The MagazineBalkan DreamsA debut novel hovers among shadows and action.Jun 27, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 39
• By JOHN SIMON
 The Tiger’s Wife  Téa Obreht Beowulf Sheehan This is the latest runaway bestseller among first novels. Much has been made of the fact that Téa Obreht was 24 years old when she finished writing it, that she hailed from the former Yugoslavia, that she was 12 when she came to the United States with her family, that she wrote the novel mostly as a student at Cornell, that the style could best be described as magic realism (though she does not call herself a magic realist), and that she was a woman. And not only a woman but a blonde, and an attractive one. The novel has mythic qualities—and is by no means the sort of thing attractive young blondes usually write about. The vocabulary is large, the syntax mostly correct and idiomatic, and the prose both exotic and poetic. Obreht declared various influences, the most evident being Gabriel García Márquez, whose Love in the Time of Cholera she pronounces the perfect novel. Respected writers—T.C. Boyle, Colum McCann, and Ann Patchett—showered her book jacket with superlatives. She has appeared in respected publications: The New York Times Book Review accorded her the rare privilege for a first novel, a front-page review; the New Yorker chose her as the youngest member of a select group, “The Twenty Under Forty,” and published a chapter of The Tiger’s Wife in its pages, something tantamount to literary canonization. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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