EN POINTE
In her gorgeous historical novel, The True Memoirs of Little K, Adrienne Sharp mixes fact and fiction to create an atmospheric period piece set in the glittering imperial court of Russia. Little K is the nickname of ballet legend Mathilde Kschessinska, who is penning her memoirs in Paris, having reached the age of 100, when the novel begins. Mathilde starts her ballet studies as a child, rising through the ranks of the Russian Imperial Ballet to become prima ballerina assoluta. As a teenager she sets her romantic sights on Nicholas Romanov, the future tsar, but their affair is doomed from the start, and when it ends, Mathilde finds comfort in the company of two grand dukes, forming a notorious ménage a trois. Such adventures are the norm for the glamorous five-foot-tall star, who uses her feminine wiles to secure a future for herself when troubled times hit Russia. Filled with romance, political intrigue and insights into the glamorous world of Russian ballet, Mathilde’s story is mesmerizing. Sharp, a former dancer, brings wonderful authenticity and detail to this lavish work.

SENIOR MOMENTS
Nora Ephron’s new collection of essays, I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections, brims with the razor-sharp wit and classic insights that have made her one of America’s most popular authors. Now 69, Ephron delivers essays on a variety of topics, musing on memory loss in the book’s title piece, tackling the difficulties of divorce in “The D Word” and looking back on her early years as a reporter at the New York Post in “Journalism: A Love Story.” As a successful writer of screenplays (When Harry Met Sally; Sleepless in Seattle), Ephron has crossed paths with scads of notables, Lillian Hellman among them, and she shares priceless memories of them here. Throughout this sparkling collection, she offers readers a rare sense of camaraderie—a just-one-of-the-gals tone that’s consistently appealing. As her scores of fans already know, Ephron makes for great company. Timely, funny and wise, her latest collection is a delight.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Téa Obreht’s accomplished debut novel examines the nature of memory, the power of stories, and the ways in which both can sustain us. When her grandfather dies, Dr. Natalia Stefanovi is left with unanswered questions about his final days. Natalia, who works at an orphanage in an Eastern European country that’s never identified, recalls the magical stories he used to tell her—tales of the village he was raised in during World War II that delighted her as a child. The past comes alive as Natalia remembers his accounts of the neighborhood butcher, the strange Muslim woman who became his wife and a tiger who escaped from a local zoo after the Germans bombed it. These and other stories offer clues to the mysteries surrounding her beloved grandfather, helping Natalia to make sense of the past as well as the present. Her journey toward resolution is a remarkable one. Beautifully conceived and elegantly written, Obreht’s rewarding novel is a must-read for fans of literary fiction.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future Téa Obreht plans to move to New York City. "That's where the action is, I guess," she says, sounding in the same instant both eager and skeptical. 

But for now, Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York, where she has remained since finishing her M.F.A. at Cornell two years ago. In Ithaca's relative calm she has ridden out the hoopla of being named to the New Yorker's list of the 20 best writers under 40—and at 25, she is the youngest writer on that list. "Ithaca is a nice environment to write in, and I have a community of writers here, so I have stayed," says Obreht, who is remarkably composed for a young writer cast suddenly into the limelight. "Besides, changing environments in a situation where the book was in final edits wasn't something I wanted to do."

"I was interested in the point [that] a story becomes so important to a person that it doesn't matter if it's truth or legend."

The book in question is Obreht's stirringly accomplished first novel, The Tiger's Wife. Set in an unnamed country in the Balkans after prolonged civil war, the story is narrated by a young doctor named Natalia as she travels into the borderlands, where emotions about the war are still raw, to deliver medicine to an orphanage. Early in her journey Natalia learns that her grandfather, also a doctor, has died in a remote village while on his own mission of mercy. Her grandmother asks Natalia to retrieve a packet of his belongings. As Natalia travels deeper into the fraught landscape, she unravels the meaning of the two central stories that ran "like secret rivers through all the other stories of [her grandfather's] life"—the story of his repeated meetings with the deathless man and the story of his childhood experience with the tiger's wife.

Like her narrator, Obreht was very close to her grandfather. She was born in Belgrade in 1985 and lived there with her grandparents and her mother until 1992, "when things got pretty heated." As fighting intensified in the former Yugoslavia, her family fled.

"My grandfather was an engineer and he had connections in different places, so we ended up in Cyprus for a year. Then we lived in Cairo for three and a half years until we were lucky enough to come to the United States. A lot of our family lived in a far suburb of Atlanta, so we lived there for two or three years. And then my mother met my stepfather and we moved to Palo Alto." The summer before she left for Cornell her grandfather died. "He was always very supportive of my decision and desire to write," she says. On his deathbed he asked her to write under his family name—Obreht—"and now I do."

Obreht has been writing since the age of eight. As an undergraduate she "went to the University of Southern California to study creative writing, with the full support of my mother. But she also wanted me to have an additional major so I could get an actual job. So I chose art history!" she says, laughing. At USC, Obreht wrote prolifically at first and then stopped for a year. "In any artistic endeavor when you're just learning something, there comes a moment in your progress when you hit a wall and the wall is simply there. And the only way for that wall or curtain or whatever it is to dissolve is to wait it out."

Obreht's wait lasted until her senior year, when she took a workshop with T.C. Boyle. "I suddenly understood there was this whole thing to be done with structure, how it works and looks and what it feels like to read a good short story and understand what makes it good," she says. "After that, writing for me was the absolute top priority once again and it has remained so."

The Tiger's Wife, Obreht says, began as "a terrible short story that took all kinds of beatings in workshops. It failed but there was something I was really attached to and I wasn't willing to give up on—the tiger. I'll say without embarrassment that writing the tiger sections was my favorite part of the process. I write out of chronological order. I skip around a lot. But I wanted to stay with his character and go on this journey with him. So those were the parts that got written first."

As the story grew, Obreht drew first on things she knew from her own life and from stories her relatives told her. Then in the summer of 2009 she went to Serbia and Croatia "to hunt for vampires for Harper's" (her nonfiction piece appeared in the November 2010 issue of the magazine). "We ended up bumming around a lot of villages in a car with a tape recorder, getting out and asking, ‘Does this village have any vampire stories?' It ended up being a much-needed lesson in village life, the way village society functions, the way myths operate in a village setting."

The result of that research is one of the most powerful aspects of The Tiger's Wife—the novel's strong sense of place: not merely place as vividly described locale, but place as the location of layers of often conflicting emotion. In the villages Natalia visits, for example, the recent civil war is never discussed, but the sorrow and distrust it has left behind seem to seep out of the earth itself.

Likewise, Obreht's exploration of folktales and myths adds powerful resonance—and compassion—to her narrative. "I think when people suffer great tragedy, they turn to myths," Obreht says. "I was interested in the point a story becomes so important to a person that it doesn't matter if it's truth or legend. Sometimes the fact that the story exists at all is moving in itself. I think there's a lot of that where I come from, and a lot of that generally in the world."

The final thread in the development of The Tiger's Wife, Obreht says, was her experience of her grandfather's death. "I had tried for a long time not to deal with it and not to think about it and say to myself, ‘I'm doing fine. I'm great.' Then this story started to come together with this narrator who had a grandfather who had died. . . . Maybe this isn't the right thing to say because we're talking about writing. But personally in the process of writing this novel I ended up making peace with the fact that my grandfather was dead. I'm not pleased with this [in the sense of] ‘oh, this is an accomplishment,' but somehow . . . it became a fact that I could process in a way that I hadn't thought I could do before. The writing of the book got me there, and I'm happy."

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.  

Copyright 2011 BookPage Reviews.

In the torn-up Balkans, as medic Natalia is preparing to cross what was once not a border to help vaccinate orphans, she learns that her distinguished physician grandfather has died in an obscure clinic not far from where she's going. No one knows what he was doing there, though Natalia does know he was seriously ill. This incident opens up Obreht's dizzyingly nuanced yet crisp, muscularly written narrative by allowing Natalia to introduce two stories (fables? truth?) that her grandfather related to her. One concerns the "deathless man" her grandfather sometimes encountered, who collected the souls of the dead. The other concerns a tiger that escaped from the zoo during World War II and made its way to the village where her grandfather lived as a boy. Attempts to kill the tiger fail, but the butcher's abused, deaf-mute wife seems mystically connected to the great beast, rousing the villagers' fear and anger. That tiger—and others seen later at the zoo—looms here as a symbol of defiant, struggling hope as the deathless man continues his task. VERDICT Demanding one's full attention, this complex, humbling, and beautifully crafted debut from one of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 is highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in contemporary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/10.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

The sometimes crushing power of myth, story, and memory is explored in the brilliant debut of Obreht, the youngest of the New Yorker's 20-under-40. Natalia Stefanovi, a doctor living (and, in between suspensions, practicing) in an unnamed country that's a ringer for Obreht's native Croatia, crosses the border in search of answers about the death of her beloved grandfather, who raised her on tales from the village he grew up in, and where, following German bombardment in 1941, a tiger escaped from the zoo in a nearby city and befriended a mysterious deaf-mute woman. The evolving story of the tiger's wife, as the deaf-mute becomes known, forms one of three strands that sustain the novel, the other two being Natalia's efforts to care for orphans and a wayward family who, to lift a curse, are searching for the bones of a long-dead relative; and several of her grandfather's stories about Gavran Gailé, the deathless man, whose appearances coincide with catastrophe and who may hold the key to all the stories that ensnare Natalia. Obreht is an expert at depicting history through aftermath, people through the love they inspire, and place through the stories that endure; the reflected world she creates is both immediately recognizable and a legend in its own right. Obreht is talented far beyond her years, and her unsentimental faith in language, dream, and memory is a pleasure. (Mar.)