Desirable Daughters: A Novel - Hardcover

Mukherjee, Bharati

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786865989 ISBN 13: 9780786865987

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2002

Synopsis

At the heart of this remarkable new novel by the award-winning author of The Middleman and Other Stories and Jasmine are issues of culture, identity, and familial loyalty. Comparable to The Joy Luck Club in its honest portrayal of the American immigrant experience, Desirable Daughters follows the diverging paths taken by three Calcutta-born sisters as they come of age in a changing world.

Tara, Padma, and Parvati were born into a wealthy Brahmin family presided over by their doting father and his traditionalist mother. Intelligent and artistic, the girls are nevertheless constrained by a society with little regard for women. Their subsequent rebellion will lead them in different directions, to different continents, and through different circumstances that strain yet ultimately strengthen their relationship.

Moving effortlessly between generations, Mukherjee weaves together fascinating stories of the sisters' ancestors, their childhood memories, and dramatic scenes from India's history.

About this title

About the Author

Bharati Mukherjee is the author of five novels, two non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories, including The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of English at the University of California Berkeley.

Reviews

HIt should take nothing away from the achievements of new young writers of South Asian origin to state that Mukherjee eclipses all of them in her new novel, the highlight of her career to date. Only a writer with mature vision, a sense of history and a long-nurtured observation of the Indo-American community could have created this absorbing tale of two rapidly changing cultures and the flash points where they intersect. The narrator, 36-year-old Tara Chatterjee, was born into comfort and privilege in Calcutta. She and her two sisters are part of a close knit, snobbish Brahmin Bengali family, and the girls are raised to marry well. Tara, however, has brought shame to the family by divorcing her multimillionaire husband, Bish, and moving with their teenage son, Rabi, to Atherton, Calif., where the sudden intrusion of the past into her and her sisters' lives is only the first tremor of an earthquake that will undermine their safe assumptions. The narrative succeeds brilliantly in interweaving several themes of class, history and changing consciousness. Beneath the family drama and Tara's quest for her identity, Mukherjee tells a larger story about Indians in India and the U.S., painting a complex picture of vastly different cultures Hindu, Muslim, Parsi, Sikh further divided by substratas of caste and ancient prejudices, yet kept together by strict rules of family behavior and spiritual rituals. Finally, there's a very real current of danger running through the narrative that explodes into violence and irrevocable change. With remarkable dexterity, Mukherjee depicts tradition and myth colliding with the free will and dynamics of a one-world economy. Winner of the NBCC Award for The Middleman, Mukherjee has always been considered a significant writer. Here she bursts out as a star. 5-city author tour. (Mar. 31)Forecast: Mukherjee's perspective on the two societies she straddles is sharp and candid. Since she hasn't published a novel in several years, review attention and handselling should help this book find a discerning audience.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The complex plot of this novel by the award-winning Mukherjee (The Middleman and Other Stories) centers on three sisters of a Brahmin Indian family whose lives have diverged over the years; the youngest, Tara, has in fact moved to California. When Tara is approached by a young man claiming to be her nephew, a family secret is finally revealed, unleashing a sophisticated, gang-driven plot to kill or kidnap various family members. While Tara strains to unravel one mystery, new revelations surface, until she is forced to reevaluate everything she thought she knew. Artfully conveying the complexities of Indian society, philosophy and religion in India and the United States, Mukherjee's writing is rich, deep, and compelling, and her characters are well rounded and believable. Recommended for most collections. Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Mukherjee can't resist raiding the mystery genre's bag of tricks to keep her reflective literary fiction focused and suspenseful, and to remind readers of just how precarious even the most privileged lives truly are. Like Leave It to Me (1997), her newest tale is set in San Francisco, a city emblematic of instability given its pitched terrain and promise of earthquakes. The youngest of three beautiful, conservatively raised sisters in an orthodox Hindu Bengali family, Tara has done the unthinkable: she's left her brilliant, enormously wealthy husband, a Silicon Valley legend; liberated her artistic teenage son from prep school; and taken up with an ex-biker Buddhist carpenter. Then, just when she thinks she might be getting the hang of things, an obsequious yet vaguely threatening young man appears, claiming to be her long-denied illegitimate nephew. As Tara tries to find out if there's any truth to his story and adjust to the fact that her son, Rabi, is gay, she realizes how little she knows about her own family. Self-possessed and curious, Tara wouldn't be out of place on the pages of a full-fledged mystery, and Mukherjee--whose humming power-line sentences carry sparkling commentary on traditional Hindu marriages, caste prejudices, spiritual matters, and the dark side of America's striving Indian immigrant community--makes shrewd use of her protagonist's wry wit, false aura of helplessness, and keen observations. Entertaining and intelligent, Mukherjee's graceful novel explores the continuum between tradition and change as it chips away at superficialities to reach the core of human experience. Donna Seaman
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Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786865989
• ISBN 13: 9780786865987
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 310