2022/104: The Tiger's Wife — Tea Obreht

2022/104: The Tiger's Wife — Tea Obreht

When your fight has purpose — to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent — it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling — 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 it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. [loc. 4056]

Natalia is a young doctor, travelling with her childhood friend Zora across a new border to administer vaccines to orphans created by the recent war. En route, she learns of her grandfather's death: not unexpected, as she was one of the few who knew he had cancer, but mysterious because he'd claimed to be on his way to visit her, but died in a remote village that neither she nor her grandmother has ever heard of. As she pieces together the truth of his death, she recalls the tales he told her, of the deathless man and of the tiger's wife. ( Read more... )