Product Description

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 shocking 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #175915 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .69" h x 5.56" w x 8.23" l, .53 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Amazon.com
&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 Library Journal
This novel relates both the odyssey and the metamorphosis of a young immigrant from rural India. Her story is often shocking: the violence of the rape that greets her on her first night in America is certainly no greater than that of the crazed Sikh extremists who made her a widow at age 17 in India. Yet neither the character nor her story is held back by this violence. Along the way Jaze acquires three children, including Du, a Vietnamese boy who like herself is an immigrant. Finally, still only in her early twenties, Jaze takes off to pursue her own version of the American dream. The novel has a delicious humor and sexiness that make it a treat to read. The author is this year's winner of the National Book Critics Circle fiction award for The Middleman and Other Stories ( LJ 6/1/88).
- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.