[.ca] Jasmine (ISBN 1853812781)

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.

The American Identity:
I am a high school sophomore at a boarding school. I read Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee as an independent reading assignment. This is a story of a young girl forced to grow up, while trying to find who she is. Throughout the novel, we become acquainted with five women who are one and the same. We watch as Jyoti goes from the young, timid village girl to the strong American Jase, who knows exactly want she wants. She goes through many obstacles before she can just be happy. Through these obstacles, she also takes on different personas. I think Mukherjee had Jasmine go through everything she did for a reason. There is a purpose for everything in life. Jasmine's long journey made her stronger in the end. I think that the story is very well written and it gives young people, woman in particular, hope. Even if things don't seem to be going the way you think they should, you can overcome. That's what this book says to me. I would recommend this book to teenage girls that are searching for an identity.

Dreadful:
Frankly, 'Jasmine' is one of the worst books I have ever read... I cried, from boredom. Many characters names pop out of no where, and the author does not explain who they are and where they came from. You are left hanging, trying to figure out what is going on. In addition, random words are capitalized and it is written using short sentences, like that in some childrens' book or something.

Dissappointing..:
After a long time I read a book by an Indian author and it was really disappointing. Initially, the characters are not described well, there are too many of them, and it seems like it's all over the place. There is no constant train of thought and it's very confusing to follow the book in the beginning. The book is about a girl, who travels to America after the death of her husband and meets people while she lives in America. Its does not show the true picture of ones struggles and suffering - she seems to meet someone all the time that is willing to take care of her and help her. I think the author was not able to get the message across to the readers, if there ever was one. I would not recommend this book.

A good effort:
I found this to be an interesting take on the American dream from the viewpoint of an illegal immigrant. Jasmine evolves from a poor girl in India to a nanny in NYC to the "wife" of a banker in middle America. Jasmine is not an altogether sympathetic character, but she is enthralling. A quick read that I highly recommend.

A Novel of Ideas, And It Shows:
Bharati Mukherjee's 1988 short story "Jasmine" is a gem. It tells the story of Indian woman from Trinidad who enters the U.S. illegally and ends up working in the household of a liberal academic family in Ann Arbor. Mukherjee employs a light touch in her portrayal of the differences between the savvy Jasmine and her well-intentioned but naive employers. The story steers clear of sentimentality while still making you acutely aware of the precariousness of an illegal immigrant's life and the yawning gulf of power between the rich and poor parts of the world. The novel "Jasmine" is an expansion of that short story. Here, Jasmine is from an impoverished family in India proper, and we get a tour of subcontinental politics, Sikh separatism, and the mechanics of immigrant smuggling before she even makes it to the States. Though Jasmine ultimately lands in a liberal academic household, along the way she moves to Iowa, gets married, and becomes embroiled in a subplot reminiscent of the save-the-farm movies that enjoyed a brief popularity in the late 1980s. (For long stretches of the book you keep expecting Sally Field to show up.) This structural shagginess is the story's growing pains. Whether it's worth it depends on how compelling you find the themes "Jasmine" has been expanded to address. Given a bigger canvas, Mukherjee takes on bigger ideas. The novel depicts not just the differences between the first and third worlds, but also their interconnectedness. Most interestingly, Mukherjee undermines the notion that immigrants flee pre-modern homelands in search of modern sanctuaries. In her novel, both are equally modern: the former is just modernity of a rougher sort. At one point during her sojourn in Iowa, Jasmine and her adopted Vietnamese son Du (things get awfully shaggy) fix a VCR together. In Mukherjee's world, the west is no longer the locus of technology: there's nothing more natural than for fellow third-worlders to bond over a soldering gun. Themes like this make the novel "Jasmine" compelling on an intellectual level, and I'd be surprised if it's not a darling of undergraduate seminars. (Where the engagingly hard-to-classify Mukherjee is no doubt pigeonholed as a "woman writer of color.") Still, there's a grace missing from the novel. Though the shagginess of the plot may be forgivable, the neatness of the prose strikes a false note. In going from short story to novel, Mukherjee shifted from the third to the first person, and she can't quite pull off the change in perspective. Jasmine is supposed to be a fiercely intelligent but largely uneducated woman, but her voice in the novel has a sanguine, middle-class ring to it. It's oddly at ease, and too indulgently comprehending of the little absurdities of the liberal academic lifestyle. The short story's Jasmine sounded like a woman from Trinidad; the novel's Jasmine sounds like Bharati Mukherjee. As a meditation on what it means to be an immigrant and what it means to be an American, the novel "Jasmine" is a worthwhile read. To see art trump ideas, however, check out the anthology "The Short Story and Its Writer" (Ann Charters, editor) and read the seed from which it grew.