The Mistress of Spices

Rating:
Summary: A Delicious Tale
Review: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni illuminates the tale of mystical Tilo in her novel, The Mistress of Spices. While telling the story of Tilo's fairy tale transformation from a Mistress of spices confined to her spice shop into a passionate lover exploring Oakland, CA, Divakaruni also operates on a metaphoric level. The situations of the Indian-immigrant customers that Tilo encounters represent larger global issues concerning the immigrant experience. Haroun, a cab driver, typifies the hope and ultimate disillusionment of the immigrant. Lalita, an abused wife, characterizes the archetypal victim of Indian gender roles. Geeta, a second-generation immigrant business woman, battles the traditions of Indian culture, namely the practice of arranged marriage. Jagjit, a troubled Indian-American adolescent, struggles with the challenges of assimilation. And Raven, Tilo's lonely American love interest, symbolizes the culturally-stripped culmination of lost heritage and unfound identity.

Raven acts as the catalyst of Tilo's journey to true self-discovery and reinvention. She is forced to choose between a life of collective social responsibility and personal gratification. Immortally trapped in the body of an old woman, Tilo's life in the spice shop presents her with forbidden temptations. After meeting Raven, she begins defying the restrictions ordained to all mistresses including leaving the shop, making physical contact with others, and looking upon her own reflection. She soon must decide whether to keep her oaths as a mistress and remain with her spices and customers, or to submit to her passionate disposition and abscond with Raven.

Divakaruni does an exquisite job of intertwining Tilo's convictions and verdicts with those of her clients to create a fanciful fairy tale, complete with vitality and magic. Anyone interested in a legend of fantasy with an ethnic twist would find Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices simply delectable.

Rating:
Summary: Suspended between two worlds...
Review: Divakaruni's first novel reads like a fable, as she blends Old World India with New World America. An aged woman, Tilo, an Indian immigrant, serves as the "mistress" of spices. She unravels her mythic past to set the stage for the present. Highly fantastical, it is necessary to suspend belief in the reasonable as Tilo describes her early life, training for this unusual vocation. Using traditional Indian spices, some with particularly healing properties and required rituals, to attend to the various physical and emotional ills of her customers, Tilo carries on a constant dialog with the spices, and each chapter introduces another spice and its uses. The language is often poetic, her descriptions full of visual impressions: "my cloak dragging in salt dust like a torn wing".

Divakaruni cleverly uses her story line as a vehicle for exposing the social stigma of immigration, as well as the ills of modern cities riddled with poverty and crime. Where it could be strident, instead the writer introduces her character's problems and complexities in the context of understanding. In the course of her conscientious ministrations, Tilo unwittingly falls in love with a man she calls the "American". She cannot fathom his motives in their mutual attraction, as she is "disguised" as an old woman and he is a man in his prime. Soon the present pulls as strongly as the past, and desire clashes with duty. Her serenity shattered, Tilo is forced to make life-altering decisions, agonizing over her choices; in the end, the direction is clear, without doubt.

With the aura of a fable, I often felt too aware of the transition from the believable to the unbelievable; the author's device should not have been so obvious. In her following work, however, particularly Sister of My Heart, Divakaruni is able to overcome such flaws without losing her power or her poetry.

Rating:
Summary: the Mistress of Spices
Review: Incorporating the magical with the real, this novel follows the life of Tilo, a woman with magical powers who decides to become a Mistress of Spices. Divakaruni uses intense imagery and vivid descriptions to narrate the story. Her style verges on prose, utilizing sentence fragments, distinct punctuation, and strange paragraph formats for an interesting and compelling read.

In addition, Divakaruni develops a story that places a mystical character in an ordinary setting: Oakland, California. She combines Tilo's exciting life as an immortal being with the lives of every-day mortals in an effort to contrast the two extremes. With the presence of Tilo, the reader is able to view the commoners in Oakland as special people. Tilo, however, begins to feel jealousy at their lives, rich with human contact and emotion. When a strange American man enters the shop and steals Tilo's heart, she begins to question her decision to be a Mistress- is this the life for her?

Rating:
Summary: Magic mixed with reality.
Review: This book is my favorite by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Whereas her short stories all seem to end with depressing ending, this book does the complete opposite and leaves the readers with a complete sense of hope. It's the story of Tilo and how she incorporates her enchanted world into the mundane lives of those that need her help. She uses her magical spices and her powers that were granted to her to help those around her. It's a modern day fairy tale that throws mystical elements into an ordinary California town and Divakaruni writes it so magnificently, that the magical world seems believable.

The stories of those that Tilo helps, tugged at my heartstrings and I found myself empathizing with more then one character. But most of all, I found myself empathizing with Tilo as she goes on her journey to find her place in the world and what she is truly meant to do. This is a heart warming story full of rich characters that the author writes with very colorful and precise details. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: More than expected
Review: This book was a very satisfying read. Using lyrical prose, the author tells her protagonist's story in past and present. I've noticed other reviewers have commented on how artificial the book's narrative seemed, but I thought it was beautiful. It felt like the story was being told directly to you, making the story more immediate (for me at least). Although the story is told through the protagonist's association with Indian spices, its not only about Indian and Indian-American perspectives and issues. The author does a wonderful job using this setting for her story but it can be told in any cultural context I think. But in using this context, she effectively shows that (what white Americans consider) "ethnic subcultures" experience the same trials of life everyone else on the world does. Generational misunderstanding and racial intolerance are a few of the problems her characters encounter, but not in an especially overblown or melodramatic way. The story is told emotionally, but that's because it is in first person narrative. In this sense I agree with other reviewers that women may enjoy it more than men. My husband also agrees, but thought the story was compelling nonetheless.

Altogether I felt this was a gorgeous and modern usage of fantasy, emotion and cultural representation. I doubt it will change your life forever, but its consciousness and beauty has really touched me.

(PS: if you want to learn more about Indian spices buy a cookbook, this is fiction)

Rating:
Summary: A Treasure
Review: This is a beautiful book. Each word seems carefully chosen to weave a spellbinding story of an other-worldly woman who faces the timeless struggle of finding and honoring her own path. The prose is rhythmic, almost poetic, and rich with marvelous imagery. It is a favorite I'd recommend to anyone who knows, or wishes to know, her own heart.