Tiger's Wife Book

Tiger Wife The opening passage of Tea Obrecht's novel The Tiger's Wife is one of its most compelling, and draws the reader into the unique narrative. With the line, "the forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death," Obrecht could be resorting to a maudlin bit of poetic license. Instead, the author continues the existential description and thereby sets the stage for the tone and themes of the entire novel. By beginning with imagery of death, Obrecht welcomes the reader to ponder the meaning of life.

A juxtaposition of life and death haunts the reader from the first paragraph. However, there are more juxtapositions that await the reader and which are foreshadowed in this early passage. The narrator states that the living "know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past." In addition to the juxtaposition of life and death, soul and body, is added the juxtaposition of past, present, and future.

Therefore, the opening passage signals one of the main themes of the novel, that continuity and change coexist in the human experience. Binaries are key to understanding The Tiger's Wife, which is why the opening passage is filled with an exploration of how opposites characterize human perception.

The node of juxtaposition hinges mainly on binaries like "difficulties and unbridled happiness," as well as "love and guilt." All human beings experience these types of polar opposites in their life, which is why the author is able to weave a story through multiple generations while retaining core themes. Historical situations change, social norms change, but human perception, cognition, joy and suffering do not change. Throughout multiple generations, such as the ones we meet as we read The Tiger's Wife, human beings all must die.

Therefore, the reader learns that multigenerational wisdom, continuity, and change permeates the pages of The Tiger's Wife, too. After the opening passage and its exploration of death, life, and binaries, the narrator grounds the narrative by referring to her grandparents. Grandparents symbolize a bygone generation. However, grandparents also represent wisdom and an understanding of history. Superstitions, such as those related to the proverbial forty days of the soul that offers the opening imagery for the novel, are also deeply rooted in the past.

By exploring the past with grandparents, it becomes possible to understand the present and possibly transform the future. Throughout generations there is continuity of culture and core human values; but change is also inevitable. This is why the opening passage of The Tiger's Wife is remarkable. Obrecht is able to show that change and continuity occur simultaneously and that death is a counterpart of life and integral to it.

Given the setting of the novel, the author does want the reader to better understand Balkan culture and history through an exploration of change and continuity. The opening passage of the narrative provides the theme of continuity and change so that one can see how and why the Balkans has gone through its many wars and periods of conflict. War is an unfortunate part of human history, and younger generations often forget the past.

However, young people are often also victims of the past as they fight the wars their grandparents never resolved. The Balkans can be an archetype from which to explore global problems related to human conflict and ethnicity. Natalia is coming to terms with her culture and history, perceiving gradually the ways globalization and Americanization have changed her, but also the ways she retains the seed elements of her own culture.

The weaving of superstition and folk tale with real life is the narrative or literary juxtaposition that accompanies the thematic juxtapositions in Obrecht's The Tiger's Wife. With an opening passage describing the grandparent's version of how the soul proceeds after death and how the living perceive death, it is possible to locate the past in the present, and vice-versa. However, the reader is also led to the grounding point of the central narrative of Natalia.

Without the ethereal elements of the book including the folk tales and superstitions, the book would fall flat. Instead, the narrative is emboldened by a sense of magical realism that permeates Natalie's life. All readers will on some level relate to Natalie's experiences of confronting her culture and personal identity in part through the hard realities of daily existence in the Balkans but also through the softer elements of religion, culture, and superstition. Ultimately, the real and the unreal are.