gives beautiful and vivid descriptions of a series of events during wartime in Serbo-Croatia (wish I knew or remembered more about this history - not even sure the dates of the war, but by various cultural references the novel seems to center on events in the late 80s or early 90s?) - main character, Natalia?, is a young doctor on a mission bring meds to an orphanage in one of the neighboring states, a very tense journey taking her across a few borders in wartime, but as with other excellent war-time fiction, we also get a sharp sense of what life is like for ordinary people, not just combatants, during the events of war: on her journey to the orphanage she stops to make some phone calls, she's near a barbecue stand, we see what the people eat, we see the soldiers jostling, flirting with some girls - Obreht renders the whole scene with photographic exactitude. The call she is making - responding to messages - is about the death of her grandfather, a doctor who late in his life was forced to give up his public practice and see patients secretly because of the war - he was under suspicion. The grandfather is the central figure in this novel apparently - over the first 80 pp we move around in time quite a bit, we see Natalia in high school, when all the kids are pretty much allowed to run free, nobody has any boundaries or ambitious and parents can't or won't set limits with society in turmoil - and we see her even younger as she visits the city zoo with grandfather - he's fascinated with the tigers, perhaps too heavy-handed as symbolism, but it's a way for us to understand this character, his demands on and expectations of his granddaughter and her attempts to live up to his ideals, which puts her in conflict with her mother. Near end of section 2 there's a very dramatic scenes in which an interrogator comes into the apartment and tries to elicit info from the grandfather, who resists, to his peril. Also, the grandfather tells a rather long story about a patient who "could not die" - despite drowning, gunshots, etc. - a bit of fantasy or magic realism twisting its way into this realistic novel - I think there will be other such strands as well later in the book - and it will be interesting to see how these elements coalesce, what point Obreht is making, whether she'll be able modulate and integrate the different elements. Story has obvious Christian-allegorical themes - but also is about the tenacity of the people, or of the country itself - not actually named but evidently Croatia - in time of war.

Louise? She's all right. Don't underestimate Erdrich's fiction.

I can still remember the excitement of reading Louise Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine - such a fresh new voice, at once innovative and accessible, and a report from the field - a community not often written about - the Native Americans of the Midwest, told sometimes from a very traditional, internal perspective and also, at times, from the point of view of a young member of the tribe who has moved away, grown, gone to school, and maybe come back or maybe not. I read all of Erdrich's books for some time, but have to admit that I have not read all of her work in more recent years - it's almost as if her success was her undoing, many had followed her and her voice was no long unique, I began to associate her with best-selling, book-group fiction, and though always enjoyed reading pieces I came across did not rush out to grab her next new novel. I've come to think I've been underestimating her recent work, based in part on her story, Nero, in the current New Yorker. She's always been a great storyteller, very drawn to traditional plots and to the dictum of show don't tell - lots of action and emotion in her stories, and not a lot of needless rumination. Again - easy to underestimate that talent, and write her off as just a raconteur. Nero, as just one example, shows there's a lot more going on in Erdrich's fiction than just good yarns from the rez - this story is extremely well crafted, and traces a period in the life of a young girl, very much from her point of view, though recollected from years later, and story working on 2 levels: the eponymous Nero is a ferocious guard dog in the girl's grandfather's butcher shop, and as the girl tentatively cares for and befriends the dog, the dog leads her to the discovery that her uncle is courting a neighboring woman - a dnagerous courtship because of the extraordinary fierce jealousy of the girl's dad - story leading to a ritualized fight between young man and potential father-in-law. The girl has little overt reaction to this fight - but we can see a little bit around the edges and see that she's learning, in silence, about the strange ways of adults - the jealousy, the sexual drives, the domination. The dog becomes a symbol of this, and, at the end of the story, when the dog dies and the girl and her uncle bury the corpse, we can see or sense that an episode in her life has passed - that she has learned about the frightfulness of adulthood. Erdrich's stories seem to be conventional and circumscribed - but at their best they're as grand and universal as I.B. Singer or other great writers who have concentrated on a little postage stamp of native soil, to quote one of 'em.

Who's the corrupt one in Daisy Miller?

So who's the corrupt one? Who's the fool? Henry James's great short (for him) story Daisy Miller would is very tricky: the surface information of the story, the facts as presented by the seemingly objective 3rd-person narrator, would suggest that Daisy Miller, a 20ish American woman touring Europe with her indifferent, narcissistic mother and her bratty kid brother, is irresponsible and even, in the terms of the day, "loose": she goes out in public accompanied by a young man without a chaperone, she's even willing to walk about an park in Rome with an Italian man, finally she sits with the Italian guy under moonlight in the Coliseum. This just isn't done - and many people, including the 27-year-old American Winterbourne (no first name) advise her about this. But she's typically youthful and typically American: she'll do things her own way, and she gets the "cold shoulder" from the American community in Rome and, ultimately, in a bit of symbolism far too heavy-handed, she gets "infected" by the Italian miasma and comes down with a fever and dies. OK, she's the one who suffers - but is she wrong? I think her behavior, though unconventional, is acceptable and were she a stronger (or luckier) character she would be heroic rather than tragic. The corrupt one is Winterbourne - seeming to offer her advice and counsel, but actually in my view more or less stalking her, jealous that she's turned her affections elsewhere (even though it's obvious that the Italian guy pursuing her is no good and is only after the Miller fortune). Everyone remembers that Daisy dies, but the last moments of the story had slipped from my memory, at least - Winterbourne realizes that he blew it, that he could have had Daisy's love if he hadn't been, in her words, such a "stiff." At the end, he goes off into his meaningless life - we never learn about his family or his fortune or what it is he does all day other than allegedly "study" - apparently last heard of (by the narrator) back living in Geneva and interested in a "foreign lady" - he's no different from the Italian fortune-hunter who pursued Daisy Miller. The real corruption is the total lack of a sense of purpose or role in society other than one's own self-advancement. As Winterbourne realizes, too late, he'd lived abroad too long.

The great themes of Henry James in capsule form

As friend of W.S. wrote in an e-mail that he forwarded to me, Dickens didn't corner the market on great literary names. Henry James for one was no slouch in that department - not sure what she cited (something from the Golden Bowl, that I once found unreadable - but who knows maybe I'll try again), but I'd add: How about Caspar Goodwood, from Portrait? or how about Winterbourne, from Daisy Miller, which I picked up last night. Daisy M. was on the reading list in my freshman British Lit course a million years ago - I think it stands, alongside Turn of the Screw, as James at his most accessible, and probably a better choice for an intro Brit Lit class (do they even teach this anymore? I hate to think - does anyone still read Chaucer? Spenser? Milton?) because it introduces in capsule form many of the great James themes - especially Americans abroad and the clash between the seemingly sophisticated and cultured Old World and the seemingly boorish and ill-mannered New - but the trick is that the Old World is enervated and corrupt. If only the wandering Americans could see that, they'd be far better off. Daisy Miller, first (of 2) parts, takes place during a very short time span when Winterbourne meets Daisy, and her bratty kids brother, Randolph, on a veranda or walkway near a fancy Swiss hotel where they're both staying - Winterbourne offers to take her to visit the Castle at Chillon, she agrees, and they go without an accompaniment: scandalous! The point seems to be that Daisy is a flirtatious, loquacious American without culture - but she's stylish and very pretty. The tragedy of her life - all of us can see it coming - is that she tries to be something she's not. She would be far better off at home in Schenectady or somewhere else in the States, meeting people her age, learning something, doing something to help others or to help her family and friends at the very least - instead of these ridiculous "tours" that Americans with far too much money indulged in a century ago. The more disturbing character, though, is Winterbourne - who the hell is he, what does he do all day, how did he come upon a fortune that allows him to do nothing but travel and visit? What kind of indulgent life is this? James had his face pressed up against the glass - he socialized with many people like Winterbourne - and I suspect he despised them: he was engaged all the time, with his art. But as an author he doesn't really take a stance - just lets Winterbourne play out his role. He eviscerates W. with one sharp sentence, though - something like: His friends thought he was a friendly and amiable sort and his enemies thought - but, of course, he has no enemies. Not an exact quote - but the unspoken thought behind it is that the author is cunningly protecting W. - that we will know far more about him that W. knows about himself. We are his enemies.

Jim Burden's fear of "his" Antonia

Finished Willa Cather's "My Antonia" and read through the intro and other supplementary material in the Oxford Lit edition that I borrowed - I knew almost nothing about Cather's life and still of course know only the outlines of her life - but I give her a lot of credit, based on what I know - born with few advantages, uprooted early in life and moved (with her family, unlike the fictional Jim Burden) to the Nebraska prairie, and in this uprooting and this somewhat isolate life she found material to last her a lifetime. She obviously was an outcast and misfit in her society - dressing like a man for most of her adolescence, a behavior or decision that would be reasonably well accepted today, especially in metropolitan areas, but must have been very difficult for her in 19th-century Nebraska, to say the least. Her sexual orientation plays no overt role in My Antonia but, as at least a few critics cited in the intro have noted, sexual orientation plays an oblique role in our interpretation of this ambiguous and complex novel: does she write about Jim Burden and his heterosexual attraction to Antonia because unable to recognize or publicly express her own longings? Is her lesbian orientation part of the reason she cannot develop Jim as a character with a sex drive of any sort? Could be interesting to compare My Antonia with another great novel of a young man attracted to an older, unavailable woman: thinking of Sentimental Education - but notice the differences, in Flaubert the man eventually could get what he desired so deeply, but by that time his youthful desires mean nothing to him. Jim Burden, in My Antonia, on the other hand, finds a fulfillment in Antonia - in a way feels warmest toward her and closest to her - when she does become unavailable: he's not drawn to her when she is a single mother working on a farm and maybe he could have had her for his "sweetheart" or his wife, as he wistfully says (but he does nothing to make this so) - he's drawn to her when he sees her as a happily married farm wife with a brood of 12. He can only feel close to her when she's not available, when she's not a threat.

The strangest thing about Willa Cather's My Antonia

When you get right down to it, the strangest thing about Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is that the narrator, Jim Burden, has absolutely no feelings about losing his parents when he was 10: the novel begins (after the short frame-setting preface) with Jim, a 10-year-old boy from Virginia, whose parents both died "within the year," I think is how he puts it, and he's sent, with a fellow who worked for his parents on their Virginia farm (?) half-way across the country to live with his grandparents on a farm on the Nebraska prairie. Never at any point in the novel, to my recollection, does he express any thoughts about his parents or any feelings about missing them, about being lonely, isolated, abandoned, anything. This blankness in his heart helps understand or unravel his confused feelings toward Antonia at the end of the novel: the next-to-last section concludes with Jim's visiting Antonia, after he's finished college and is about to enter law school, and she's an unwed mother working on a very isolated prairie farm: their lives are obviously going in completely opposite directions. Their reunion is in "silence and tears," as Jim notes (quoting Byron, according to a footnote), and he says he always wanted her as a sweetheart, wife, mother - and that she will always be part of his life. The telling word there is: mother - that's what he's really wanted from Antonia, whether he understands this or not. This feeling becomes more open and apparent in the last section, Cusak's Boys (?), when Jim 20 years later visits Antonia on her farm - he feels bad about staying away for so many years - he wants her in his life forever, but he just doesn't want to be with her, apparently - the novel's odd avoidance of sexuality ? - but when he sees her all his affections for her reignite - but in a very pristine and asexual manner - because she's married, a strong and busy farm wife, with a brood of I think 11 children - all of them lively and helpful- the family is quite a team. In some ways it's a pastoral ideal - but Cather, with her characteristic tough-mindedness, makes sure we also see the hardships and difficulties of prairie life: when Jim arrives on the farm, the boys are lamenting the death of one of their dogs - but then life moves on, there are chores to do. The novel ends with this grand and idealized version or vision of Antonia: Jim doesn't want "His" Antonia as an object of sex or desire, he wants his mother.