Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Here is what I thought about all the books I read in December 2024. I apologize for posting this so late into January but, once again, life got in the way. I am also still planning on posting my End of the Year Wrap Up soon.
1. FICTION AND MAGICAL REALISM: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
The epitome of magical realism in modern literature is A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. But García Márquez did not invent magical realism. Yes, he is often credited as the father of it, but he is not. Important precursors include Franz Kafka and Mexican authors such as Elena Garro and Juan Rulfo. In Elena Garro’s novel, Recollection of Things to Come, time has stopped and nothing can continue. The only way forward is towards death, but, alas, everyone and everything in Ixtepec, the setting of this novel and its protagonist, is already dead. So the only thing that the town can do is remember itself as it once was when time had not stopped yet; to remember its future (or the future it once had) as it sits on a rock (or something that looks like a rock) and contemplate itself. This book is magical realism in its finest. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, recently adapted by Netflix, is a short novel that “honors and explores Mexican culture and its belief in the afterlife through a nonlinear narrative that takes us literally into a ghost town” (Hardcore Literature Book Club). Another example of magical realism in contemporary literature and one that I think is more familiar to American readers is The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishigiro. This book is ultimately about lost memories, and the buried giant (spoiler alert!!) is all those memories that come to life after the beast is slain and the consequences of remembering everything that was forgotten. This is not a book about Arthur but a book about a world that remembers everything, has confronted the consequences of remembering everything, but ironically does not remember Arthur anymore. And to this day, the world does not know if Arthur ever existed.
How can something be realistic and magical at the same time? The term magical realism is an oxymoron, something that seems to contradict itself, but it is more like a chimeric combination of romanticism (think Don Quixote and every other adventure/quest story you’ve ever read) and realism (Madame Bovary or War and Peace), where the author becomes invisible and the narrative attempts to describe life in its most realistic form. Magic realism is a narrative in which magical elements are woven into a realistic setting and treated as though they are ordinary and commonplace. And this is most definitely true for The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht.
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht is a book about death and the role of myth in Balkan consciousness (Jurišić, P, 2012, The Massachusetts Review). Set in an unnamed city in the war-ravished Balkans, its narrator, Natalia Stefanovic, is a young doctor who crosses the border (again unspecified) to deliver inoculations and medicine to orphaned children of the war. Once there, she learns that her beloved grandfather has died. The circumstances of his death, however, are unknown to his entire family and Natalia is tasked with finding out what happened to him. Suspecting that he died of cancer, Natalia however knows nothing about the place where he died, a mystifying village close to the place where she currently is at. The story itself focuses on the relationship between Natalia and her grandfather, but “everything necessary to understand her grandfather, Natalia says, and ultimately the circumstances of this death, is found in the stories he told her about the ‘deathless man’ and ‘the tiger’s wife’”.
The book begins as follows:
The forty days of the soul begin in the morning after death. That first night, before the forty days begin, the soul lies against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past, and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. For this reason, the living will bring their own rituals to a standstill: to welcome the newly loosed spirit, the living will not clean, will not wash or tidy, will not remove the soul’s belongings for forty days, hoping that sentiment and longing will bring it home again, encourage it to return with a message, with a sign, or with forgiveness. If it is properly enticed, the soul will return as the days go by, to rummage through drawers, peer inside cupboards, seek the tactile comfort of its living identity by reassessing the dish rack and the doorbell and the telephone, reminding itself of functionality, all the time touching things that produce sound and make its presence known to the inhabitants of the house.
I found the description of this Balkan ritual of death very interesting and was hooked into the novel pretty quickly. The writing is superb. Written in two separate timelines: one, the past, where the author relates the story of Natalia’s grandfather’s childhood and his encounters with both the tiger’s wife and deathless man, and two, the present, where Natalia is searching for clues as to why her grandfather died where he did, and why he traveled there to do so. Both of these timelines, however, and the stories told therein, take a significant amount of time—and length of the book—to connect with one another. There are stories told within other stories told and the purpose of these stories within the plot isn’t immediately known. Nor can we figure out how they are relevant, until further into the book. So for long stretches of the book, the story goes in several different directions and we aren’t immediately sure what the purpose of it all is. Hence, the plot seems to lack cohesiveness as a whole. The conclusion itself was also lackluster and dull. I was a bit disappointed. And finally, I did not connect with Natalia.
In addition to the writing, which I think is one of the best things about this novel, I really enjoyed the passages where Natalia’s grandfather tells her about his encounters with the deathless man. The stories of the deathless man and the tiger’s wife are both stories turned into myths to cope with two harsh realities of Balkan life: superstition and violence. Superstition abounds in this book but it is personified in the figure of the tiger’s wife, who is brutalized and a victim of violence (in several of its forms) because of it. And the figure of the deathless man appears and reappears over and over to remind us that death by violence in the Balkans is something that happens over and over as well.
Did I like this book? Yes, but, like I said before, parts of it disappointed me. Will I ever read it again? I don’t think so. Do I recommend it to others? To be honest, I’m not sure. I liked that it is a book about death and how it is viewed in a part of the world ravaged by war, but I didn’t like the protagonist and I am a big advocate of liking the protagonist of a story in order to love it. I wanted to love this book, like I love Recollections of Things to Come and Pedro Páramo, but I didn’t. So it goes into the same pile as The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishigiro, the unhaul pile.
2. CLASSICS: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens is one of those literary giants whose novels I typically cannot get into, no matter how much I try. Another notable author in this club is Alexandre Dumas. Both of these authors published their works in parts or volumes in periodicals very month or week, so of course each one of those volumes ended on a cliffhanger. It’s what made readers pick up the next installment of the work the following week or month. But for some reason, I cannot stand this. And I have not been able to finish A Tale of Two Cities or The Count of Monte Cristo for that same reason. Everything happens so fast too. So when one of my book clubs decided to read David Copperfield for the festive season last year, I thought about skipping it. I’d tried reading A Tale of Two Cities before, like I said, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood and both were DNFs. I also read A Christmas Carol and didn’t like it, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be picking David Copperfield up at all. But I did, and I loved it. And I was the first person to be surprised by this. So was my husband, to whom I have complained to about my complicated relationship with Dickens to before, and was nudgingly trying to encourage me to read something I would enjoy more…aka, fantasy. Bless his soul. He’s an avid Brandon Sanderson and Michael J. Sullivan fan and he would surreptitiously leave books of both these authors lying around the house. Not that I don’t like fantasy. I do; I was the one who told him to read Theft of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan in the first place (a series he has read back to back THREE, yes, three, times!) But I have been drifting away from fantasy lately (that is all I read for so long) and going back to my first love, classics, that I decided to pick David Copperfield up after all, and it easily became one of my best books of the year, even though it was one of the last books I read in 2024. It is a very good book, and one of the best coming-of-age tales I have read in a very long time.
I highly recommend it.
Maybe I’ll pick up A Tale of Two Cities or The Count of Monte Cristo again later. I like to believe that when you can’t get into a book or don’t understand it very well, it’s not always because that book isn’t for you. Maybe it’s just not the right time for you to read it yet.
3. NONFICTION AND HISTORY: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone
The Holocaust, Dan Stone says, wouldn’t have happened if these two things hadn’t happened in tandem: one, an almost ubiquitous collaboration across Europe and beyond. In other words, the Holocaust wasn’t just a German affair; it was a truly transnational affair driven by a coincidence of wants between the Nazis’ ideologically driven aspiration to rid the world of Jews and the desires of many nation-states’ leaders to create ethnically homogeneous populations; two, a hatred and, more important, fear of Jews was deeply ingrained into Nazi thinking. Nazi ideology set out a “metaphysics and an anthropology of German superiority and proposed that the movement of history was driven by a clash between good and evil, represented by the German on the one side and the threatening race-destroyers, the Jews, on the other. This ideology also ties in with Nazi fantasies about obtaining Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe and creating a ‘racial community’ in the Reich”. And this ‘racial community’ could only be constructed through genocidal destruction. But what makes the history of the Holocaust an unfinished history is that the effects of the Holocaust can still be felt today. Unfortunately, the author says, there is a general looking away of the evidence; “tears may flows, yes, at Holocaust memorial ceremonies but the truly destructive nature of the Holocaust—and for the societies they came from—and the radical implications of the Holocaust for our modern world are passed over in silence,” as it happens when museums selectively interpret the past so as to make one’s nation appear an innocent victim or rescuer of Jews. The legacy of collaboration is also visible in the resistance to research that appears from a nationalist perspective to “defame” the good name of a nation as in the Polish government’s attempts to prosecute historians who uncovered information about Poles who handed Jews over the Nazi occupiers. We must, Dan Stone says, “see how the afterlife of the Holocaust has been shaped in the years since 1945 to the present.”
This book is not a history of the Holocaust. It is a book that tries to explain how it happened, why it happened, and which have been the consequences of it to modern society. Do I recommend it? Yes, though it may not be a book for everyone or meet your expectations of it. Will I ever read it again? Probably, and if I do, I know that I will catch things that I didn’t the first time I read it. Its premise is that the Holocaust and its effects in the world today are still happening and shaping our postwar life.
That’s everything I read this month. My next post will be my End-of-the-Year post. Thank you for stopping by.
