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    Jasmine: 30th anniversary edition
    Unavailable
    Jasmine: 30th anniversary edition
    Unavailable
    Jasmine: 30th anniversary edition
    Ebook214 pages3 hours

    Jasmine: 30th anniversary edition

    By Bharati Mukherjee

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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. "Rich one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American." -- The New York Times Book Review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802196354
    Unavailable
    Jasmine: 30th anniversary edition
    Author

    Bharati Mukherjee

    Winner of a National Book Critic’s Circle Award, BHARATI MUKHERJEE is the author of eight novels, two story collections, and the coauthor of two books of nonfiction. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

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    Reviews for Jasmine

    3.5/5

    10 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      There was nothing spectacular about this book. At certain moments, I kept thinking, "oh, now it is going to get good.." but if just never panned out. Granted, I read most of it while simultaneously watching inauguration day coverage, so I wasn't fully paying attention to it.
    • 5/5
      Jasmine has many names, many roles, many ways of relating to the world. Follow her on a journey from India to the US as she explores her identity and finds a place for herself.Adult situations (rape); parent permission required.
    • 3/5
      HAd it not been for the Stanford Book Salon, I probably would not have picked this book up to read, despite my interest in Indian culture. Until the reading list came out, it had flown completely under my reading radar. The group was asked to keep in mind the question, "To what extent is Jasmine, or anyone for that matter, in control of his/her destiny?" while reading the book. Having been involved in one too many destiny versus free will discussions in my lifetime, I conveniently let that slip from my mind, slipping instead into the world of Jasmine.Born in that strife torn part of India, where the trauma of the Partition remains a wound today, Jyoti's (who is given the name of Jasmine by her husband) story starts "Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an asrologer cupped his ears--his satellite dish to the stars--and foretold my widowhood and exile. " The language of this story swept me away. I could so easily visualize her sisters, "slow, happy girls with butter-smooth arms or hear the humor and love in Taylor's voice, talking to his young daughter, later on in New York. The novel follows young Jyoti through a decade of her life, from 14 to 24. In each phase of her life, she is given a new name by different men who are pivotal in her world at that point: Jasmine, Jase, Jane, Mom. When the astrologer proved correct, and she is widowed at age 17 in an act of political violence, her exile, as an illegal immigrant to the United States is not far behind. Her entrance to that country is heralded by a horrifically brutal act, but she survives, able to compartmentalize her life as easily as she is to slip into another name. How she gets from a rural village in Punjab to Baden, Elsa County, Iowa is a journey of more than miles. The poetic language and soft humor woven in the telling are what kept me reading, uncertain until the very last page the next trajectory of this young woman's life.
    • 4/5
      This novel was not what I expected. When I first picked it up I had thought it would be about a woman's life in India. And to an extent it was, however, it took a twist and brought the woman to America.The main character is a woman named Jasmine. Throughout the story she goes by several other names including Jane, Jyoti, and Jase. Each name she has seems to bring its own life with it and she has several different periods of time in her life.She starts out as a young girl in India where she marries at fifteen. When her husband is murdered in a bombing, she travels to America with the intent of committing suicide at the college campus he was to go to. However, she is stopped by a fierce determination to live after a hardship befalls her.Without giving away too much of the novel I don't want to give greater detail to the events of her life. She lives with several people performing different tasks at each and this storyline flits back and forth with one of her final stays, with a handicapped man whose child she is carrying.I was impressed with this novel. While I originally wanted to dislike it for not being what I expected I found that it told an impressive story. One might not think much of the hardships of one woman, but this book made you care about her and at the end I was rooting for her to take a certain path in life.The language is clear and doesn't get overly wordy. Even though a lot of the concepts are from India Mukherjee makes them easy to understand. Overall, it was a great story.JasminePublished in 1989241 pages
    • 4/5
      A sad haunting story that has come back to me as I try to sleep, hoping that Jane (as she is last known in the story does have a happily ever after life. Her bravery in leaving India where she had no future to come to America is to be cheered as is her determination to make it.
    • 2/5
      Jasmine had depth, but it was too depressing for my tastes. One of its biggest weaknesses was the fact that it's a book about a very intelligent woman whose life is nearly completely steered by men. That really got to me.
    • 3/5
      Jasmine Vijh, widowed in India at 17, flees to America. This is the story of her daring travels, her painful yet exhilarating cross-cultural metamorphosis and, eventually, the home she finds in Iowa where she accepts how inextricably her fate has become part of America's.Deceptively simple, lots of cultural differences, and Jasmine's struggle to find her way to and in a foreign country
    • 4/5
      This is a novel that I had placed in my discard pile, but retrieved to re-read after a friend told me she had really liked it. Almost all the way through I was happy to be reading this book again & thinking that I would keep it after all. Acutely post-colonial (as we called such novels 15 years ago) in its point of view, it seems very up to date in its insider understanding of the often bizarrely complex interior and exterior lives of many immigrants, particularly illegal ones from poor countries (an immigrant arriving today from India might be a very different kind of person, with very different life story & motivation, however). I particularly liked Jasmine's thinking about and interaction with Du, her Iowa "husband" Bud's adopted Vietnamese teen age son. The chapter in Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed in which she lives & works with illegal immigrants working as hotel maids in Florida came to mind, as Jyoti Vigh aka Jasmine aka Jase aka Jane Ripplemayer arrives in the U.S. by way of Florida, after a squalid boat voyage, rape by the boat's captain in a seedy motel & the murder (by knife) of said rapist. She is rescued by a Quaker woman who helps her on her way to New York City for a couple of years of a dream life working as a "Day Mummy" for Taylor (a physicist & professor at Columbia), Wylie & their precocious & perfect adopted daughter Duff. After Wylie leaves Taylor, Jasmine continues to live with Taylor & Duff until one day she sees her Indian husband's (her first love & lover Prakash) murderer in Central Park & decides to flee to Iowa (where Duff was born). It's here that we find her as the novel opens & where we leave her as she is about to take off for California (newly retrieved by Taylor & Duff). In the meantime she has become the pregnant wife(in all senses other than the legal one) of a small town (Baden, Elsa County) banker, Bud Ripplemayer, during the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. [I am wondering, of course, whether Mukherjee once attended the Iowa Writers Workshop] For the past 2 years, Bud has been paralyzed from the waist down after a desperate farmer shot him in the back before blowing his own brains out.
      I had a love/ hate response to this book. I really liked it & then finally resented its narrative seduction (drive to conclusion). I wasn't satisfied with the ending. Taylor & Duff arrive. Jasmine is in love & leaves Bud (right after Du has also left for CA). She has told us that Bud was a great guy. Now, he's a cripple (politically incorrect word but useful here) & 30 years older than she is & would be a dead end for Jasmine. What about the baby she's carrying? There's not even a mention of the right or wrongness of taking that baby away with her (it's not yet born). I don't buy the Taylor fantasy. He does little for me. Bud is a better person. Which is not to say that Iowa & Bud make sense for Jasmine, but that she perhaps lets herself off the hook a bit too easily, just as she did when she first became involved with Bud (Karin, Bud's ex-wife asked her then why she never thought to ask Bud if he was married. Jasmine treats this question as irrelevant, since it was Bud who fell in love with her & not her who pursued him. But the question seems quite relevant to me. It's as if Jasmine's own story (poverty, lack of education, murdered husband, rape, murder) allows her (or the author) to rationalize some dubiously ethical decision-making.




    • 5/5
      Jasmine takes on a different name wherever she goes. From India to Iowa. I do enjoy Indian writers. I have to admire her for all she's lived through and her nomadic life. I can identify with the moving and I think I long to be able to pick up and move, only under better situations.
    • 4/5
      This novel of trifurcation follows a young woman from a tiny Punjabi village to Florida, Manhattan, and a farm in Baden, Iowa. When her husband Prakash is murdered by a terrorist's bomb in a sari shop, seventeen year old widow Jyoti manages to gather enough false documents and funds to become contraband on a cargo ship out of Amsterdam. Landing penniless in the Florida Keys, she kills the rapist ship captain and is rescued by a kind stranger who helps Jyoti to chop off her hair to pay for a green card. In Manhattan, she morphs into Jasmine, au pair to a Columbia professor, a book editor, and their young daughter. When Jasmine thinks she sees the terrorist from her hometown selling hot dogs in a city park, she leaves the family and flees across country. In Iowa, Jasmine becomes Jane to her boss, a middle aged married bank manager who falls in love and divorces his wife to marry her. And this is a mere outline of all the events in her story. Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane is a dreamy survivor and I reveled in the lyrical, sometimes difficult to follow, non-linear passages and in the dramatic conclusion.Quotes: "An astrologer cupped his ears, his satellite dish to the stars, and foretold my widowhood and exile."