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Why ‘The Palace of Illusions’ stands apart
Sometimes, you need to shed that hinged bias to experience wonders that surprise, take you by the storm, and tell you — You were wrong.
Most of us have been there.
That phase when it became difficult to read books — accompanied by lethargy, or as you may put it, distaste for a certain genre of books.
In my case, it was the mythology books, they seem(ed) to me, a futile attempt to revisit the past, to unnecessarily glorify the lives of Gods and Goddesses, to make money out of writing what appeals to the masses.
But I was wrong. And badly at that.
I had heard reviews about “The Palace of Illusions”, people talking about it in lofty terms. I had devoured resplendent reviews, Instagram posts — all these and more had already been added to my repository of prejudices.
Yet, I never ventured to read it.
Why did I then pick up this tour de force by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni?
What made me hang on to every page like a child clinging to the parent to show them the other side of the cliff.
Flipping some pages to see what the book was all about, it was this extract in the second chapter, called ‘blue’ that screamed attention, and nudged me into urgently reading it -
