Inland by Téa Obreht5/13/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() On the face of it the book begins conventionally enough, with the story of an outlaw, Lurie, who is on the run. Magic realism served Obreht well in her fable about Yugoslavia’s baroque divisions, and it’s no less effective in shaping this alternative foundation myth about the American west. The fictional territory of Inland is as vivid and as violent: Arizona in the second half of the 19th century, populated by “cowpokes and prospectors”, gunslingers and cattle kings – and, yes, cameleers. Her 2011 Orange prize-winning debut, The Tiger’s Wife, mapped the aftermath of civil conflict in an unnamed “Balkan country still scarred by war”, which was based on her native Serbia (born in Belgrade in 1985, Obreht moved to the US at the age of 12). ![]() Sometimes the wounds are so grievous, there’s no coming through them at all.” Obreht is superb at tracing such inescapable wounds, both personal and national. “Sometimes people come through their wounds, but time does not. “T here are wounds of time and there are wounds of person,” cautions a camel driver in the extraordinary second novel by Téa Obreht. ![]()
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