“Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans: all I knew of the South Slavs.”- Rebecca West

The breakup of the former Yugoslavia inspired a flurry of works that have sought to portray and dramatize the human costs of the wars that followed. Slavenka Drakulic, Dubravka Ugresic and Aleksandar Hemon have achieved international recognition, while many other writers have largely escaped our notice. Then there is the fabulous success of Tea Obreht.Few recent books have met with such widespread enthusiasm as her debut, The Tiger’s Wife. In 2011, the New York Times dubbed the novel one of the best books of the year. It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, received overwhelmingly positive, even glowing reviews, and won The Orange Prize. The New Yorker heralded Obreht as the youngest writer in their ‘20 under 40’ feature.But mention the book’s title to an unsuspecting individual from the former Yugoslavia, and you might receive the response I recently heard from a friend. “Who?” she said, “Arkan and Ceca?”Arkan and Ceca may be said to be the Brad and Angelina of Serbian ethno-nationalism. He, the lifelong criminal, folk hero of the 1990s and leader of the notorious Tigers, a paramilitary group that terrorized civilians in Croatia and Bosnia, was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia but gunned down before a trial. She, his buxom folk and pop singing widow, is one of the most beloved singers and perhaps the biggest celebrity in contemporary Serbia.Outside of former compatriots, reference to the novel creates no similar confusion. Readers are whisked off to an unnamed country in the Balkans and introduced to a young doctor, Natalia Stefanovic, who has just learned of the passing of her grandfather. The story revolves around their relationship, or rather the fables he told her, fables which provide “everything necessary to understand my grandfather.”The Tiger’s Wife is a book about the Balkan wars, death and the role of myth in Balkan consciousness. These are its chief thematic concerns, interwoven together. “Pretty early on,” Obreht has said, “I realized that myth-making and storytelling are a way in which people deal with reality. They’re a coping mechanism.”With regard to language, praise for the book is richly deserved. Obreht is a wonderful writer, a great talent at any age. Open to any page in The Tiger’s Wife and the prose is precise, evocative, unobtrusive. Here a character cuts open a suitcase containing a body dug up from the earth:

Total silence from the spectators for Dure’s backswing and then the knife went in. A strained creak, followed almost immediately by the stench of decay. The body groaned. The sound straining like a violin, stretched between the fire and the fence. Someone behind me called for God. Arms swung up in action; up and down the fence, people were crossing themselves.

The narrative is not entirely successful. It lacks unity, reading like a collection of short stories rather than a cohesive whole, but the brilliance of the writing keeps us reading.The book’s biggest problems lie in its representation of the Balkans. Despite the amount of attention and ink granted the novel, this aspect of the narrative has remained curiously neglected. The portrayal of the region has been praised but little examined.Critics have lauded the book’s mesmerizing style, a magical-realism that casts the reader deep into the fog of reality and myth that supposedly permeates the Balkans. Writing for the Wall Street Journal, in what is otherwise a measured review, Sam Sacks observes that the tiger serves as a catalyst “for the villagers' fear and hatred—the same sort of passions that will inspire the region's implacable ethnic wars.” Michiko Kakutani praises the portrayal of “an indelible picture of life” in the Balkans and of a “people torn between ancient beliefs and the imperatives of what should be a more rational present.” Liesl Schillinger, also writing for the New York Times, glorifies the novel’s use of “fable and allegory to illustrate the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing the region’s patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence.”In review after review, the link between Obreht’s novel and Balkan history is casually asserted but never reflected upon. Instead, the novel’s image of the Balkans seems to have been simply and uncritically accepted as true. If The Tiger’s Wife indeed illustrates Balkan history, we might wish to investigate the narrative that it offers. What is its representation of the Balkans, and what should we make of it? Obreht writes beautifully, yes, but what does she have to say?To begin with, The Tiger’s Wife recounts very little history. “The story of this war—dates, names, who started it, why—that belongs to everyone,” says the grandfather to Natalia before sharing with her one recurring fable. “But something like this—this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us.”In this way we are first introduced to the deathless man, “young, thirty at most, and he has a fine head of dark hair and a pleased expression on his face.”  He has been drowned, carries two bullets lodged in his brain, but has no interest in revealing who drowned or shot him.In an interview with Jennifer Egan that appears in more recent editions of the book, Obreht says she had an “extreme, compulsive desire to not use any real places or names and to instead capture the war in essence. [emphasis added]” The names are fictional, the timeline obscure, the places, as the novel tells us, cannot be found on the map. Nonetheless, a reader familiar with the region will have no trouble identifying Belgrade as The City, Mostar as the fictional Sarobor, and the Croatian coastline that serves as a backdrop for the town of Zdrevkov.In the New York Review of Books, Charles Simic speculates that “it most likely struck [Obreht] that this was material that requires a lot of background and explanation, which would clog the narrative and prevent her from writing the kind of novel she wanted.” Perhaps this is so. Perhaps Obreht was simply more interested in Balkan myth than Balkan reality. Or perhaps she has herself mistaken myths about the region for the region’s realities.Obreht is certainly careful in handling the region’s politics. Through inferences that are evident to readers familiar with the region, The Tiger’s Wife is careful to nod in all directions to dispel any notions of bias. NATO’s bombing of Belgrade is described, an impending massacre of Muslims at Mostar implied, and the orphans left behind by paramilitaries on the Croatian coast acknowledged.Nonetheless, there are things to quibble with. For example, the Administration—as Obreht refers to the Milosevic regime—is portrayed in a semi-totalitarian guise, even though many Serbian citizens backed the wars for a Great Serbia, and cheered Milosevic as a hero and national savior.Eschewing a narrative rooted in historical detail, Obreht represents the Balkans through a series of fantastic tales, tales that mediate between the real and imaginary, the past and present. These develop in two temporal spaces: the present time, and the time of the grandfather’s childhood.The grandfather comes of age during World War II, when an escaped tiger arrives at his village. By way of Luka the Butcher, a disappointed player of the gusla (a traditional one-string instrument) with a “predilection for men”, we are introduced to the deaf and mute girl whom he is swindled into marrying. He abuses her brutally until the tiger arrives, and then one day Luka is mysteriously gone. The villagers gossip that his deaf-mute wife has killed him. They begin to refer to her as the tiger’s wife.Folkloric characters populate this section. There is the great hunter, Darisa the Bear, who was “raised by bears—or, he ate only bears”; Mother Vera, whose “people had always been shepherds”; Blind Orlo, who “read tea leaves, bones, dice, innards, the movement of swallows”; and his understudy, the apothecary, who hands the grandfather, then a young boy, a clouded mixture of sugar-water, chalk and mint leaves to give to the pregnant tiger’s wife.Characters that inhabit the present are no less colorful, not to say mythological. Here we find Ironglove, named for wearing silver bracelets during pelvic examinations; Magnificent Fedrizzi, a smuggler who procures human skulls; we even encounter parrots that recite epic poetry!Think back to that passage in which Dure digs up and opens a suitcase stuffed with a corpse. The body is that of a distant cousin. When his entire family fell sick, “some hag back in their village told them it was the body making them sick, the body calling out for last rites, a proper resting place…they were paying to dig.” As she instructed him to “wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind,” Dure rejects Natalia’s offers for medical assistance and care for his ailing daughter. Later, when Natalia follows the path of her grandfather to the shantytown where he died, she is told the kids in the clinic have died as well. “Makes no difference to me,” says the barman, “they always die when they get hoisted around here.”Superstition and violence: these are the two common strands connecting the past to the present in Obreht’s account of the Balkans, and they pervade the narrative to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Superstition abounds, emerges from every mouth, while all narrative strands seem to end in violence.We encounter every conceivable form of brutality—shelling, mass atrocity, rape, domestic violence, poisoning, drowning, hanging, shooting, maiming, dismemberment of dead bodies—and little in the way of more humane actions and qualities. Thus, the deathless man appears and reappears, to remind us of the pattern of death in the Balkans. And the tiger chews his own legs, to symbolize the act of self-destruction. Is this a rich imagination, or an impoverished one? It certainly is not a convincing account of the Balkans.Reading The Tiger’s Wife, one thinks of Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay, “How to Write About Africa,” which bitingly exposes common misrepresentations of Africa with ironic advice to aspiring writers of the continent:

“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country”; “Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions”; “Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances”; “Characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause”; “Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters.”

If this sounds much like The Tiger’s Wife, with its dogs, bears, tigers, elephants and multiple visits to the zoo, there is no coincidence. Obreht has repeatedly said that, along with the obvious influence of magical realists, National Geographic has helped shape her writing.As a consequence, in the more than three hundred pages that make up The Tiger’s Wife, there is scarcely a character that is not borne of or governed by myth and superstition. The partial exceptions are Natalia and her grandfather, who are “trying to bring light (compassion, medical treatment) to a country shrouded in darkness,” claims the Los Angeles Times review, without a hint of irony.“In Balkan culture, there’s almost a knowledge that reality will eventually become myth,” Obreht tells Jennifer Egan. “In ten or twenty years you will be able to recount what happened today with more and more embellishments until you’ve completely altered that reality and funneled it into the world of myth.” This peculiar account of Balkan attitudes to reality glosses over the difference between telling a good story about the time you got your head stuck in the closing doors of a Sarajevo tram while kissing a date goodnight, and recalling the night you took your son, kissed your husband goodbye, and fled your hometown—to take the example of my aunt, a master storyteller and embellisher. But while the first story is invariably altered and exaggerated for effect, the second is only told straight. Its simple truth is harrowing enough. There are no such stories in The Tiger’s Wife, only myths and fables. Instead of a compelling account of Balkan culture and people, we find everywhere a beautifully written affirmation of Balkan stereotypes.To be sure, there are popular myths in the Balkans: among many Serbs, who deny the crimes done in their name and feel victimized by a biased media; among many Croats, who lionize former President Tudjman without acknowledgement that his politics mirrored the politics of Slobodan Milosevic; among many Bosniaks, who today look to intolerant forms of Islam for salvation and meaning; and among Kosovar Albanians, who turn a blind eye to the atrocities of the Kosovo Liberation Army. There are other myths too—superstitions, as Obreht calls them—but these are smaller in import and prevalence. It is only in the oriental imagination that they are central to the Balkans.But, from Dracula to The Tiger’s Wife, the West has long been captive to its own image of the Balkans as a collection of divisive, backward-looking and bloodthirsty lands. Indeed, in an era of political correctness, it is hard to think of another term quite like “balkanization”—pejorative to an entire region, yet in common usage. Despite the casual prejudice with which it treats its Balkan subjects, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has been held up as an authoritative account of the region for nearly a century now. A mere six weeks of travel prompted Rebecca West’s 1,200 page rumination on the nature and character of the Balkan people(s). That is some 30 pages of conclusions per each day as a tourist.The tendency to applaud works that most echo our misconceptions remains. While we are able to acknowledge recognizably human portrayals of the Balkans—“Grbavica,” which depicts a single mother attempting to conceal the truth from her daughter born of rape, won the Golden Bear for Best Film in 2006—we remain unfortunately susceptible to shallow and clichéd portrayals that confirm our prejudices. Emir Kusturica, by far the most successful filmmaker from the former Yugoslavia, inevitably presents the Balkans as incomprehensible to outsiders. One of his most famous films, which won the Palme d’Or and caused a stir of controversy in former Yugoslavia, also gives the impression that Balkan violence is the product of some collective, regional madness.The problem with replacing political choice and accountability with vague terms like Balkan culture is twofold. First, it whitewashes the responsibility for the crimes from individual perpetrators and communities that make heroes of murderers. Moreover, by treating both perpetrators and victims as mere symptoms of the same cultural strand of violence, the distinction is blurred. The suffering of the victims is not only diminished—victims are subtly implicated in the roots of the problem.It is therefore deeply misguided to paint over the wars with the thick brush of supposedly Balkan myth-making. After all, one need not search far and wide for people to discuss very real, very practical things. On the contrary, casual conversation in Bosnia, for example, is often preoccupied with the absence of jobs, the indignity of indolence, wasted lives, crime and corruption, political paralysis and obstruction, the struggle of the present and a grave concern for the future. Young people want to leave and seek opportunities abroad. The old barely eke out a living on their pensions. There is scant mythology, little superstition, only the cold, brutal reality in the aftermath of atrocity, war, and social destruction.Thus the most enduring myth of The Tiger’s Wife—the one that is unseen and unspoken but which pervades the whole of the novel and its reception—is at least as pronounced outside the region as within it. This is the notion that the region’s various peoples are engaged in a timeless, endless, senseless war. The Tiger’s Wife does nothing to dispel this “ancient hatreds” thesis. On the contrary, the blending of time, bloodsheds, and myth that the novel puts forth has always been an essential complement to it.“This war never ends,” says the grandfather as the book draws to conclusion. “It was there when I was a child and it will be there for my children’s children.” And elsewhere:

When your fight has a purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.

The same Los Angeles Times review calls this “one of [Obreht’s] most acute points… that it has always been thus, that from the tribal past through the age of empire and into the post-imperial present, conflict is the order of the day.”This is nonsense, pure and simple. In fact, as Misha Glenny notes, there is no history of mass violence between Serbs and Croats prior to the rule of the fascist Ustasha regime during World War II. A long line of literature punctures the myth of ancient hatreds, and the Yugoslav break-up is much better explained by close analysis of the political choices of various actors than by reductive tropes such as the one above. But none of this is new. The exuberance of the reception that greeted The Tiger’s Wife speaks to two things: the precocious, evident talent of the author and the lingering, unexamined popularity of Balkan stereotypes.Unfortunately, the perpetuation of misleading narratives is no innocent matter. Maria Todorova notes that in 1993, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace simply reprinted its 1913 report on the causes and conduct of the Balkan wars, and slapped on a new introduction by George Kennan. At the same time, Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts — another of the New York Times’ best books of the year, which did much to popularize the ancient hatreds thesis — famously influenced President Clinton’s betrayal of his campaign promise for a humanitarian intervention in Bosnia. In the most flagrant example of how far these misconstructions can take us, French President Francois Mitterand once remarked, "In such countries, genocide is not too important…" He was talking about Rwanda, but the ancient hatreds thesis implies precisely this sort of logic.But the Balkans did not go up in flames because people one day woke up and remembered old resentments. Instead, influential republics had little interest in maintaining Yugoslavia as it was, and pulled the country in opposite directions until it broke apart. The political leadership in Serbia and Croatia pursued premeditated murder and the cleansing of thousands. Bosniaks followed suit on a smaller scale. In Croatia, Bosnia, and later Kosovo, people were slaughtered like cattle not for history or ancient beliefs but for cynical calculations of present political gain.The region’s past served its purpose as cloth and gasoline serves an act of arson, like an open window serves a common criminal. The ashes and graveyards left in the wake of cynics and butchers reflect ancient hatreds no more than the narrative of Brotherhood and Unity reflected Yugoslav solidarity. Instead of a fit of madness, the impulsive, recurrent act of a people predisposed to violence, the correct diagnosis is far more universal and unsettling for it. Simply, it reveals a nasty but common human tendency, guided by a vicious sort of logic, which seeks to justify a current injustice with the memory of some prior one.In the final analysis, what does it mean, as Natalia’s grandfather says, “to have no side,” to be “all sides”? Must we cast aside history and context to arrive at the essence of war, as Obreht purports to do? I think we cannot, except from an individual’s perspective, as Erich Maria Remarque and others have done. But The Tiger’s Wife does not essentialize man’s experience of war. Instead, it essentializes the Balkans.In one sense, however, Obreht is right. Not twenty years after the wars, a young raconteur has attempted to alter the immensity of that injustice, horror and suffering, and funnel it innocently into the world of storytelling myth. She won’t have succeeded to do so in the Balkans, of course, where people lived those days, bear their imprint, and live their stark consequences. For the concentration camp survivor, a child who lost a parent, a family who fled home, such a transformation is impossible. In fact, the myth-making Obreht ascribes to the Balkans is only possible outside it, for those who experienced the war at a great distance, and for whom the Balkans remain a dark, foreign region where seemingly anything is possible.As Roland Barthes recognized, myth does not deny reality. Rather it empties reality, distorts it, and presents it in a timeless and natural guise. Precisely for this reason, so many reviews observed that The Tiger’s Wife told fables, and—in the very next breath—saw in these fables a reflection of Balkan truths. So, when Schillinger writes that “Obreht shows that you don’t have to go back centuries to find history transformed into myth; the process can occur within a lifetime if a gifted observer is on hand to record it”, the last verb here is sadly telling: the critic has mistaken Obreht’s myth-making for Balkan history.But if this is not reality, what alternatives exist? The choice is not between Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak or Kosovar versions of events, as ethno-nationalists would have it. The choice is between explanations stressing agency or myth, between authentic or misleading narratives, between nuanced or shallow representations.All of which brings us back to Arkan and his Tigers. More than twenty years ago, on March 31st, 1992, in the first military operation in the war for Bosnia, the paramilitary group entered the strategically located municipality of Bijeljina in order to “cleanse” it. A great massacre ensued. Photographs by Ron Haviv, whom Arkan invited to witness the so-called liberation of the town, were soon published. An unforgettable one shows a uniformed paramilitary soldier—with sunglasses on his head, a cigarette lingering in his left hand, an automatic rifle held in the right—kicking a dead woman in the head as she lies with two others in a pool of blood. Writing for the New York Times, John Kifner asserted that the picture “tells you everything you need to know.”

Susan Sontag replied that, in fact, the photograph tells us very little apart from the accepted notion that war is horrible and that human beings are capable of doing terrible things to each other. “The problem is not that people remember through photographs,” she wrote, “but that they remember only the photographs…they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand.” The Tiger’s Wife paints ghastly and memorable pictures but, sadly, it does not help us understand.____ Pedja Jurisic lives in Copenhagen. He appears regularly in his local supermarket. A previous version of this essay featured on the Massachusetts Review blog.