Kauai and the Park Country of Hawaii

I picked up this book because the premise seemed interesting and because it reminded me of those novels with magical realism that I used to love reading so much (and still do, but it's difficult to find new ones these days. This one itself is about five years old). The Palace of Tears is one of the most wonderful and literary romantic novels I have read in recent years. In his thirties, Casimir de Chateauneuf has it all, a wife, three children and is a successful vintner. However, he is bored with his predictable life and seeks something more profound, and he gets his answer when he sees the miniature of the beautiful and mesmerizing woman with one blue eye and the other one yellow. He falls in love with this fascinating vision and sets out to find her. The woman he seeks out is a harem slave in Istanbul, and she has had dreams of Casimir. Casimir goes through many things in his search for La Poupe (the woman in the miniature). Will he be able to find her? Will these two unlikely characters find love and happiness? The Palace of Tears is more of a novella than a novel, but it is wonderful and engrossing and I wish it had been longer. As another reviewer pointed out, this story reminds me a lot of one by Jorge Luis Borges. Actually, this story reminds me a great deal of South American and Eastern European literature with all of the magical realism, fairy-tale feel and interpretable language that populate the aforementioned genre. This novel also reminds me a little of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray with its arty surrealism. Casimir is a fascinating character. He is by no means sympathetic, and that is what makes him all the more palatable. I love the backdrop of France and Istanbul in 1868. And I also enjoyed the two star-crossed lovers that make this one of the most fascinating reads I've had this year. I cannot recommend The Palace of Tears enough.

This is a great little story of love, desire, loss, foreign places, and culture. Croutier paints beautiful pictures of every place the book takes the reader. The prose is vivid and alive, and the characters are vibrant and complex. Each chapter begins with a tiny black and white sketch that just adds to the mystery and eroticism of the book. This is a fairy tale for adults. You will want to live in the countries and time period that this book brings alive.

In Palace of Tears, Alev Croutier wraps us up in her own magical reverie on a late 1800s-Frenchman who falls in love with a Turkish woman he sees in a miniature painting and sets out on a voyage to find her. Croutier's masterful handling of language and its layers only adds to the dreamy, ethereal nature of this novel which lulls you quite into another world, another age, making you believe you are drifting on a cloud above its protagonists. Taking her inspiration from Persian fairytales, Croutier leaves empty spaces for the reader to fill, ending up with a book that is interactive enough to fit in with our new high-tech age, while also harkening back to another, where poetry and love are always enough.

This is an exquisitely crafted novel that will inspire all sort of orientalist fantasies. Madame Croutier pulls you into her story with the ever sympathetic dreamer, Casimir Chataneuf, and doesn't let you go until he finds his destiny -- the mistress of an enchanting pair of eyes: one blue, one yellow. M. Croutier weaves her tale by zooming in and out of time and painting scenes in all the detail of Turkish miniatures. Though its told in the style of a fairy tale, this novel is anything but, for it resonates with important themes, including how life and love are inscrutably at the mercy of kismet or destiny.

Though very successful as a vintner and happily married with three children, Casimir de Chateauneuf is bored. He leaves his family behind in Chateauneuf to travel to Paris where he maintains a mistress. While there, Casimir enters Orientalia, a shop with goods from the East. When he sees the miniature of a young woman, he obsesses over the unknown female with a blue eye and a yellow eye. He quickly learns the identity of the artist and begins to trail the man, who has headed home to Alexandria, but his quest fails and Casimir returns to France a broken man.Not long afterward, Casimir becomes involved with the opening of the Suez Canal. On his return to Egypt he meets the lady in the portrait, Kukla, who has been lent to the French by the Sultan as a translator. She knows he is the love who she dreamed was the one dreaming of her. Casimir and Kukla begin to fall in love, but though East meets West at the Isthmus, love might not survive the shrinking of the world.THE PALACE OF TEARS is an enjoyable historical romance that brings life to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1868. The plot belongs to the characters, especially Casimir, who will give up his material world to attain his destiny. Readers will immensely enjoy this novel while wondering how this superb book is Alev Lytle Croutier's debut novel.Harriet Klausner