deceased grandfather, the novel’s sense
of place took on an air of universality.
The stories, like the myths and folktales
they invoked, transcended the specifics
of time, location, and history.
Obreht’s actual grandfather, a cen-
tral influence on “The Tiger’s Wife,”
also provides the seed of inspiration for
her second novel: obsessed with West-
erns, he imparted his fascination with
the American frontier to his young
granddaughter. Obreht grew up imag-
ining America as “a vast, unpeopled, al-
most supernaturally beautiful wilder-
ness,” a place that, she has said, “seemed
impossible to me, a landscape of the
imagination more than anything else, a
painted backdrop, the mirage of another
age.” After spending her youth in the
former Yugoslavia, Cyprus, and Egypt,
Obreht first came to the United States
at the age of twelve, settling with her
family in the American South before
later moving to Northern California.
When she finally laid eyes on the West,
she was captivated, and found herself
“overwhelmingly bound to a place where
I had no connection, no roots, no fam-
ily, no cultural touchstone whatsoever.”
With “Inland,” Obreht makes a re-
newed case for the sustained, interna-
tional appeal of the American West,
based on a set of myths that have been
continually shaped and refracted through
outside lenses—from Karl May’s ad-
venture novels to Sergio Leone’s spa-
ghetti Westerns or, more recently, Chloé
Zhao’s film “The Rider.” The fictional
outpost of Amargo, where Nora and her
family have carved out their home, is
rendered by Obreht with instantly recog-
nizable, almost cinematic clarity. The
town teeters between the prospects of
boom and bust, and Nora’s household
finds itself on a similar precipice; after
her husband goes missing on a trip to
find water, her two elder sons take off
following a heated argument about his
fate, leaving her to look after Toby and
attend to the family’s affairs on her own.
The West of Obreht’s grandfather—
grounded in seductive stories of adven-
ture rather than in the grim particulars
of history—has been as potent to chil-
dren in her native Europe as it has been
to young Americans growing up in the
conquered landscapes where its events
actually played out. I realized, while read-
ing “Inland,” that Obreht had imagined
Amargo to be situated not far from the
town where I was raised. Born the same
year as Obreht, I, too, imagined the land-
scape as a backdrop for adventure—my
friends and I played cowboys and Indi-
ans in our high-desert back yards with
thoughtless abandon, and we partici-
pated gleefully in our town’s Frontier
Days celebrations and its “World’s Old-
est Rodeo.” But, even for those without
roots in the American West, the setting
of “Inland” is immediately familiar, part
of a near-universal inheritance.
“Inland” interweaves the story of Nora
and her homestead with the adventuresof a young immigrant known as Lurie,
an Anglicized version of his original sur-
name, Djurić. In the book’s opening pages,
he recounts to an unidentified interloc-
utor how he left the Ottoman Empire
as a boy with his father, a Bosnian Mus-
lim, who sought a new life in America.
Not long after they arrive in an Eastern
port, his father dies, leaving Lurie with
only scattered memories of him. The en-
suing details of Lurie’s story bear out any
number of genre clichés—he falls in with
a group of outlaws, kills a man, goes on
the lam, and moves farther and farther
west—but there are also hints that Obreht
has something different in mind for him.
Lurie sees ghosts and carries with him
the desires of those who touched him in
death—among them a child pickpocket
with whom he once shared an attic room
near the Missouri River. The boy dies of
typhoid, but his spectre and his lust for
petty larceny remain with Lurie.
After thieving his way along the Gulf
Coast of Texas, Lurie is caught by a
group of Levantine sailors in the act of
stealing a nazar, a blue amulet like one
that he remembers his father carrying
as protection against the evil eye. It is
here that we are introduced to a cadre
of characters unfamiliar to the Western
genre—Greek, Turkish, and Arab camel
drivers from the Eastern Mediterranean
who have arrived in America with a
boatload of dromedaries, which are the
first of their kind to set foot on the con-
tinent since their progenitors died out
in the last Ice Age.O
nce Lurie joins the cameleers, his
story departs from its seemingly
prefigured trajectory. This portion of
the novel draws from an obscure chap-
ter in history, involving the United States
Camel Corps, a project of the U.S. Army
that deployed camels as pack animals
to support military operations in the
arid Southwest. Obreht preserves many
true details in her rendering of this
short-lived experiment: the names and
biographical details of the drovers and
their military overseers, the route trav-
elled by the caravan from Texas to Cal-
ifornia, the locations of their encamp-
ments, and the bizarre challenges
presented by the animals along the
way—their intense musk, for example,
repels the other pack animals meant to
labor alongside them.“ Yes, it was originally a bouncy castle, but in this market
I say take off your shoes and make an offer!”