O, The Oprah Magazine – September 2019

THE OPRAH MAGAZINE

O PIONEERS!

The bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife delivers a stunning tale of derring-do.

INLAND (RANDOM HOUSE), Téa Obreht’s mordantly imaginative new novel,
comprises two stories that do not exactly intertwine but run, like rivers, in view of
each other, sometimes crossing, headed toward a remote meeting point. The first
concerns an immigrant known as Lurie, who begins as an abandoned child and
becomes—in the opening pages—first an errand boy for a collector of corpses, then
a body thief, then a conduit for the dead and a pickpocket, then an accidental
murderer, after which he goes on the lam. Eventually, he ends up a cameleer; that is,
in charge of one of a number of camels brought to Texas for their ability to transport
enormous weights long distances without stopping for water.
Mingled with Lurie’s tale is an account of just over 24 eventful hours in the life of
Nora Lark, a frontierswoman in Arizona Territory in 1893. Nora has three living sons,
one talkative dead daughter, a silent grandmother, a ward with a spiritualist bent, a
missing husband, and a literal constant thirst. Lurie’s sections are rollicking and full
of movement; Nora’s sprawl in the manner of great landscape paintings. This is a
desert story rendered in technicolor.

Obreht is the kind of writer who can forever

change the way you think about a thing, just through

her powers of description—one scene in which the

residents of a small Texas town empty their houses

to see how much a camel might carry haunts me

still—and she can snap your head back with an

aphorism. “I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by

their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions,” says

Lurie, and who alive today could argue?

Inland is an ambitious and beautiful work about many things: immigration, the

afterlife, responsibility, guilt, marriage, parenthood, revenge, all the roads and

waterways that led to America. Miraculously, it’s also a page-turner and a mystery,

as well as a love letter to a camel, and, like a camel, improbable and splendid,

something to happily puzzle over at first and take your breath away at the end.

—ELIZABETH McCRACKEN

ROOM

reading

ILLUSTRATION BY Sally Deng @OPRAHMAGAZINE SEPTEMBER (^201985)