The Palace of Tears

Rating:
Summary: a nice bit of exoticism, but a bit derivative
Review: AFter glancing at the lush cover and exotic plot, I couldn't wait to start this book. Though it had some strong qualities (dreamy writing, exotic scenery ranging from France to Egypt to Istanbul), overall, I found it disappointing. Not to nitpick, but the major plot device (dreaming someone else while at the same time they are dreaming you) is stolen directly from Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer. To make matters worse, later in the novella a character looks for a book in the library that contains everything, and that too is directly copied from Borges! So much for originality. There is very little character development, so we never feel that we get to know Casimir or feel for him. The "true love" never seems fully rendered. All in all, most of the charm of this book lies on the surface (setting, plot) but once you dig a little, much of the magic fades away.

Rating:
Summary: a nice bit of exoticism, but a bit derivative
Review: AFter glancing at the lush cover and exotic plot, I couldn't wait to start this book. Though it had some strong qualities (dreamy writing, exotic scenery ranging from France to Egypt to Istanbul), overall, I found it disappointing. Not to nitpick, but the major plot device (dreaming someone else while at the same time they are dreaming you) is stolen directly from Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer. To make matters worse, later in the novella a character looks for a book in the library that contains everything, and that too is directly copied from Borges! So much for originality. There is very little character development, so we never feel that we get to know Casimir or feel for him. The "true love" never seems fully rendered. All in all, most of the charm of this book lies on the surface (setting, plot) but once you dig a little, much of the magic fades away.

Rating:
Summary: Failed to engage
Review: I give _The Palace of Tears_ three stars, because I can't think of anything I particularly liked _or_ disliked about it. It just kind of...was.

The novel seems to be based on a tale the author's grandmother told her long ago, and I can see that this could have been an enchanting story when told in that way. In fact, had Croutier written a short story with this material, pruning out the fluff, it probably would have been a very good love story. As it is, we have a slim story padded out into a short novel, stuffed with ruminations about the Suez Canal, and about the nature of love. We have characters that I just couldn't get into. They never really seemed real to me. The hero is callous in his treatment of everyone but the heroine, the heroine is too sweet and beautiful to be real, and they wander through the novel spewing forth theories on the nature of love and of fate. They talk like proverbs, not like real people.

Again, I would have liked it much better as a short story, with the forced philosophical musings left out.

Rating:
Summary: Palace of Tears
Review: In Palace of Tears, Alev Croutier wraps us up in her own magical reverie on a late 1800s-Frenchman who falls in love with a Turkish woman he sees in a miniature painting and sets out on a voyage to find her. Croutier's masterful handling of language and its layers only adds to the dreamy, ethereal nature of this novel which lulls you quite into another world, another age, making you believe you are drifting on a cloud above its protagonists. Taking her inspiration from Persian fairytales, Croutier leaves empty spaces for the reader to fill, ending up with a book that is interactive enough to fit in with our new high-tech age, while also harkening back to another, where poetry and love are always enough.

Rating:
Summary: A gorgeous little book
Review: This is a great little story of love, desire, loss, foreign places, and culture. Croutier paints beautiful pictures of every place the book takes the reader. The prose is vivid and alive, and the characters are vibrant and complex. Each chapter begins with a tiny black and white sketch that just adds to the mystery and eroticism of the book. This is a fairy tale for adults. You will want to live in the countries and time period that this book brings alive.

Rating:
Summary: A gorgeous little book
Review: This is a great little story of love, desire, loss, foreign places, and culture. Croutier paints beautiful pictures of every place the book takes the reader. The prose is vivid and alive, and the characters are vibrant and complex. Each chapter begins with a tiny black and white sketch that just adds to the mystery and eroticism of the book. This is a fairy tale for adults. You will want to live in the countries and time period that this book brings alive.

Rating:
Summary: Love like a Dream
Review: This is an exquisitely crafted novel that will inspire all sort of orientalist fantasies. Madame Croutier pulls you into her story with the ever sympathetic dreamer, Casimir Chataneuf, and doesn't let you go until he finds his destiny -- the mistress of an enchanting pair of eyes: one blue, one yellow. M. Croutier weaves her tale by zooming in and out of time and painting scenes in all the detail of Turkish miniatures. Though its told in the style of a fairy tale, this novel is anything but, for it resonates with important themes, including how life and love are inscrutably at the mercy of kismet or destiny.

Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: Though very successful as a vintner and happily married with three children, Casimir de Chateauneuf is bored. He leaves his family behind in Chateauneuf to travel to Paris where he maintains a mistress. While there, Casimir enters Orientalia, a shop with goods from the East. When he sees the miniature of a young woman, he obsesses over the unknown female with a blue eye and a yellow eye. He quickly learns the identity of the artist and begins to trail the man, who has headed home to Alexandria, but his quest fails and Casimir returns to France a broken man.

Not long afterward, Casimir becomes involved with the opening of the Suez Canal. On his return to Egypt he meets the lady in the portrait, Kukla, who has been lent to the French by the Sultan as a translator. She knows he is the love who she dreamed was the one dreaming of her. Casimir and Kukla begin to fall in love, but though East meets West at the Isthmus, love might not survive the shrinking of the world.

THE PALACE OF TEARS is an enjoyable historical romance that brings life to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1868. The plot belongs to the characters, especially Casimir, who will give up his material world to attain his destiny. Readers will immensely enjoy this novel while wondering how this superb book is Alev Lytle Croutier's debut novel.

Harriet Klausner