Inland, Tea Obreht’s second novel came out this year nearly a decade after her debut The Tiger’s Wife came out in 2010 and you can really see the years of hard work that went into this period novel where two separate storylines converge in a brilliant finale at the tail end of the 19thcentury. It is beautifully written and never once feels inauthentic or read like a cheap knockoff and its best quality which I will get to in a little bit, in other hands would crumble quickly in lesser hand but here becomes its best feature and what I am sure will be what most people take away from it. Having heaped praise on it, it is not a perfect book, with the two sections never feeling complimentary narrative wise (although they do thematically) and the plot gets overloaded with details that get lost inside each other. The two main characters of the story that takes place in the untamed Southwest of 1893 are Nora, a woman trying to hold her fractured family together on a constantly threatened parcel of land with a missing husband and soon to be missing sons and Lurie, an orphaned immigrant from Turkey whose wild life, from grave robbing to bank robbing and finally becoming a fugitive on the run from the law. It is clear they both share otherworldly qualities in their ability to talk to the dead, with Lurie followed by those he’s known who have died and one he killed on accident, and Nora by Evelyn, her daughter who died young but has grown into adulthood in her mind. These stories are interesting on their own, but until the payoff near the end of the 370-page novel they rest side by side in unharmonious fashion. But that aside, this is one of the most interesting novels of 2019 from an author I’m glad I reacquainted myself with.
Rating: 4/5
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