The Tiger's Wife

It feels like a loose collection of European short stories bordering on fable.

Darisa the Bear, the greatest of hunters in the old kingdom who in his youth practised taxidermy at night to keep Death there among the dead cats and small animals he worked on. He was long to master the craft but was otherwise intent on keeping Death from wandering the house and alighting on his sickly older sister.

Or there was Luka the butcher who in his youth longed only to master the single stringed Balkan folk instrument the gusla. Seeking a chaste marriage to appease their respective families he would, through a string of seemingly random events, become the monstrous wife-beater the city of Galina quietly ignored.

The Deathless Man, Gavran Gaile who could read the arc of other people's lives in their coffee ground. And of course, the Tiger's Wife.

But while they may feel like the remembered old stories spun from an aging man, his granddaughter the narrator Natalia finds herself amidst her own strange world. An old monastery with families of sickly gravediggers, lavender pouches tied around their necks in fraying ribbon, searching the vineyards looking for a long buried cousin and the phrase “wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.”

Within each world I find myself engrossed but constantly stumbling to regain my footing in between each section, wishing for some stronger connective tissue that might better bind these disparate elements together.