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Jasmine
By Stephen Herold
Sep 27, 2001 -- We usually think of book reviews as title oriented--I like this book. Overlooking natural variation in any artist's work, I think more of the author and how this book fits into their scheme of life and art. Some writers only reiterate variations of the same story again and again until we forget them, but others, like Bharati Mukherjee, continually open new layers of beauty and vision like petals of a rose.Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee is such a book. Mature both in perception and technique, Mukherjee connects us to a sense of inner clarity in viewing the world that only an outsider can feel and share. We love those works of fiction by our neighbors, brothers and sisters that speak the common idiom and connect us to our nature as a social unity. We take our identification from the best of these works--Mark Twain and Hemmingway, Irving and Fitzgerald. But in the process we lose the ability to see ourselves fresh every day as if never before seen. When a gifted foreign author looks at us and then immerses themselves into the social life of their adopted country, we get sudden truths that are always startling and sometimes disconcerting of our conceits.
Having done her graduate study in Middle-America Iowa, Mukherjee sets Jasmine in that elemental farming state and explores how an Indian-born wife of a traditional dirt farmer becomes a party of a new world. To always be that foreigner, to have your basic realities unknown to your simple friends and never be understood or given a scrap of your original identity is a line of separation that can be very hard. And yet, the conservative, unchanging farm life of Iowa has so many analogs to Jasmine's Indian homeland. Perhaps this is why Mukherjee was drawn to Iowa for study and her fiction.
Then, with great poise, Mukherjee continually contrasts Jasmine's time in New York with her rural life in a crumbling world beset by world economics. Like a litany, as a Greek chorus, her friend Taylor in New York keeps repeating she can't leave New York, she belongs there, "Iowa's dull and flat." As it repeats throughout the book a sense of motion and contrast builds up until its energy pulls everyone from their frozen lives and forces them to confront America's motion.
Jasmine has to deal with all the tragedies of life and find her way in an America that is as full of change as her old Indian world was of stability and unchanging relationships. Even harder is accepting perfect freedom to act and move, if we will pay the emotional price, and not be tied forever by old words and acts. With clean, clear prose that is often poetic in its distillation, Mukherjee leads us through the time of transition in a woman's life before erasing New York and Iowa both as she moves on to a fresh life beyond the world we now know. It's hard to put a book like this down until you have digested it to the very end.
Steve Herold
Reader Comments
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| hi | Apr 26, 2004 | bye | goodbye |
| thanks for writing this, steve. you really helped me out with my research paper. you guys should have a link on your home page for book reviews, old and recent. anyway, peace! | |||
| lathavenkateswari | May 28, 2004 | india | lecturer |
| Your article is splendid.If you add criticism to mukherjee's works, it will be of great help to researchers. | |||
