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A review by tbr_the_unconquered
Kaurava by Krishna Udayasankar
2.0
This is not a review per se, but do bear with me. I’ll be honest with you – it is extremely difficult to read this series. Not because it is a bad book but because it is incredibly complicated a storyline. The Mahabharata in itself is a labyrinthine maze of tales and when more and more of complexity is poured into the tale, it is like wading in quicksand. I do not exaggerate when I say that the storytelling in this one gave me an aching head trying to unravel the plots and subplots scattered all along it.
Chronologically, the tale starts after Yudhishtir’s coronation as the emperor and ends at the time when the Kurukshetra war is poised to begin. As in the earlier story, there are no divine beings in the tale and it is the story of an arms race between two clans and of the arms merchants who are in their midst making the best profits of them all. To the credit of the author, she manages to retell all the major plot points in the epic in her own way. She has also been able to weave a tale of how the trade of weapons and their making can completely overwhelm the minds of just and honest rulers. The characters in her story are not the classic characters of the epic but every single one of them are flawed heroes. They pursue their own ends and thereby leading the entire kingdom of Aryavarta to the brink of a deadly war.
My problem with this book and its predecessor lies with the rambling. The characters tend to go off on monologues that last pages at the drop of a hat. The last I remember, the only author to have made me feel so was Ayn Rand. They go on and on about varied topics like honor, war, justice, technology, reason and fairness for pages and pages. I skipped huge swathes of pages, passages and sometimes even chapters for this reason. From the mass of reviews about this book, it seems that most readers have enjoyed this but for me it served to disconnect me very quickly from the storytelling.
On to the last part of the trilogy. I still want to stick on and find out the treatment that will be meted out to the Kurukshetra war.
Chronologically, the tale starts after Yudhishtir’s coronation as the emperor and ends at the time when the Kurukshetra war is poised to begin. As in the earlier story, there are no divine beings in the tale and it is the story of an arms race between two clans and of the arms merchants who are in their midst making the best profits of them all. To the credit of the author, she manages to retell all the major plot points in the epic in her own way. She has also been able to weave a tale of how the trade of weapons and their making can completely overwhelm the minds of just and honest rulers. The characters in her story are not the classic characters of the epic but every single one of them are flawed heroes. They pursue their own ends and thereby leading the entire kingdom of Aryavarta to the brink of a deadly war.
My problem with this book and its predecessor lies with the rambling. The characters tend to go off on monologues that last pages at the drop of a hat. The last I remember, the only author to have made me feel so was Ayn Rand. They go on and on about varied topics like honor, war, justice, technology, reason and fairness for pages and pages. I skipped huge swathes of pages, passages and sometimes even chapters for this reason. From the mass of reviews about this book, it seems that most readers have enjoyed this but for me it served to disconnect me very quickly from the storytelling.
On to the last part of the trilogy. I still want to stick on and find out the treatment that will be meted out to the Kurukshetra war.