2004 Texas Book Festival Preview
Fri., Oct. 29, 2004
Queen of Dreams
by Chitra Banerjee DivakaruniDoubleday, 340 pp., $21.95
Rakhi is a painter and tea shop owner who has never been to India, yet paints an imagined India on her canvases and fetishizes her parents' experience of their native country, about which they are frustratingly mum. Rakhi feels "too American" and seeks out a more "authentic" Indian identity; what Divakaruni seems to be getting at in her sixth novel is that in this "variegated world" there is no such thing, although she cannot resist a sly, good-natured jab at the academics who try to categorize the hybridized postcolonial subject. Rakhi's mother is a dream interpreter, a gift that the daughter covets and that the mother guards jealously. For Rakhi, it is something uniquely Indian; for her mother, it is the defining factor in her own identity, her one true tie to her homeland, and she refuses to share it with her child or her husband. Once the mediating factor of the mother is gone, Rakhi and her father connect, and she finally gets the narrative of India she craves as her father rediscovers life outside the bottle. Food is the medium through which Rakhi unlocks her Indian identity; while Rakhi's mother is the Queen of Dreams, it is Rakhi's father (the King of Kormas?) and his tales of working in a Calcutta snack shop that allow her to connect with her heritage with unexpected, but enriching, results. While Divakaruni's novel is a delight, it also frustrates. Some of the narrative clunks a bit, namely the September 11 subplot, which feels painfully contrived and embarrassingly obvious despite its importance to Rakhi's development. Additionally, Divakaruni repeatedly makes overt what should have remained subtext; why would an author deny her readers the heavy lifting of interpretation, a courtesy she seems only too happy to extend to her characters? This technique undermines what is otherwise a thoroughly lovely and thought-provoking work. Melanie Haupt
Sunday, Oct. 31, 12:30-1:15pm, Senate Chamber
See www.texasbookfestival.org for full schedule.