Mistress of Spices

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
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I really enjoyed this book, but it’s hard to describe. It’s by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, formerly a community college creative writing instructor at Foothill in Los Altos, and it’s set in Oakland (not the expensive, yuppie side of Oakland, but the more interesting and sometimes dangerous areas). It’s usually just listed as fiction, literature, or magical realism, but I disagree. It’s fantasy start to finish. I would even say, given the role the San Francisco and Oakland play in it, with the immigrants’ and locals’ hopes and dreams and crimes, urban fantasy. Yes, it’s fantasy based in on cultures that have been continuously alive (India) rather than the more common urban fantasy that’s loosely based on what we know about ancient Celtic cultures, but there’s also plenty of Catholic- and Haitian Vodou- and other continuous-living-tradition-derived-based urban fantasy out there, so I hope nobody from the Indian subcontinent will be upset if I label this as urban fantasy of a kind. (Anyway, my impression is that the details of the magic in the book were totally made up by the author, besides the traditional elements of Ayurvedic medicine and whatnot, but please let me know if I’m wrong.)

The main character is Tilo, a “Spice Mistress” who can use power-infused spices from around the world to solve the problems of the customers who step through the doors of her little shop in Oakland. To wield such magic, she has had to pay a high price. She’s a young woman trapped in an old woman’s body, trapped in the store, but because she chose this life, she doesn’t view it as a trap. Until she meets someone who’s different …

One of the things I thought was interesting about this book was that it doesn’t shy away from racial issues–Tilo is aware of her ethnicity, her customers’ ethnicity, and so on. That’s not the main focus of the book, but it comes into play. There is a movie, but from everything I’ve heard, it removes all of the most interesting parts of the book, including Tilo’s fascinating back story before she becomes a Mistress of Spices (AWESOME). And speaking of ethnicity, as far as I understand, they actually change one of the most important characters’ backgrounds to be completely white, which is totally obnoxious because that character’s background is really important to the story. The movie might be interesting if you really like Aishwarya Rai, the famously beautiful Indian actress, but I don’t have any interest in seeing it, because it turns a complex, multilayered fantasy that includes a love story into a fluffy romance.

Be warned that the writing style is unusual and sometimes almost poetry-like. One reason for this is that the author is trying to convey the different patterns of the characters’ voices, I think, so that you will notice the way characters from different regions of India have different ways of speaking English. (English is one of various native languages for many people in India and Pakistan, and one of the reasons this is so, even after the end of colonialism, is that there are multiple language families in that part of the world that are not related to each other at all. There is no “Indian language” or single “Indian accent.” Many of the languages within India are mutually unintelligible, being far more different from each other than French and Spanish–since those come from a single language family.) Other times there’s unusual punctuation or sentence structure just to convey a sense of dreaminess, I think. Just go with it! It’s definitely not for everyone, but give it a few chapters and see if you can get into it.

This book is a great demonstration of the American literature market’s weirdness about “genre fiction,” which includes fantasy, science fiction, mysteries, romance, horror, and other things that book critics, some so-called intellectuals, and many literature and creative writing professors look down on. (Not all of them–I have a master’s degree in English myself.) This book is usually referred to as literary fiction, but as far as I’m concerned, it and similar things like Chocolat are fantasy. There seem to be some unspoken rules that most critics and professors would apply to books like this, like If It Addresses Real Issues Such As the Immigrant Experience It Cannot Be Genre Fiction, and If It Has Interesting Punctuation or Other Fancy Writing Tricks It Cannot Be Genre Fiction, and If There Are Parts Where You Can’t Tell Metaphor from Reality It Cannot Be Genre Fiction, and Basically If Reviewers Liked It It Cannot Be Genre Fiction, Because They Have Never Actually Read Any. So in order for a book critic, etc., to speak positively about a genre book, they can’t admit that it’s a genre book (unless it’s “for kids,” like Harry Potter). They have to pretend that despite the blatant use of magic (Chocolat, Mistress of Spices, Practical Magic, etc.), being set in the future (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Sparrow, etc.) and so on that something isn’t fantasy or science fiction. (Actually, I think that’s part of how the term “magical realism” got invented, to be totally honest.) It’s pretty funny in some ways, but it also backfires when students, writers, and others can’t get taken seriously because their books got labeled one way while some very similar book got labeled another way.

But this is genre fiction. And if you read widely within genre fiction, you will encounter all of these concepts and everything else that literary fiction does well, because just like all other things in life, genre fiction has a wide range from “complete crud” to “utterly excellent.”

Anyway, although this book is definitely not for everyone, I recommend it if you think you might enjoy a fantastic journey into a dreamland of spices, magic, and love, firmly grounded right here in the Bay Area. But be warned that you’ll be craving an aromatic cup of masala chai afterwards!

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Where to Find It

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