The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Review by Grace Andreacchi

It is impossible to take this book seriously. It professes to be a re-telling of the great Indian epic ‘The Mahabharata’, from the point of view of a female protagonist, the Princess Panchaali. But the writing is so awkward and the sentiments so hackneyed and cloying, we know immediately we have been relocated to the sprawling suburban sensibility of modern America. If this were meant as a sharp-tongued critique thereof then there might be something in it, but alas, the author seems to have adapted thoroughly to the style of her adopted country, and so is bereft of irony. What is one to make of such sentences as ‘I was fascinated by Krishna because I couldn’t decipher him’? Or this: ‘I felt dejection settle on my shoulders like a shawl of iron’. Like a what? Or this: ‘A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so.’ That this sort of trite sentimentality passes for ancient wisdom from the mouths of the gods is only one of the things wrong with this book. The unevenness of tone, which veers wildly back and forth from a kind of by-your-leave-Miss storyteller’s affectation to the banality of the shopping mall is another. Merely to label a book a ‘feminist re-telling’ is not enough, the reader must find therein an engagement with the feminine experience that somehow both transforms and illuminates the ancient material. Instead we have a series of tired slogans.

The best that can be said for this book is that certain passages are not without charm, as the colour and sweep of the great epic itself sometimes take over. The Princess Panchaali is said to have been born of the sacred fire, and occasional flickers sometimes light up the pages, like signal fires glimpsed through the fog. But one would do far better simply to read the original than to bother with this pallid offspring.

I had high hopes for this book, for I consider the territory of myth and legend to be one of the most fertile and rewarding for the writing of good fiction. That this book fails to interest or excite me is not due in any way to the subject, but rather to its tedious and awkward handling. There is probably a good book to be written about the vivid princesses of the Mahabharata. Sadly, this is not it.