gobblebook 's review for:

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

4.0

---

The Glass Palace follows one family through most of the Twentieth Century in Burma, India, and Myanmar. It explores the family's relationship to British Imperialism and the personal and political struggles of India's fight for independence. It's an ambitious book: it covers a lot of territory, history, and themes. Ghosh is good at depicting people and events vividly; in some ways, this is actually a weakness of the book. He is very good at bringing characters to life quickly, but the book's scale is so large that he can't focus on many of these characters for long. I would have preferred a story that only covered 10 years, instead of nearly 100. Any book that spans such a long time period must skip over some events, and the pacing felt uneven to me. I have studied a lot of postcolonial theory. This book raises many of the major postcolonial issues: is violence or non-violence a better approach to throwing off an imperialist power? Are the benefits of colonialism (education, roads, etc.) worth the costs (subjugation, loss of culture)? To whom should a soldier in an imperial army be loyal? Ghosh treats these topics very sensitively, showing just how impossible it is to come up with a good answer to any of the questions raised by a postcolonial situation. This would be a wonderful introduction to postcolonialism; however, I've read enough postcolonial literature and theory that the book felt a bit like a postcolonial primer to me. All in all, a very enjoyable book that raised some interesting issues, but perhaps had too much of an agenda to really be an enjoyable story. I listened to the audiobook, and as always, Simon Vance's narration was wonderful