The Palace of Tears is literary fiction about love. It follows no romance novel conventions, so it would be unfair to judge it by the standards of the genre: it features adultery, lacks a standard HEA, and has extremely spare characterization. By literary fiction standards I didn’t much care for it either – my standard for literary fiction still demands that I be entertained, and I wasn’t. While this book has strong imagery and atmosphere, it’s unaccompanied by interesting characters and emotional immediacy.

The book is set in 1868. We meet Cassimir de Chateauneuf, a vintner who has left his wife and children at home so he can play with the sophisticates in Paris. He goes into a shop of “Orientalia” and is mesmerized by a miniature portrait of a woman with one blue eye and one yellow eye, labeled “La Poupee” (The Doll). He sets off to find her by tracking the artist through the desert, nearly succeeds, but collapses and is sent home, where his wife and children nurse him back to health. Then he sets off to Paris again. He accompanies the Empress Eugenie to Constantinople, where she is being wooed by the Sultan. When Eugenie asks to see the royal harem, a female who can translate French is brought from the Palace of Tears. The translator was once the personal doll of the so-called French Sultana, and she was known as La Poupee.

To describe the story further would require giving away an unfair amount of information – even the above covers a lot of ground in a very short book. While this brief synopsis sounds pretty interesting, it doesn’t capture the experience of actually reading the book, which is much less interesting. The prose is so spare that the book itself reads like a summary. There is a potentially interesting, emotionally involving story here, but it’s as if we’re seeing it through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars – everything is very distant and smaller-than-life. The stylized prose is sometimes unfortunately reminiscent of the Bad Hemingway contest. Events pass by rapidly but in a monotonous, emotionless drone; although the first half of the book moves very quickly it still manages to be boring. The second half is a bit more interesting, because La Poupee is a much more intriguing character than Cassimir and because the story has expanded to include glancing encounters with historical figures such as the Empress Eugenie, Charles Worth, and the Sultan Abdulaziz.

The book is very allegorical about East meeting West, with the waters of two empires mingling in the Suez Canal. And the writing is sometimes very atmospheric, redolent with imagery and strong visuals. Both of these qualities are strong, and if they were supporting a story I would delight in them. But I could not attach this atmosphere to anything very interesting to me.

With my romance fan’s hat on (a lovely sunbonnet with long streaming ribbons), I have to say that for the number of characters who weigh in with their views of what love is, not one of them seems to have hit on any definition of the term that I recognize. To these folks, love is obsession, pain and suffering. Love is wholly selfish; the one who loves projects that feeling onto another person. Love is also entirely on the surface-the central love story of the book is that of a man who abandons his old life to pursue an image in a painting. Cassimir and La Poupee’s souls may intertwine, but they never actually have a conversation.

I don’t buy it. I don’t feel especially bad for not buying it, because I’m not much interested in what a book that purports to be about love but that keeps an unyielding emotional distance from the readers at all times has to say. If you are intrigued by very distinctive writing styles, this book could be worth a look. If, like me, you mostly read for emotional connection, this is one to miss.