Inland
Tea Obreht, 2019
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812992861
Summary
The bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife returns with a stunning tale of perseverance—an epic journey across an unforgettable landscape of magic and myth.
In the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, two extraordinary lives collide.
Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life—her husband, who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons, who have vanished after an explosive argument. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home.
Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West.
The way in which Nora’s and Lurie’s stories intertwine is the surprise and suspense of this brilliant novel.
Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history.
It showcases all of Téa Obreht’s talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely—and unforgettably—her own. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 20, 1985
• Where—Belgrade, Yugoslavia
• Raised—Cyprus; Egypt; Georgia, & California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Southern California; M.A., Cornell University
• Currently—lives in Ithica, New York
Tea Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997.
Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. The Tiger’s Wife (2011), is her first novel.
She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Tea Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York.
Among many influences, Obreht has mentioned in press interviews the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric, Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, and the children's writer Roald Dahl. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[S]entimental and meandering…. Let me pause to say: Obreht has real gifts as a storyteller… [but] all the drama feels fake, as if someone is backstage shaking a thunder sheet…. More common are observations and dialogue that are as softly didactic as refrigerator magnet slogans…. I realize I am being terribly hard on Obreht’s novel, but… [t]he many readers who will enjoy Inland and put it on best-seller lists can send an old curse in my direction.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
[T]he landscape of the West itself is a character, thrillingly rendered throughout…. Obreht's simple but rich prose captures and luxuriates in the West's beauty and sudden menace.… Obreht also has a poetic touch for writing intricate and precise character descriptions…. In Obreht's hands, this is an era that overflows with what the dead want, and with wants that lead to death.
Chanelle Benz - New York Times Book Review
[Inland] unfolds like a dream… a smoky borderland between…reality and fantasy, the living and the dead, textbook history and fairy tales. Ms. Obreht has the extraordinary ability to… [create] a fully immersive imaginary world governed by its own logic…. The bedtime-story elements can become twee and caricatured…. And the novel feels sanitized… [yet] when you’re under its spell the objections seem beside the point…. Inland is a place of killers, camels, families and phantoms. Reading it, you may feel as Lurie does: "I had somehow wanted my way into a marvel that had never before befallen this world."
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
It’s a voyage of hilarious and harrowing adventures, told in the irresistible voice of a restless, superstitious man determined to live right but tormented by his past. At times, it feels as though Obreht has managed to track down Huck Finn years after he lit out for the Territory and found him riding a camel.… The unsettling haze between fact and fantasy in Inland is not just a literary effect of Obreht’s gorgeous prose: it’s an uncanny representation of the indeterminate nature of life in this place of brutal geography.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Inland is a classic story, told in a classic way—and yet it feels wholly and unmistakably new.… At once a new Western myth and a far realer story than many we have previously received—and that’s even with all the ghosts.
NPR
Tea Obreht’s M.O. is clear: She’s determined to unsettle our most familiar, cliche-soaked genres.… Inland can feel like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian turned inside out: contemplative rather than rollicking, ghostly rather than blood-soaked.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
With Inland, Obreht makes a renewed case for the sustained, international appeal of the American West, based on a set of myths that have been continually shaped and refracted through outside lenses.
New Yorker
Obreht is the kind of writer who can forever change the way you think about a thing, just through her powers of description…. 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… splendid.
Oprah Magazine
What Obreht pulls off here is pure poetry. It doesn’t feel written so much as extracted from the mind in its purest, clearest, truest form.
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review) [A] mesmerizing historical novel spun from two primary narrative threads.… Obreht paints a colorful portrait of the Western landscape, populated by a rogue’s gallery of memorable characters… . [She] knocks it out of the park in her second novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) At 37, Nora Lark feels she's become a hard woman from the impossible challenges over the last 20 years…. [P]arallel to Nora's story is one of the Balkans-born outlaw Lurie Mattie…. How he ends up in Nora's yard roped to a camel is a most unusual, absorbing tale. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal
(Starred review) [E]xtraordinarily intricate worldview, psychological and social acuity, descriptive artistry, and shrewd, witty, and zestful storytelling…. As her protagonists’ lives converge, Obreht inventively and scathingly dramatizes the delirium of the West—its myths, hardships, greed, racism, sexism, and violence.
Booklist
(Starred review) A frontier tale dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet.… Meanwhile, there are head lice, marvelous, dueling newspaper editorials, and a mute granny with her part to play. The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away.
Kirkus Reviews
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