Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday March 25, 2011
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THE TIGER'S WIFE
Tea Obreht
Random House
ISBN 978-0385343831
338 pages
$25
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor
Tea Obreht's swirling first novel, "The Tiger's Wife," draws us beneath the clotted tragedies in the Balkans to deliver the kind of truth that histories can't touch. Born in Belgrade in 1985 -- no, that's not a typo -- she captures the thirst for consecration that a century of war has left in that bloody part of the world. It's a novel of enormous ambitions that manages in its modest length to contain the conflicts between Christians and Muslims, Turks and Ottomans, science and superstition.
The story, which demands a luxurious stretch of concentration, works on two levels that initially seem unrelated but eventually wind around each other evocatively. In the present day, the narrator is a young doctor named Natalia, who travels 400 miles on a "goodwill mission" to inoculate orphans at a monastery in a town now separated from her home by a new border. Just as she arrives, she gets word that her beloved grandfather, also a physician, has died while coming to help her. His death is not a surprise -- she alone knew he had cancer -- but the circumstances strike her as odd.
Obreht has lived in the United States since she was 12, but she creates a vivid sense of this war-torn region (we're never told exactly where all this is taking place). Her thoughtful narrator must navigate the land mines -- literal and political -- that still blot the countryside. Natalia's world is a steampunk mingling of modern technology and traditional tools -- cell phones and antibiotics alongside picks and poultices.
But what confounds her medical work at the monks' orphanage is a conflict of values, which touches on the novel's most interesting theme. While Natalia administers vaccines, a group of ragged people is digging in a vineyard behind the monastery. They're not gardening; they're looking for the body of a cousin abandoned 12 years ago during the war. One of the men is convinced that if they can properly rebury this relative, the sickness affecting their village will abate. Natalia, of course, would rather these superstitious men allow her to examine and treat their children, but she also appreciates their need to recover and sanctify the remains of the dead. Indeed, she now feels the same obligation.
This activity in the present is only the novel's skeleton; the meat of the book is supplied by the lyrical stories Natalia remembers from her grandfather. These tales take place in a time of isolated villages inhabited by craftsman, traveling peddlers and healers. That "The Tiger's Wife" never slips entirely into magical realism is part of its magic -- its agile play with tragic material and with us -- because, despite Natalia and her grandfather's devotion to science and rationality, this is a story that bleeds into fable with the slightest scratch.
Two semi-mythical characters dominate her grandfather's reminiscences, stories flecked with macabre humor that sound at times like Balkan versions of Isaac Bashevis Singer. One is "the deathless man," the nephew of Death himself, who came originally to heal but eventually to carry the souls of the deceased to the other side. Again and again, her grandfather crossed paths with this mournful but congenial man, whose story he never allowed himself to fully believe.
The other character is a deaf and mute woman, viciously abused by her husband, who befriended a tiger in the woods. It's a big, violent, romantic symbol, like Melville's whale, a fiery orange canvas onto which any number of meanings might be projected. Natalia claims that "everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger's wife and the story of the deathless man," but his relationship to these mysterious characters yields only more evocative questions. Indeed, it has to be said: There are times when "The Tiger's Wife" reaches more for affect than for coherence.
But the reception for this book couldn't be more encouraging. Well-deserved praise has been accumulating ever since Obreht published a chapter in the New Yorker almost two years ago, and now that we have the whole, its graceful commingling of contemporary realism and village legend seems even more absorbing.
Also, its sentiments are refreshingly un-American. Anxiously youth-obsessed, we've always been awkward and weird about death; our rituals for grieving and commemorating are still chaotic and ad hoc. But "The Tiger's Wife" never strays far from the desire of desperate people to do right by the dead, no matter how much time has passed.
"What shall we bury?" is the plaintive cry in towns repeatedly bombed and burned. Scattered bones must be collected, washed and put to rest. The Balkans' legacy of living amid so much carnage and desecration has produced what Obreht calls "the delusion of normalcy, but never peace." That sounds grim and depressing, but conveyed in storytelling this enchanting, it's the life you remember.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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TWICE A SPY
Keith Thomson
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385530798
326 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers for The Washington Post Book World
As I read "Twice a Spy," Keith Thomson's stab at a humorous spy novel, I kept thinking of the old actor's last words: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
This is not to say that first-rate humor can't be squeezed out of the spy game. Graham Greene triumphed in "Our Man in Havana"; Robert Littell provided ultra-black comedy in "The Defection of A.J. Lewinter"; and former CIA analyst Susan Hasler scored just last year in her ironically titled "Intelligence," which satirized the CIA's dubious performance during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Thomson's novel -- a sequel to his maiden effort, "Once a Spy" -- does not equal those sterling works, but it's a good-natured romp that offers slapstick and endless fast-paced shootouts and chases, all of which help compensate for its ramshackle plot. Our heroes are a father-and-son team, Drummond and Charlie Clark. Charlie had long thought his father was an eccentric appliance salesman and has only recently learned that he has for three decades been a brilliant undercover agent of the CIA. Drummond has masterminded a secret unit that sells nuclear weapons, concealed inside washing machines, to terrorist groups. Once the sale is made, the terrorists are seized and the washing machines recovered before the nukes can do harm.
Alas, in his mid-60s, Drummond has developed early-onset Alzheimer's disease, and deceitful colleagues are planning to kill him and start selling the washing machines for profit. (The washing-machine conceit, be it noted, is likely homage to the vacuum cleaners that play a central role in "Our Man in Havana.") As the novel opens, father, son and a comely ex-National Security Agency official named Alice are in Switzerland, fleeing the killers. Alice is one of two women in the book who can kill you with almost any small object that happens to be at hand. She purports to be in love with Charlie, but in this world no one is to be trusted, bedmates included.
A good deal of the book's humor is built around Drummond's Alzheimer's. Although he often seems to be living in a fog, at crucial moments the old spook is able to charm, deceive or disarm his adversaries ("danger tended to jolt him into clarity"). This is only the second time I've seen Alzheimer's used for comic effect (the first was a series of jokes Roger Miller told at the Birchmere some 20 years ago), and some readers might consider this humor politically incorrect or worse. I must say that I objected not to the Alzheimer's jokes -- despite his disability, Drummond is, after all, the closest thing the book has to a heroic figure -- but to the novel's proliferation of lame jokes generally.
Examples: "One of the police cars was now close enough that Charlie could make out the driver's mustache -- the traditional Burt Reynolds model." "Drummond Clark could have convinced a polygraph that it was a toaster." A middle-aged couple "looked like Superman and Lois Lane fifteen years after their first meeting." A small plane provides "the bumpiest takeoff since Kitty Hawk."
To be sure, there are good lines in the book. I liked this aside on real estate: "New money often didn't aspire beyond a McMansion with superfluous turrets, their sensibilities shaped by Donald Trump." And this capsule summary: "the young woman in a Princeton sweatshirt at the other end of the bar. ... Aphrodite with green eyes and a damned good attendance record at the gym." But the good lines are outnumbered by the groaners.
Mostly our two heroes are kept in near-constant motion. They flee three police cars in a hijacked Amphibus that moves at a snail's pace on both land and sea. After the pilot bails out, they find themselves high above the Caribbean in a plane neither man can fly. They are arrested, thrown in jail, rescued and then caught in a hail of bullets. As the story nears its end, Drummond fades away, the jokes slow down and, in more conventional thriller style, Charlie tries to stop the villains from nuking a Gulf Coast resort hotel where an international economic conference is underway.
One of this novel's admirers blurbed it thusly: "Think Carl Hiaasen taking on John le Carre." Personally, I'd rather not contemplate such a train wreck. How you react to "Twice a Spy" will largely depend on your tolerance for whimsy. But Thomson's weakness for dumb jokes aside, he writes fluid, vivid prose, good dialogue and first-rate action scenes. I couldn't help thinking he should leave the slapstick to others and apply his talents to a more conventional thriller. The old thespian nailed it: Comedy is hard.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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PROFILE OF ESMERALDA SANTIAGO
Maria Arana
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Marie Arana
A child of two cultures is never quite comfortable in her skin: Her homeland might be at a distance; her parents of different races. But it is that existential alienation from which an entire imaginary universe can spring.
Esmeralda Santiago was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and came to New York at the age of 13. She was the eldest in a family that eventually included 11 children. Her childhood in Brooklyn, which she described in the memoir "When I Was Puerto Rican," was filled with heartache: "I didn't tell Mami that although she had high expectations for us, outside our door, the expectations were lower, that the rest of New York viewed us as potential muggers, drug dealers, prostitutes."
But she managed to turn trial into advantage. At 15, she was admitted to New York City's Performing Arts High School, where she majored in dance and drama. After studying at various community colleges, she transferred to Harvard, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1976. After the publication of her first memoir in 1993, she went on to write two more: "Almost a Woman" and "My Turkish Lover."  Her novel "America's Dream," inspired by her mother's experience as a hotel maid in Manhattan, has just been made into a Spanish-language feature film, "America."
In July, Santiago will release her first historical novel, "Conquistadora," born of her curiosity about her family's turbulent past. "The curiosity actually began with 'When I Was Puerto Rican.' I became fascinated by my parents' lives. They were children of the Depression, from families of the landless poor. My mother's parents were evicted from their property; my father's migrated to the city, looking for work. ... I began to wake up in the middle of the night, wondering about their struggles, about my great grandparents, my great great grandparents. Until my curiosity finally reached 1844."
Difficult as it is to research the history of the illiterate poor, Santiago succeeded in learning much about her native island: its blend of African, Spanish and Indian ethnicities, its powerful sugar cane plantations, its cruel legacy of slavery. In "Conquistadora," she attempts to conjure anonymous forebears. "I effectively created my ancestors. The characters in my book, I'm convinced, are my great great grandparents."
So it is that Santiago's childhood has become a gift she can endlessly open. "I am full of questions," she says. "Big, unanswerable questions."
Marie Arana can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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MICHELANGELO: A Life on Paper
Leonard Barkan
Princeton Univ
ISBN 978-0691147666
366 pages
$49.50
Reviewed by Michael S. Roth
Don't we already know a lot about Michelangelo? Most of us are aware of his awe-inspiring achievements in sculpture, painting and architecture, but perhaps not that he was a prodigious poet who strove to find in words a vehicle for connecting ever more closely with the divine. We know that, as a young man in Florence at the end of the 15th century, he already displayed prodigious talent. While still in his 20s, he completed two of the most remarkable sculptures in the Western canon: the David and the St. Peter's Pieta. Art historians and popular audiences alike have marveled at the sculptor's extraordinary technical skill and been moved by the subtlety and grandeur of his translations of Biblical moments into material form. His large public projects, like the design for the dome of St. Peter's Basilica and the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cemented his fame as an artist-hero. He was celebrated in his own time, and he has remained in the popular imagination ever since.
In America, the older generation will remember Charlton Heston's portrayal of the artist's fierce struggles for perfection, while the younger generation turns up the volume as the Counting Crows sing "When I Dream of Michelangelo." The sculptor's contemporaries simply called him il Divino.
Leonard Barkan's ingenious, lavishly illustrated study does not linger over the familiar aspects of the Divine One's life and work. It focuses instead on the artist's "life on paper," the hundreds of sheets that have survived containing drawings, poems, doodles, instructions to assistants and "notes to self." For Barkan, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton, these sheets are a treasure trove of aesthetic delights; traces of the historical context of Renaissance art making; and, most important, a window onto the personality and artistic practice of a figure who came to define genius. Even genius, though, doesn't produce final products without a searching, sometimes circuitous process. Drawing is just such a process: a way of thinking, of working out artistic problems and of exploring personal obsessions.
The young Michelangelo was focused on making a name for himself, which he did literally by sculpting his signature onto the chest of the Virgin in his St Peter's Pieta. His relationship to his David was more subtle and even more bold. Through a careful, nuanced reading of the artist's drawings and notes, Barkan shows how Michelangelo placed himself in the sculpture. Like the Biblical David, the artist is working with a rock, but "since the premise is that he is outdoing David, he is declaring himself in the end to be just as much a conqueror as the figure he is sculpting; indeed, he is conquering the conqueror." Michelangelo wrote of "David with his slingshot, and I with my bow," and Barkan shows how the artist strove to supplant the youthful hero, with God on his side.
The hundreds of sheets of paper that survive oscillate "between orderly representation and a kind of visual cacophony." Michelangelo draws over words, and he writes poems over his drawings. He turns the paper 90 degrees to take on a new task, and sometimes he passes the sheet to his students and assistants, who then try to imitate the work of the master. Making sense of these palimpsests is no easy task, and Barkan is a tentative but deeply learned interpreter. His close readings of these complex traces are marvels of erudition, even though he understands that claims about the meaning of these images will never be proven.
For example, it is often difficult to know which writings on a page came first, or whether the master or one of his students had pencil in hand. The historical reconstructions, like Freudian interpretations of dreams, are fraught with ambiguity, and we realize that the "calligraphic stuttering" of the great artist may mean different things to different beholders. Barkan presses on, giving us voluminous visual evidence with which to make sense of Michelangelo's artistic practice, and much of what he shares with the reader is beautiful to behold.
Michelangelo wrestled on paper with his ambitions and his frustrations, his longings and his fears. He wanted clarity and beauty, earthly satisfaction and divine reward. "The folio is not merely a site for drafting poetry," Barkan writes, "but the ground where he sketches out the contradictions of his life." The artist struggled to understand his creative gifts in relation to his possible salvation. Michelangelo wrote, "Art and death do not go well together: in what, then, should I place my greatest hope?"
Barkan is a sensitive and thoughtful guide through this fragile legacy of a monumental figure. Michelangelo, he writes, "remains stuck in the paradox of a godlike creativity that cannot bring him closer to God." This biography of the artist's "life on paper" reveals both his solitude and his efforts at communion. Barkan's reading of the richly evocative paper trail reminds us how much we still have to learn about this towering, quivering man.
Michael S. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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