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Bharati Mukherjee Jasmine
Fawcett 25-Dec-90 0449219232 / 9780449219232 Mass Market Pa Very Good
0449219232 Amazon.com &quto;Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an ast rologer 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 Am erica to reemerge as Jase, an illegal """"day mummy"""" in hip Manhattan; a nd lands beached in Iowa's farmlands as Jane, mother to an adopted teenage Vietnamese refugee and """"wife"""" to a banker. Bharati Mukherjee (The Mid dleman 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 immigr ant 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. Al ong the way Jaze acquires three children, including Du, a Vietnamese boy wh o 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 h as 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
Price:
2.57 EUR
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