> wonderful opening line: "In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers."
> book club selection
> Debut novel, author born in Belgrade, has lived in USA since age 12
> Setting: in the Balkans, "after the war"
> Natalia, young doctor, on mission to take inoculations to orphans, finds out her grandfather has died while on a journey no one was told about
> p.7 - "The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death."
> p.9 - Grandfather, on finding cancer...."Fuck. You go looking for a gnat and you find a donkey."
> love the poetry reciting parrot
> p.25 - hospitality: "She had made a massive effort, arranged everything carefully on blue china that was chipped, but lovingly wiped down after probably spending years in a basement, hidden from looters."
> two stories needed to understand grandfather: the tiger's wife and the deathless man
> p.36...."Those first sixteen months of wartime held almost no reality, and this made them incredible, irresistible, because the fact that something terrible was happening elsewhere, and at the same time to us, gave us room to get away with anarchy. Never mind that, three hundred miles away girls sitting in bomb shelters were getting their periods at the age of seven."
> p.42 ..."The years I spent immersing myself in the mild lawlessness of the war my grandfather spent believing it would end soon, pretending that nothing had changes."
> Such elegant prose from such a young writer.....and life wisdom, as well
> p.49....:Despite the insistent pull of his instinct to protect use, my grandfather still suffered from that national characteristic of our people that is often mistaken for stupidity but is more like self-righteous indignation."....grandfather's resistance to government man who came to the house
> p. 51......This was, perhaps, a kind of punishment, and back then I thought it was for allowing myself to slip, or for letting the "hat" into our apartment. Now I realize that it was punishment for giving up so easily on the tigers."
> "One of those moments you keep to yourself."...the night they followed the elephant through empty streets
. the deathless man's tale....told to Natalia as an example of a prior moment to be kept to oneself in her grandfather's life.............the man who would not or could not die
>flash to present in story...the diggers..."We've got a cousin in this vineyard, Doctor...Buried twelve years. During the war.......Doesn't like it here, and he's making us sic. When we find him we'll be on our way."
>tiger's wife...tiger got away from zoo after bombing, before Natalia was born, and wandered, ending up in Galina, where the grandfather had lived
> p.98...."The fact that you are in a hurry is of no particular interest to them; in their opinion, if you are making your journey in a hurry, you are making it poorly."
>p.101...."The monastery was the project of an architect whose mapping skills and artful design were undermined by his inability to consider that the seclusion of the monks would be regularly interrupted by the movement of armies over the eastern mountains and into the river valley."
> p.104..."....my grandfather would look up at the shelves and shelves of jars, the swollen-bottomed bottles of remedies, and revel in their calm, controlled promise of wellness."
> "The Jungle Book" was a gift from the apothecary to grandfather
> p.105...."I knew "tiger" because my grandfather took me to the citadel every week and pointed to show me, "tiger"; because the labels in........"
>To grandfather, the devil was "Lesi, the hobgoblin you met in the pasture.....Crnobogh, the horned god, who summoned darkness.....the devbil was Night, Baba Roga's second son.....the devil was Death waiting for you at the Crossroads"
> loved the history of the musket....see p.120
> p.153...."...I had been inspired largely by guilt that was manifesting itself among members of my generation as a desire to help the people we kept hearing about on the news, people whose suffering we had used to explain our struggles, frame our debates, and justify our small rebellions."
> p.154..."When men die, they die in fear....They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them, to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living..in hope. They don't know what's happening, so they expect nothing, they don't ask you to hold their hand....but you end up needing them to hold yours. With children, you're on you own."
> Enjoyed the story of pleasing Mica the cadaver procurer....the skull adventure
> p.161..."In my grandfather's life, the rituals that followed the war were rituals of renegotiation." a divided country meant loss of certain rights to claim historical figures as one's own.
> Vocab: 1) gusla: a one stringed fiddle-like instrument 2) fare: to travel, get along
> Lifting of the veil....long history from the Bible, still part of Jewish pre-wedding ceremony
>p.219..."The tiger saw the girl as she had seen him: without judgment, fear, foolishness, and somehow the two of them understood each other without exchanging a single sound."
> the tiger's wife gave grandfather some tiger hairs as a token of gratitude
> Why did the tiger begin eating his own legs?
> grandfather went to the site of his honeymoon, in his wife's hometown which was Muslim and being bombed during the war
> p.303 "This war never ends...it was there when I was a child and it will be here for my children's children."
> People took animals from the zoo into their homes during the war, until the zoo could re-open.reminds me of "The Zookeeper's Wife".
> grandfather left Nathalia the tiger hairs and the word, Galina, his home town....the "jungle Book" was gone...given in pledge to the deathless man
> p.336...."However expertly he learned to fend for himself, his life as a tiger had been tainted since birth...maybe that great, deadly Shere Khan light my grandfather believed in had already been extinguished. He had been dulled at the edges by circumstances, and it was simply easier for him to succumb to being hand-fed."
> p.337 ..."When you ask the people of Galina today: 'Why don't you let your children out after dark?' their answers are vague and uncomfortable......But the truth is, whether they think about him or not, the tiger is always there, in their movements, in their speech, in the preventive gestures that have become a part of their everyday lives....."....the manner in which our true heritage manifests itself.
> In order to understand these characters, you must first understand.....
1. Grandfather......"the deathless man", "the tiger's wife", killed Darisa to save her
2. Vladisa, the sheperd.....never had heard of a tiger before seeing one
3. the deathless man.....is the nephew of Death
4. Luka the butcher/batterer.....was cheated out of marrying the woman he loved and pursuing the life he dreamed of as a guslar
5. Darisa the bear hunter.......loved life, wanted to be a taxidermist, had an epileptic sister who died, wanted to "preempt" death, or "to find life in Death"
6. The "Diggers".....had to correct an error from the past to heal the family in the present
7. the apothecary...orphaned, forced into a hajduk gang, befriended Blind Orlo and learned to heal from him, hid fact he was Mohammedan to survive
> LibraryThing Review: I really had to consider how to write this review. I am not generally a gushing type of person, yet his book truly invites a bit of gushing. Here are the teasers, at least they would tease me........Do you like great characters? How about "the deathless man", "the tiger's wife", the tiger, the apothecary, the bear hunter, and above all, the grandfather. Oh wait.....the narrator herself, Nathalia, a young physician trying to understand herself through her understanding of her beloved grandfather. Okay....that's it for character teasing. How about being teased by beautiful fables? How about one of the best expressions of what heritage is that I have ever read? How about the author is only 24 years old? Come on, by now you must want to read this book! On a serious level the themes include: heritage, the need to understand one's past to understand oneself, the power of the past, the power of belief, and the power of metaphor.
Prior to reading this novel, I read a collection of essays which were coincidentally written by someone from "the former Yugoslavia". Talk about a one-two punch! Try reading this novel and "Nobody's Home" by Dubravka Ugresic consecutively. Fascinating juxtaposition of perspective on the impact of dissolving a nation and highlighting of the different ways in which we all seek to make meaning of life!
No comments:
Post a Comment