Jasmine - Softcover

Mukherjee, Bharati

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449219232 ISBN 13: 9780449219232

Publisher: Fawcett, 1990

Synopsis

"Mukherjee has eloquently succeeded in creating a kind of impressionistic fable, a prose-poem, about being an exile, a refugee, a spiritual vagabond in the world today."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jasmine, widowed at seventeen, and living quietly in the small Indian Village where she was born, wants more. Her journey from rural Hasnapur to southern Florida, to Manhattan and ultimately to Iowa, creates a Jasmine in metamorphsis. Her vision and intelligence reveal America to us in new ways, while her courage and her exhilarating energy draw us irresistibly through pain and tragedy to renewal and hope.
"A beautiful novel, poetic, exotic, perfectly controlled."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

About this title

Review

&quto;Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ear ... and foretold my widowhood and exile," relates Jyoti, fifth cursed daughter in a family of nine. Though she can't escape fate, Jyoti reinvents herself time and again. She leaves her dusty Punjabi village to marry as Jasmine; travels rough, hidden airways and waters to America to reemerge as Jase, an illegal "day mummy" in hip Manhattan; and lands beached in Iowa's farmlands as Jane, mother to an adopted teenage Vietnamese refugee and "wife" to a banker. Bharati Mukherjee (The Middleman and Other Stories) makes each world exotic, her lyrical prose broken only by the violence Jasmine almost casually recounts and survives.

From the Back Cover

One of the best-loved novels from a writer of richness and significance, Jasmine has been acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as "artful and arresting . . . breath-taking . . . [Mukherjee] marks with unsparing brilliance the symptoms of a new Third World." When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee.

Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its sudden upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her and others like her-our new neighbors, friends, and lovers. In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee has created a heroine as exotic and unexpected as the many worlds in which she lives.

"Rich . . . One of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to be come an American."-The New York Times Book Review

"Engrossing . . . Mukherjee once again presents all the shock, pain and liberation of exile and transformation. . . . With the uncanny third eye of the artist, Mukherjee forces us to see our country anew."-USA Today

"A fable, a kind of impressionistic prose-poem, about being an exile, a refugee, a spiritual vagabond in the world today; Mukherjee has eloquently succeeded."-The New York Times

"A beautiful novel, poetic, exotic, perfectly controlled."-San Francisco Chronicle Born in Calcutta and now a distinguished professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Bharati Mukherjee was the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, for her book The Middleman and Other Stories. She is also the author of Leave It to Me, The Holder of the World, Darkness, The Tiger's Daughter, and Wife. Bharati Mukherjee lives in San Francisco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fawcett
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0449219232
• ISBN 13: 9780449219232
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 214