62 Time August 26, 2019
F
or someone convinced ThaT noThing lies
beyond the grave, Téa Obreht brings a lot of stuff
back from the dead. The living and the unliving
mingle in her books like uneasy teens at a party,
half recognizing each other, uncertain of what they have
in common. She’s fascinated by history, particularly that
which has been forgotten. And more literally, her latest
book, Inland, contains some of the undead remains of the
almost two whole books she wrote, but never finished,
after her 2011 smash best seller The Tiger’s Wife.
“I threw 1,400 pages in the trash,” says Obreht, 33, sit-
ting on an unreliable chair in the windowless room she
shares with two other adjunct professors at Hunter Col-
lege in New York City. For a novelist about whom TIME
critic Mary Pols wrote, “Not since Zadie Smith has a young
writer arrived with such power and grace,” it’s a remark-
ably modest office, just the place to talk about those dis-
carded drafts with struggling students. “It felt like failure
a lot,” she says. “But then I realized it was just a different
way of measuring progress, that I was opening doors and
realizing there was nothing in the room and then closing
those doors and continuing down the hallway.”
She’s phlegmatic about it now, but it must have been a
little terrifying watching those years of searching tick by
since she won a slew of accolades, including the presti-
gious Orange Prize—now known as the Women’s Prize for
Fiction—at the criminally young age of 25.
The book in which she eventually found a reason to
tarry weaves together two narratives in Arizona at the end
of the 1800s. In one, Nora Lark, a wife and mother, spends
a day trying to restore order to her homestead, which is
currently missing one husband, two sons and most of its
water supply. It also seems to have lost its mind, since the
remaining inhabitants insist that the house is being men-
aced by a terrifying beast. Nora believes that she alone is
behaving rationally—and the dead daughter with whom
she steadily converses agrees with her.
The other story, which intersects with Nora’s, is told by
Lurie, a wandering miscreant immigrant from Yugoslavia
who’s recounting his life to a friend. Perhaps because of
his early childhood years spent as a grave robber, he can
talk to the dead, though if he does, they deposit their deep-
est desires within him and he begins to want what they
wanted. This may be why the friend he chooses to talk to is
a particularly good listener, and also a camel.
A novel bAsed in the American West is not an obvious
choice for an author born in Belgrade and raised in Cyprus,
Cairo, Georgia (the American one, not the European one)
and California. Nor is it an obvious follow-up to Obreht’s
first book, although that also wove together strands of
folklore, family and fantastical bonds
between the animal and human king-
doms. The Tiger’s Wife was inspired by
the death of Obreht’s grandfather, the
dominant male figure in her upbringing.
(Her mother’s marriage to her father
was very brief.) Inland, meanwhile, was
sparked by a history podcast about the
Camel Corps, a short-lived experiment
to introduce camels into America.
Yet the books are similar in many
ways, most obviously in the fascina-
tion with death and with communion
between humans and non-humans. “I
remember talking to David Mitchell at
a dinner many years ago, because I was
in a crisis about what I was supposed
to write next,” says Obreht. The Cloud
Atlas author told her that all books do
three things. “There are the themes
that every book is about: love, death,
loyalty,” she says. “Then there are the
things that this book is about, like the
American West or the Balkans. And
then there are the things that every
book you write is about. That is what he
called your Whac-A-Mole themes.”
Obreht is beginning to believe that
humans’ relationship to fauna is her
chief Whac-A-Mole theme: no mat-
ter how often she hits it, it’s going to
pop back up. She has long been a David
Atten borough megafan, after all. And
she’s toying with studying zoology in
her downtime from writing and teach-
ing. One of the characters in her book
divides the world into “two kinds of
folk: those who name their horses and
those who don’t.” Obreht is firmly in the
former category.
When she started the novel, Obreht
probably had some notion that the ideas
she wanted to pursue were going to be
relevant for a while. The newspaper
published by Nora’s missing husband,
which is in dire financial circumstances,
is engaged in a political dustup with a
rival newspaper. Each paper’s publisher
accuses the other of simply making up
facts to fit its opinion as to where the
county seat should reside. (Obreht, an
enthusiastic researcher, explored the
newspaper wars of the era for one of
her failed drafts.) The novel is also shot
through with the unexpected collateral
effects of that game- changing technol-
ogy, the telegraph. And over it all hovers
the specter of scarce natural resources,Obreht had a
hit with her debut
novel. Some of her
other firsts:TimeOff Opener
BOOKS
Téa Obreht returns to
resurrect the Old West
By Belinda Luscombe
BOOK
SHE LOVED
The Incredible
Journey by Sheila
BurnfordSTORY
SHE WROTE
A two-paragraph
tale about a goat,
when she
was 8STORY
SHE PUBLISHED
“The Laugh,” about
a blackout, a baby
and a hyena, when
she was 23LINE
OF FIRST BOOK
“In my earliest
memory, my
grandfather is bald
as a stone.. .”