What Book to Read?

This debut novel won the 2011 Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) which was inaugurated to overcome a perceived bias in other literary awards against women writers. The prize is worth winning, because as well as its monetary value, the publicity around it generates sales. There has been a lot of controversy about this prize, and whether it is sexist in suggesting that women writers are not good enough to compete in the open prizes like the Man Booker. This made me wonder if a book such as this would ever be written by a man, and whether it is good enough to make the Booker short list, (though I know it didn’t even make the long list). You may remember that the 2011 winner was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, which I liked well enough, but didn’t think outstanding. Four of the six shortlisted books were by men, but I still haven’t read any of them. So where does that leave me? I like it quite as much as the Man Booker winner and I don’t think the gender of the writer is important. I suspect that the Women’s Prize may be more adventurous in fostering new work than the Man Booker, and maybe that is justification enough.

Téa Obreht is a Serbian-born Bosniak/Slovene American, whose family left Belgrade soon after the beginning of the wars that shattered Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The story takes place in a country that resembles Yugoslavia and the conflicts which tore it apart, but it is an imagined recreation, not reportage. The primary narrator is Natalia Stefanovic, a young doctor, and the action follows both her, in the present, and the stories she tells about her grandfather’s life, or he tells her, in the past. A prologue tells of a visit by Natalia and her grandfather to the zoo, and tells us something of the nature of tigers. The narrative proper starts with Natalia after the war is over. She is on her way to do health checks and inoculations for orphaned children over a now fortified border that previously had been ‘a joke, an occasional formality’. On her journey she learns that her grandfather, also a doctor, has died. From there, we follow Natalia’s errand to the orphans, but also trace her grandfather’s life. ‘Everything necessary to understand my grandfather,’ she says, ‘lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man.’ These are the stories Obreht tells.

In telling her grandfather’s story, Natalia is also telling her own about growing up in a dictatorial country in the throes of civil war. ‘When the fight is about unravelling – when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event – there is nothing but hate, and the long slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed by it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them.’ After the war is over, there is a sense of anti-climax. ‘For years, we had fought to show nonchalance in the face of war, and now that is was suddenly over, over without having touched us in the City, indignation was surfacing.’ What should they do with their lives? How should they come to terms with the past? Obreht does this through her exploration of Natalia’s grandfather’s life, which stands against the prevailing hatreds and fears.

In Western culture, and particularly in its medical expression, it is usually clear what is rational and real, and what is superstition and supernatural. In this imagined central European country, fought over for generations by the Orthodox, the Catholics and the Muslims, that distinction is less defined. The story explores how gossip and superstition become myth, and how myth can come full circle back to reality. It also examines the relationship between those who practise medicine, and death, ‘medicine’ here including the apothecary who first introduced Natalia’s grandfather to tigers through Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Natalia’s grandmother has her own rituals about the passage of the soul after death, and even her grandfather may, or may not, have believed there was something more than superstition in his story of the deathless man. Natalia also encounters ritual and superstition. Who is to say it cannot give hope to the relatives of the dead?

One of the things I find interesting about this book is the writer’s manipulation of chronology. I read a comment by Vargas Llosa in Tasting Life Twice (which I posted on last week) about how time ‘is always a creation in a novel.’ I immediately thought of this book, which moves seamlessly between the past and the present, changing the narrator between Natalia and her grandfather, and the tone between the here and now, the past as she remembers it, the past as her grandfather remembers it and the past she later recreates. It is, as Llosa says, ‘like one of the invented characters.’ This skill with narrative is sufficient to warrant a literary prize, even without the interest and insight of the content of the story. It is an amazing debut.

You can read more about Téa Obreht here.