Obreht makes powerful debut with 'Tiger's Wife'

[March 12, 2011]  FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) -- "The Tiger's Wife" (Random House), by Tea Obreht: In Tea Obreht's powerful debut novel, "The Tiger's Wife," the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and plenty of the guilty as well.

In this novel set in the postwar Balkans after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, there is no Sarajevo, Pristina or Belgrade -- coordinates that might be familiar to the average American reader.

Instead, Obreht, who was born in Belgrade but grew up in Cyprus and Cairo before immigrating to the U.S., sets her story in mythical cities and towns with made-up names like Sarobar, Brejevina and Zdrevkov.

This choice frees up Obreht not only from the requirements of history but also from a lot of messy detail about who did what to whom. And it allows her to explore the supernatural at the vortex of reality and myth -- a place uniquely situated to dealing with the aftermath of a series of bloody, genocidal wars.

Named one of the "Best 20 Writers under 40" by The New Yorker, where an excerpt of "The Tiger's Wife" appeared as a short story, Obreht tells her story with a remarkably confident hand, deploying sentences so tightly wound they often seem ready to explode, and seamlessly weaving quotidian detail with magic realism to create an enraptured vision amid the decrepit orphanages and rundown clinics that pepper the postwar landscape.

[Associated Press; By MICHAEL ASTOR]

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