Téa Obreht, a prizewinning Serbian-American author, has a penchant for ghosts and exotic beasts
, a prizewinning Serbian-American author, has a penchant for ghosts and exotic beasts. Her debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife”, was an affecting meditation on war and survival in an unnamed Balkan country that circled around the titular tiger and a spectre known as “the deathless man”. Her second novel takes this otherworldly sensibility into the Arizona Territory of the late 19th century.
This tall tale, like Ms Obreht’s first, conjures a mythical, supernatural world. It bears a resemblance to “Days Without End”, a magnificent recent Western by Sebastian Barry, an Irish author. Both novels are lush and poetic; both nod to the West’s bloody history, yet hover vaguely, and gorgeously, above it. “Inland” is most compelling in its study of the pioneer wife whose frustrations and fears lead to tragedy.
Ms Obreht has a gift for vivid language and deft stories-within-stories. Descriptions of the camels, especially, are delightful: “Their eyelids are thatched with the finest lashes God ever loomed.” She gives words fresh purposes, to great effect; verbs sizzle. In “Inland”, Lurie fills the philosopher’s role; he can see the dead, and mourns the fact that they cannot see one another and thus are doomed to roam eternity alone.
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