Téa Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, which hit bookshelves in 2011, received high praise. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, landed on the New York Times bestseller list, and took home the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, Inland, has been eagerly awaited and lives up to expectations seamlessly.
The story unfolds in the mid- to late-nineteenth century and is narrated through alternating storylines. It kicks off with a man known as Lurie, originally from Djurić, recalling his childhood experiences to an unknown listener. After moving from Ottoman Herzegovina to New York City with his father as a young boy, Lurie finds himself orphaned at just six years old when his father passes away unexpectedly. To survive, he collects the deceased from flea-infested establishments on Bleecker Street or, in slow times, digs up bodies from churchyards and delivers them to hospitals for examination: “Their innards laid out. Their bones boiled white.” When caught, Lurie and other delinquent boys are sent by train to the lawless West, where his life of crime intensifies. His chapters detail his escape from the law along the Missouri River and journey south to Indianola, Texas, where he meets the companion currently listening to his tales, embarking on a further journey together out west.
On the other narrative front, we meet Nora Lark, a blunt homesteader in the Arizona Territory, who has spent two decades laboring on the arid frontier, hoping for her husband to return with a fresh water supply. While Lurie’s chapters span his entire life, Nora’s unfolds over a single day. The powerful moment when Lurie and his companion encounter Nora stands out as one of the novel’s most riveting scenes.
Right from the start, the absence of Lurie’s listener grips the reader’s attention. We become his eager audience, as if we are right there with him, somewhere along the late 1890s Missouri, with a sense of urgency. Lurie’s recollections about his father are faint and broken; he knows his father was fleeing something but never learned the specifics. Descriptions of their sea voyage are delivered in precise, unsparing language, recollecting “the dead, of course, outlain in their white shrouds side by side along the stern.” He reminisces about his father’s disdain for Ottoman Turks, his yearning for his childhood village with its stone houses divided by a river, but little else.
Meanwhile, back at home, Nora grapples with mounting challenges during a harsh drought. Emmett, her husband, is three days overdue. Her two eldest sons and all the family dogs have vanished. They might have to abandon their home and start anew elsewhere. Nora’s youngest son, Toby, claims to have seen a beast lurking nearby, a sighting corroborated by Josie, the family helper. “Between the two of you,” Nora remarks, “we might as well be living on Herschel’s moon.”
Though she may not fully trust Toby and Josie’s account, Nora believes that her departed infant daughter, Evelyn, is alive, growing alongside her and serving as a conduit for brutal truths:
Papa was hardly a saint when you met him.
Evelyn. It’s not right for you to say such things.
The Western landscape plays a role in both storylines, but the novel’s power lies in Nora’s internal struggles. She questions whether the hardened woman she has become was worthwhile and is incensed by her husband’s counsel to their sons to do better than he did—to marry “ladies.” How can anyone remain tender in this harsh environment? “Two people at full strength could barely manage all the chores of a homestead: plowing, sowing, raising fence.” She begins to doubt Emmett’s intentions to return, sensing that his absence is not due to misfortune:
No. She couldn’t articulate what she felt. When Nora Volk and Emmett Lark united twenty years back, it was out of love—or what they thought was love, or at the very least a strong hope that their bond could turn life at the edge of the world into an epic adventure. He had an adventure; she did not. And now, in aspiring for more for their sons, Emmett had assessed their years together, deemed them lacking, and cast them aside.
Shifting back to Lurie, we discover that his unseen listener is a musty-smelling camel named Burke. Just as we ponder if Burke is linked to the creature observed by Toby and Josie, the realization hits: “what in hell were these jangling monstrosities, these big, toothy, snooded goats”—specifically, a full load of thirty-three dromedaries—doing at the docks of Indianola, Texas? Obreht skillfully incorporates an obscure aspect of American history. The US Army indeed imported camels from the eastern Mediterranean along with Greek and Turkish camel handlers in a mid-nineteenth-century experiment. These peculiar humped animals served as pack animals for the cavalry, with the ability to haul over fifteen hundred pounds for nine days without water. One of the actual camel handlers—Hadji Ali, also known as Hi Jolly—makes an appearance in the novel and teaches Lurie how to ride.
Enriched by these historical figures, classic American Western backdrops, spirits, creatures, myths, and the máti, the Greek talisman to ward off the evil eye, the novel weaves a dense tapestry that breathes new life into American literature. When have we encountered a Turkish camel handler from Smyrna inhabiting the American West before? While Inland includes violence befitting a Western narrative, it refrains from the relentless brutality found in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; rather, the novel evokes echoes of Don Quixote or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in its scope and ambition. The unexpected convergence of Nora, Lurie, and Burke—with Nora aiming a shotgun at the juncture of Burke’s neck and shoulder while Lurie remains mounted—along with Obreht’s skillful blend of literary styles and historical truths, will leave readers pleasantly surprised and engaged.
