SOURCE: “Questions of Authority: The Story of 3 Generations Living in the Shadow of Empire,” in Chicago Tribune Books, Vol. 1154, No. 35, February 4, 2001, pp. 3, 7.

In the following positive review, Aslami praises The Glass Palace and examines the characters' quests to discover their physical and moral boundaries in a post-colonial land.

Amitav Ghosh's latest novel, The Glass Palace, begins with a sound. New and unintelligible, this sound comes surging across the plain into Mandalay, Burma, traveling up the banks of the Irrawaddy River, skidding across the western wall of the Mandalay Fort, and ultimately spreading confusion in the marketplace. With gentle irony, the narrator tells us that the only person who can identify the sound correctly—it is British cannon as the army advances on defiant Burma in the 1880s—is Rajkumar, who is merely an Indian and only a boy, and thus not to be believed.

In this way, the...