Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Books

Stepping Off the Edge: Learning & Living Spiritual Practice
India-born Chitra Divakaruni is one of my favorites. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature from UC Berkeley and teaches at Foothill College on the San Francisco Peninsula. She's won both Allen Ginsberg and Pushcart Prizes for poetry. This is my favorite of her works, a book of award winning poetry about the experience of Indians coming to the United States. Beautiful, powerful work illuminating a population I knew little about.

I love Divakaruni's writing, and this collection of poetry is no exception. She paints an incredible tapestry with her words. At times the tapestry is painful to look at, but it is always compelling.

This is the kind of collection that will turn poetry haters into poetry lovers (or at least poetry likers). Divakaruni tells moving little stories -- rather than addressing abstract ideas -- in these entertaining poems. My favorites were "Woman With Kite" and "The Makers of Chili Paste." Her poems are mostly about Indian women, though I found them universally moving

While many of the stories she tells in her poems are clearly set in specific times and places -- a convent school in India run by Irish nuns; Yuba City, California in the years between 1900 and 1940, for example -- the themes of those stories resonate much beyond those locales.

Shining like beacons, the moments of joy or happiness in these poems relieve the otherwise unremitting sadness evoked by the painful lengths of abuse, suicide and death, and fear in so many of the poems. For example, the exhiliration of the 19-20 year old narrator escaping the family home for the big city lights of Las Vegas or Los Angeles, in the eponymous poem, is palpable. And although it's clear that she's not just a teenager escaping any home -- she's a teenager escaping a restrictive traditional home with a possible arranged marriage in her future -- the poem easily evoked the same sense of a caged animal smelling freedom in me, someone who never lived in that kind of household.

Beautifully written.

Ms. Divakaruni's output is likely to be forgotten in a short time -perhaps a few years. In the mean time, she masquerades as an interpreter of the east to the sort-of-educated white audience. Along with her fellow Bengali woman author, Bharati Mukherjee, this lady continues the insults of Sikhs, this time from Yuba City. Perhaps this attitude is rooted in their upbringing in Calcutta, where Sikhs drove Taxi Cabs, buses, and trucks and (like another minority group in the US) were blessed with legendary equipment - in stark contrast to their own bengali men - who though so intellectual just did not have this physical dimension.

Black Candle succeeds in its prose poems that a vignettes of the difficulties of life as a South Asian. The poems also work if one judges them as vignettes rather than poetry. Yoga Lessons is the strongest piece as poetry. Even as vignettes, however, the ubiquous use of first person, which works well for the poems in isolation, fails to work in the collection as the reader gets many "I's" of which some are the same and others not. The book does as excellent job of making the foreign culture and environment accessible to Americans.

This book reminds me most of Jana Harris' work where pioneer women's stories are made into poetry. If you enjoyed that, you'll surely enjoy this,

I was surprised by this book. I generally dislike "modern" poetry, but these poems were different. They seemed to speak of things in a way that sounded very genuine. The major fault of the book was that all of the poems seemed to emphasise how hard and terrible women's lives were, usually as the result of actions by men. This is fair enough, but when ALL of the poems seemed to have this same theme, it began to sound more like a collection of ehining rather than genuine emotional expression. A few verses on something other than mosery would have been nice. But all in all a very nice book. Well worth the price.

Black Candle is a supremely impressive collection of poetry rich with metaphor and set on the Indian sub-continent. These poems portray moving, palpable portraits of women's lives that will strike a universal chord of recognition and appreciation with the western reader. The Room: I have walked this corridor so many times/I no longer notice/the gouged floorboards, the brown light/washing the peeling walls, the stale/childhood smell of curried cabbage.//I am looking for the door,/the one whose striated knob/matches perfectly the lines of my palm,/which opens without sound/into a room with milk-blue walls.//On the sill, a brass bowl/of gardenias in water. Peacocks/spread silk feathers against cushions./The white cockatoo on its stand/knows my name. Sun filters/through the sari of a woman/who rises toward me. I am caught/by the lines of her bones, the fine/lighted hairs on her held-out arm,/your eyes, mother, in her mouthless face.

I found these poems to reveal a harsh beauty. If I joke that American women should read this before they complain it would be to ease the tension over severity with which women are treated in many of these Asian cultures. Divakaruni has revealed a piece of her soul and raised concerns over the mistreatment of women in Asia (as well as anywhere in the world for that matter) These poems are best read a couple at a time so one can absorb the passion and the reality of the situations described. A few of the poems in this collection moved me close to tears. Hopefully, a better day will dawn. I would like to apend my earlier comment that American women should read this by stating that all the men need to read it, too.

I really enjoyed Sister of My Heart and was excited to learn there was a sequel ... and I TRIED to like it, I really did but the only reason I kept plugging away was in hopes that it would improve. The style of writing is MUCH different from the first book and no one is very likeable. Read her "Palace of Illusions" or Indu Sundresan's books instead ....

it was in excellent condition and i was proud enough to give it as a gift

This book was difficult to get through and I felt very disappointed after reading it. Divakaruni's style of writing is good. She is quite descriptive but if felt she did a poor job with the story. I didn't care for any of the characters and still had too many questions after finishing the book. I also felt some parts of the book were drawn out too long.

Sister of My Heart is one of my all time favorite books--I love everything about that book and that is why I was so excited to discover the Divakaruni wrote a sequet to it. But after reading it I wish I had not. Yes, it was nice to have so many of the questions, left over from the first book, answered but this book ruined the characters for me.

My review of it has nothing against Divakaruni as a writer, she is extremely talented and gifted but I hate where the story ended up. I also hated that I no longer cared for the characters. Overall I found it to be just ordinary and almost forced.

As far as this book is concerned I would have liked to be left in the dark.

I read this book immediately after the first one--"Sister of my heart". As a complete story, she has provided a very compelling glimpse into the hearts of two women who are closer than sisters, closer than friends. Also, we get to glimpse another culture, and when the setting shifts to the USA, we get to see the American culture through immigrant eyes. I love this author and these books, and cannot recommend them highly enough.

A collection of short stories, excepts from novels, and a few poems sounded like a nice selection. I thought it would be something I could easily pick up and put down. Each story is about someone living in California - almost all told from the point of view of immigrants and from different time periods. I thought the idea was good, but I found that I missed the feel of short stories. Only one of the excerpts from a novel left me feeling satisfied.

I did find a couple of quotes -
"At some point in your story grief presents itself. Now, for the first time, your room is empty, not merely unoccupied."
- D.J. Waldie, from Holy Land

"There bodies don't work, their minds have wandered off to meet old friends and new horizons, and their own families treat them like they are idiots."
- Laila Halaby, The American Dream

"Money, though, is an illusion with green faces. I think this is so money has a personality - like the way our dieties end up with traits like the rest of us. People create money then they let money create them."
- Luis J. Rodriguez , "My Ride, My Revolution" from The Republic of East L.A.

If nothing else, I think I found a couple new authors. I am curious to read the rest of the story. I look forward to discussing it at book club.

Someone loaned me this book on a backpacking trip and was I surprised to find such rich reading fare. The stories all focus on some aspect of life in California. The authors - a mix of old and new- are well chosen. This book made me remember how entertaining the short story genre can be. It defiinitely has a place in this hurried world we occupy. I think this is a higly worthwhile read.

Mistress of Spices starts out somewhat difficult to follow. The first hundred pages seem to jump back and forth because they are introducing the main characters, but after they are all introduced, the book becomes a lot easier to keep up with. The storyline behind it all makes me think that it would be a good ABC movie. I love how the Lonely American (Raven) can see through her aged body and see the real Tilo. After she broke her first Mistress rule, it was almost like she thought, "Well, I'm already in trouble, so I might as well make it worth while..." Then after First Mother visited her and told her she only had three days, i was unable to put the book down. It ended nothing like I had imagined...but I can't tell you the ending or else I'll ruin it. But the book was definately worth reading if you can make it through the first 100 pages. Good Luck!