Product Description
"Mukherjee writes with beautiful precision and just the right density of detail. There is an unlikely marriage of Jane Austen and Nathaniel West in her words."
THE VILLAGE VOICE
"Dimple Dasgupta had set her heart on marrying a neurosurgeon, but her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial ads." So begins the wry story of an obedient daughter of middle-class Indian parents who is about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Driven first to shock and then to despair, Dimple lives in a waking dream. And when her fantasies take a violent turn, she wonders where wishes end and reality begins....
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A complex protagonist
Dimple, the main character of "Wife" is portrayed in such a way by Mukherjee that the reader is left wondering about the attitude that he or she develops towards her.Mukherjee takes us deep into the mind ofDimple as she makes a transition from being single to marrying a husbandchosen by her father,and from living in the familiar surroundings ofCalcutta to moving to the so-perceived violent city of New York.As thenovel progresses, Dimple's hidden unstable personality reveals itselfleaving the reader shocked, yet entranced. ... Read more

Product Description
ational Book Critics Circle Award-winner Bharati Mukherjee has long been known not only for her elegant, evocative prose but also for her characters- influenced by ancient customs and traditions but also very much rooted in modern times. In The Tree Bride, the narrator, Tara Chatterjee (whom readers will remember from Desirable Daughters), picks up the story of an East Bengali ancestor. According to legend, at the age of five Tara Lata married a tree and eventually emerged as a nationalist freedom fighter. In piecing together her ancestor's transformation from a docile Bengali Brahmin girl-child into an impassioned organizer of resistance against the British Raj, the contemporary narrator discovers and lays claim to unacknowledged elements in her 'American' identity. Although the story of the Tree Bride is central, the drama surrounding the narrator, a divorced woman trying to get back with her husband, moves the novel back and forth through time and across continents. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

I did not know this ....
was a trilogy either. It is not mentioned anywhere on the book jacket. I am not sure if knowing this would change my rating though. The book is very slow moving. I stopped at page 70 or so. The first 70 pages and perhaps the rest of the book are truly a history of India (and Britain's control of it). I found the history very interesting but there was not much of a story going on here. I was looking for more of a storyline than a history text.

A disappointment
I'm sorry, but I found this book tedious and boring.The description on the book jacket made it seem much more interesting than it turned out to be.

Needed a "This is a sequel" designation on the cover
READ "DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS" FIRST.

I'd even go with 3.5 stars -- though perhaps I would have enjoyed it more and ranked it higher if I'd known this was a sequel prior to reading it.I have ordered the first book "Desirable Daughters" and hope that "Tree Bride" comes together more fully after I've read the first installment.

Nothing on my hardback copy of "Tree Bride" indicated it is a sequel -- QUITE disappointing and, as it turned out, it lessened my appreciation of this book quite a bit.

Well-written, definitely -- Ms. Mukherjee is a talented writer.It just seemed disjointed and, I thought, could have benefited greatly from inclusion of a family tree.Perhaps with the first book as background I might not have needed a family tree -- I do not yet know.

A Memorable Story
This is an enchanting tale of a young Indian woman's search for her roots in old Bangladesh. The search itself is like following the roots of a tree, a fantastical tree that is the husband of her old aunt. Each bit of knowledge takes you deeper into the narrator's past, India's past, the ambivalence of modern Indians whose ancestors had to find identity under the British Raj. How much is fact or fiction in the telling of this history doesn't matter. The story, myth, mystique take us deep into the soul of India, as deep as we can go not having experienced it ourselves.

This book is second in a trilogy (first was "Desirable Daughters). I look forward to experiencing the third.

felt like I walked in in the middle
Reading here for the first time that this is part of a trilogy, I see that there may be a reason why I felt a little let down at the end of the Tree Bride (not understanding, still, why the main character's life was threatened by a bomber).It's sort of like reading "The Two Towers" without knowing about the Fellowship of the Ring or the Return of the King.That said, I enjoyed this book immensely (I bought it in an airport and read it instead of Stephen Sears' "The Landscape Turned Red" -- which is not to say anything against the always excellent Stephen Sears).It is true that The Tree Bride has a large ensemble cast and one must be patient to understand the threads connecting the fabric of the story (the theme of which seems to be the conflict between artificial partition and natural connection) but if you are you will be rewarded.I thought the characters were well developed and interesting and I particularly enjoyed the micro review of Indian independence and partition -- so much so that I would like to read more.

And now that I know this was part of a trilogy, I am looking forward to reading "Desirable Daughters" and the third book. ... Read more

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. "Rich...one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American." - The New York Times Book ReviewAmazon.com Review
&quto;Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village ofHasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ear ... and foretold my widowhoodand exile," relates Jyoti, fifth cursed daughter in a family ofnine. Though she can't escape fate, Jyoti reinvents herself time andagain. She leaves her dusty Punjabi village to marry as Jasmine;travels rough, hidden airways and waters to America to reemerge asJase, an illegal "day mummy" in hip Manhattan; and landsbeached in Iowa's farmlands as Jane, mother to an adopted teenageVietnamese refugee and "wife" to a banker. Bharati Mukherjee(The Middleman andOther Stories) makes each world exotic, her lyrical prosebroken only by the violence Jasmine almost casually recounts andsurvives. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (46)

read more like a sampling of anecdotes than a literary masterpiece
I enjoyed the throwaway tidbits about life in Flushing Queens and adopting babies in Nahtzee-infested Paraguay (I had NO IDEA!) but I bought this book because the blurb promised an incisive look at Upper West Side culture and that was not the case at all.This book was kind of nothing so why would there be so much hype about it.

Unexpected
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.

Jasmine
Published in 1989
241 pages

Well-Crafted, Powerful Novel
I recently taught a class on Mukherjee, and this novel was a huge hit!I love the way Mukherjee uses the idea of incarnations as a springboard for the narrator's transformation.I also love the way she ties in the story of Kali (goddess of death) into her tale.If you are rusty on your knowledge of hindu gods, you may want to look a few references up.

Mukherjee also does an excellent job of portraying the modern immigrant experience -- through a compelling tale.

Great, great book!
I read the review titled "Sloppy Piece..." and felt cautious in my decision to continue reading this book.I am so glad I did!I loved this book!I loved Mukherjee's insight into her creation of such a beautiful, believable character, and loved the insight it provided on the topic of what it means to be a part of America.I highly recommend this book.

Compulsively readable!
Don't let the cheesy cover fool you, this book is amazing. It is brutally honest and intense, as well as impossible to put down. The story revolves around a woman with a multitude of identities, one to fit each phase of her ever changing life. "Jasmine" (aka Jyoti and Jane) is a woman who survives poverty and ignorance in a small Indian village, only to be rewarded with brutality. Her journey to America is beyond taxing, and what she must do to survive it is harrowing, if not downright shocking at times.
Jasmine is faced with much turmoil and many choices, none of which are easy. Her life is far from conventional, but it says volumes about what it must be like to forge a new life in a new place with an identity that even she is not certain of.
I found that the ending was a little abrupt, but other than this, I have no complaints. Mukherjee is a vivid and serious writer, one who will leave you with an often times visceral reaction.
Warning: I have heard some complaints about the beginning chapters being mildly confusing concerning character introductions, but I assure you, if you stick with it, what she is doing will become clear quite quickly. This author's technique of introducing characters is very unique and effective and gives the reader a real sense of time without being exactly linear. ... Read more

Product Description
"The highlight of her career to date . . . Mukherjee bursts out as a star" (Publishers Weekly [starred review]) in her stirring novel of three women, two continents, and a perilous journey from the old world to the new -- now available in paperback.

In the tradition of the Joy Luck Club, Bharati Mukherjee has written a remarkable novel that is both the portrait of a traditional Brahmin Indian family and a contemporary American story of a woman who has in many ways broken with tradition but still remains tied to her native country.

Mukherjee follows the diverging paths taken by three extraordinary Calcutta-born sisters as they come of age in a changing world. Moving effortlessly between generations, she weaves together fascinating stories of the sisters' ancestors, childhood memories, and dramatic scenes from India's history.Amazon.com Review
Desirable Daughters, by the prolific writer Bharati Mukherjee, whose short story collection The Middleman won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award, is a masterful meditation on marriage and family ties. It begins on a fantastic note: on a winter night in an east Bengali village in 1879, the narrator's ancestor, 5-year-old Tara Lata, is married to a tree after her 13-year-old husband-to-be dies of a snakebite on their wedding day. The novel ends some 120 years later, when Tara, the 36-year-old narrator, returns to this same village in winter with her teenaged son. Like her ancestor, Tara Bhattacharjee is the youngest of three sisters of a Brahmin family. Although they grew up in Calcutta, Tara and the oldest sister now live in America while the middle sister lives in Bombay. Tara was married (in an arranged marriage) at age 19 to Bish Chatterjee, a genius who makes a fortune from a cutting-edge computer process. He and Tara are estranged when the novel opens, but when a stranger claiming kinship shows up at the house that Tara shares in San Francisco with her son and her boyfriend, she reconsiders her assumptions about her entire family. In the course of the novel, a sister's secret and a murder are uncovered, and a near-fatal bombing occurs. Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters is yet another of her magically written, compelling novels. --Susan Biskeborn ... Read more

Customer Reviews (36)

Very moving book
A mythic family story begins the book about 5-year-old Tara Lata who is on her way to be married.When they arrive the bridegroom has died from a snakebite; therefore, to save face Tara's father marries her to a tree.The protagonist of this novel is also named Tara after her ancestor Tara Lata and they both had two older sisters so Tara feels a connection to this long dead relative.The main Tara of the book is a divorced Indian woman living in San Francisco raising a 15-year-old son and living with a ex-biker hippie named Andy.She has a very amicable relationship with her son's father and her ex - Bish.Tara believes she is close to her sisters, one of whom lives in Indian and the other one lives in New Jersey but when a stranger enters her life claiming to be the son of her oldest sister, she realizes she knows very little about either sister.

Tara is torn between being Indian and American.She has embraced Americanism the most of the three sisters but it seems as if something is missing from her life.We get to watch her grow and mature as a character and we are drawn in with her humor and assessment of her life between two worlds.It is the story of a woman trying to find her way between her traditional Indian life she grew up with and her new American ways; the relationship she has with her Indian family; and her relationships with her ex-husband and her son; not to mention her relationship with her lover.She is overwhelmed at times and happy and grateful at other times.It is truly a woman's book.Whether we are immigrants or not we all feel the same way Tara does at some time in our life.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a good read, Indian culture, the immigrant experience, feminism, or just merely human reactions to what happens to them in life.

Desirable Daughters
Book was in very poor condition.If I order one than one book from the same place at the same time I don't think I should have to pay double postage and handling.

An unworthy read
I picked up this novel in the bargain book section and Im EVER so happy that I only paid five dollars for it. The book started out intrestingly enough yet about 1/3 I just wanted it to be over! I kept reading because I was hoping the quality of writing would improve and by the end of the novel I was disappointed that I stuck it out and finished.

The plot left much to be desired, and was hard to follow at times. There seemed to be no clear resolution to any conflict and random ideas were thrown in haprazordly. However, the description of Bengali life and social status was portrayed accurately and some characters(such as Rabi, the narrators son, was three dimensional). All in all, I could have found a much better book to read on a lazy Sunday afternoon- Dont waste your time on this novel.

Not very captivating at all
I tried to read this many times. Somehow, I got easily bored. Finally I gave up reading it. It was a waste of money.

Canon reformation fad
Mukherjee is one of the lucky few hand picked by the critics in attempting to reform the classic canon.In trying to provide a voice to an unrecognised minority - the literary critics have foisted this trash upon us - and the public say "pull the other one."

Rather than letting the quality of the writing do the talking Mukherjee infuses her tedious prose with cliched cultural references and overblown reinterpretation.Leaves the reader feeling quite angry at how an author could be so presumptuous. ... Read more

Product Description
"An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling. Once again, Bharati Mukherjee prove
she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative."
--AMY TAN
This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, "a person undreamed of in Puritan society." Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, "translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja.
It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an "asset hunter" who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with "sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography...."
... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

This book will not let you down.
This is one of those books I recommend to people if they want a book that has EVERYthing.Romance, scientists, a historical mystery and detective chase, a prince and his mistress, culture clash, the search for freedom, and an amazing set of locales for contrast.You can't get any different from the palaces of India than 1700's Pilgrim America.

I can't describe how much I love this book.The ending is phenomenal, ingenious, genre bending stuff.Totally unexpected and deservedly earns to me the bestowed crown of reviews: one of the best endings of any book I have ever read.The prose is thick, it is not a quick read, but this is a detail oriented book.It is very smartly written, and I would recommend it to any professor looking for a great multicultural studies course novel.The romance of the book is sweeping but also restrained.Mukherjee is an expert at making us patiently wait for a deserved outcome.I can't say any more without giving too much away.Holder of the World is a huge accomplishment of a novel, it is something utterly unique in the number of directions it takes and the number of places we go in it makes us realize that love, however brief, is truly the greatest treasure.

Look Below the Surface
At the beginning of the story Beigh, an assets hunter, is searching for a long lost diamond that she believes has deeply rooted ties to her family. She goes on a world-wide search for this gem, through which we come to know Hannah, a woman also destined for a world-wide journey. These two women, seemingly tied together only through genes, come to be mirrors of one another. This novel uses elements of history, science fiction, and romance to tell a story of beauty, strength, and bravery that transcend the limits of what "a novel should be". Readers are sure to find the making of a hero in the life of Hannah, beginning with her birth in Puritan America to her feats of strength in battle in India.

This book spoke to me not only as a woman, but also as a young adult, who is on her way into a life unkown, much like Hannah and Beigh. I highly recommend this book to any reader who is looking for a smart and exciting journey into another world.

A Luminous Gem Of A Novel
Bharati Mukherjee's "The Holder of the World: A Novel," deals with transitions in geographical and cultural space - from America to England to India, and the personal transformations a young woman experiences as a result. This is also a novel which moves unobtrusively through time and space, between the 20th century and the 17th, with barely a ripple, shifting beautifully between geographical locations, history and human relationships. Ms. Mukherjee interweaves here the story of a 20th century New England researcher with that of her ancestor, a Puritan woman, who roamed from the New World to India.

Beigh Masters is a woman who "lives in three time zones simultaneously." Not Eastern, Central and Pacific Time, but "the past, the present and the future." Her Yale thesis on the Puritans led her to graduate school, and to a figure from the distant past, an ancestor, actually. At grad school she met and began her life with her lover, Venn Iyer. She also began her career as an "asset-hunter," a detective of sorts, who seeks out antiques and other priceless items for wealthy clients. Venn, born and raised in India, and a graduate of MIT, "animates information." He and his team are somehow recreating the universe by the mass ingestion of the entire world's information: newspapers, records and documents, telephone directories, satellite passes, every TV and radio show aired, political debate, airline schedule - well, just about every piece of information ever recorded. When the grid, the base, is complete, they hope to insert a person into time and space through this careful reconstruction of the past by the meticulous build-up of data.

Beigh has a client who hired her to track down the most perfect diamond in the world - "The Emperor's Tear." She has also been searching for a woman, known as Salem Bibi, who lived over 300 years ago. Beigh knows more about Hannah Easton, called Salem Bibi, than perhaps anyone who ever lived, and through her knowledge of this woman, she comes closer to finding the Emperor's Tear." Hannah, born into Puritan society in Massachusetts in 1670, orphaned at an early age because of fierce Indian attacks on her settlement, married an English trader/adventurer/pirate. She traveled with him to England, and then to Mughal India, at the time of the establishment of the British East India Company. There Hannah became the lover of a Hindu raja and took-on the name Salem Bibi. She is the last known person to have seen and held the "Emperor's Tear." She is also an ancestor of Beigh Masters.'

"The Holder of the World" is both Hannah's and Beigh's story. And they are both remarkable women. Hannah lived centuries ahead of her time. She was born into the restricted Puritan world, in a new country with few amenities and much hardship. The New World was a dangerous and alien environment where women knew their place. Hannah, however, was an inquisitive, lively, vital woman, with a knowledge of self and a sense of purpose. She perhaps inherited her spirited nature from her mother, a woman whose terrible secret Hannah kept all her life.

This is a beautifully written, complex novel of history, ideas and adventure. Bharati Mukherjee vividly creates a tale of relocation, the collision of values, transformation and the courage it takes to adapt to new cultures. And here two worlds do meet...and collide - the Puritan American and the Mughal Indian. Hannah guides Beigh, who in turn steers the reader through the centuries to solve ancient mysteries. I would have liked to have felt closer to Hannah. However, the author always seems to keep her at a distance, as a historic figure. I do recommend this novel as it is unusual and makes for excellent reading.
JANA

Virtual history: being there
The more I ponder this book, the more intriguing I find the story. Beigh Masters is an "asset-hunter" in search of a legendary diamond from India, The Emperor's Tear. Her research leads to a connection with a distant relative, Hannah Easton, who lived in Salem, Mass., in the 1670's. Now fascinated by her own familial ties, Beigh traces Hannah's life from New England to the Coromandel Coast and the powerful East India Trading Company. Most extraordinary, Hannah becomes the "Salem Bibi", the white lover of a Hindu Raja, carving herself a place in history.

But there is more: the novel is so brilliantly themed, the premise so unique, that this reader was guided through a journey of staggering originality. Beigh's lover/companion, Venn, is developing a computer program that would allow an individual to experience a few moments in the past, set to a specific time frame, with pertinent information entered into the program. Beigh provides the structural facts, creating the opportunity to ......? Is it really even possible? This is not "time-travel" as usually written, but Virtual participation in real time.Mukerjee actually ties the threads of history together, from one side of the world to the other, suggesting infinite permutations. Not your traditional historical novel, Mukerjee fashions an ending worthy of any mystery-adventure devotee. Experiencing this story is an adventure in itself.

A virtuoso miniature
Bharati Mukherjee emigrated from her Brahmin family's insular compound in India to study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her abiding literary yantra ever since has been inter-cultural dislocation, transplantation and rebirth -- in particular the collision of intransigent tradition with the chaotic possibilities at freedom's edge. In "The Holder of the World," she does not merely turn her personal experience on its head, but she does dizzying somersaults with full twists in midair. The context and model for her treasure-hunt mystery is one of the fascinating artistic traditions of the Indian subcontinent: Mughal miniature painting. The unexpected depiction of a fair-skinned Western woman in one of these 17th-century paintings launches the narrator on detective work she expects to lead to material treasure, but what she exhumes as virtual reality and historical truth converge is both tantalizingly less tangible and inestimably more valuable. The particular virtuosity of this slender volume is Mukherjee's determined compression of plot, narrative, character and information that makes reading something akin to aerobic exercise. Brief phrases and gestures become complex characterizations; sketches and outlines evoke transcontinental adventures; narrative whizzes by in a blur that somehow suggests rich detail; well-placed smudges and squiggles expand into vast landscapes. "The Holder of the World" is a sprawling, wide-screen historical epic, painted in miniature with a one-hair brush. ... Read more

Product Description
Bharati Mukherjee's work illuminates a new world of people in migration that has transformed the meaning of "America." Now in a Grove paperback edition, The Middleman and Other Stories is a dazzling display of the vision of this important modern writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into the center of a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, yet glowing with the energy and exuberance of a society remaking itself.Amazon.com Review
Told by fictional immigrants, the tales of arrival and survival spunby Mukherjee's protagonists often paralyze the reader with their realism.They come from Italy, Trinidad, Israel, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Philippinesand elsewhere to build new lives in such places as Ann Arbor, Atlanta,Manhattan and Miami. For all the troubles the immigrants endure, Mukherjee'sportrayal of them as dauntless participants in the American experiment servesto empower them. Even as she's being raped by her employer, Jasmine, ahousekeeper from Trinidad, ponders that she has "no nothing other thanwhat she wanted to invent and tell." The Middleman won the 1988National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Rebuttal
Any reviewer who finds this book boring probably has never read Don Quixote (the world's first novel) let alone much else, and is therefore hardly qualified to comment on the basis of such limited experience. In any case neuro-science tells us that brain-sculpting theta waves predominate during boredom, indicating that learning (whatever one's subjective feeling of lassitude) is in fact taking place.

While this is sometimes a shocking book, only the severely culture-bound and those with no sense of humour will find it boring. I would rate it as an update on Kafka's 'Amerika' - a modern vision of the USA by the latest underclass of arrivals, struggling to carve out their identity in the land of [for them] little peace and [frequently] not much glory.It'll make you laugh and cry - but you'll never see yourself as others see you unless you try .

Peter's review
I recently had to read this book for college.It is probably the worst book that I have ever read.It is so boring all of the stories usually feature a character sitting around not doing anything.There are hardly any events, this book is so slow and boring.I started reading it in June and finished in September and the book is only 197 pages.This was a great waste of my summer.I hate this book.

An Excellent Collection of Diverse Stories
Two of my most prominent reading passions are Asian books and, in particular,those set in India or concerned with the Indian sub- culture (e.g. any of Rohinton Mistry's books, The Namesake, Death of Vishnu, Red Carpet, etc) and collections of short stories.
But what makes this collectionso special isthat Ms. Mukherjee does not focus on her Indian roots, though several stories do concern people of Indian heritage,butcover many diverse cultures -- Italian- Americans, An Iraqi Jew, a Vietnam veteran in Florida and express a wide range of "voices." These storiesare particularly effective in that you find yourself involved in the characters and their circumstances almost instantly. It is as if you had prior knowledge of them as you begin to read any one of the stories.
She also has a literary"trick" of sorts that I really enjoyed in that she will make reference to some little item --almost as a throwaway that was featured in an earlier story in the collection. It is very subtle but a nice little device that I caught on to and served to enhance the experience even more.
And though this collection was published sometime ago I found these wonderful stories still timely.I would highly recommend this collection to anyone who enjoys this genre.
Now on to purchase soem of her other works.

A very good book for indians in America!!
I think this a really good book for Indians or any immigrant group who has recently traveled to the US. It shows the life in the US and how people live here. i realli liked this book ad i suggestest everyone read it even though there is alotta sex related things in it!

BEST INDIAN WRITER BY FAR
You can hardly call her a "Indian women writer" that seems too narrow. She writes boldly and assumes roles that only a cosummate writer can do. Her Middleman story set the stage and then each story just got better. Forget Divakurani whose books are overarated, if you want to read "Indian women writers", then Bharti Mukherjee has no equal in this genre. She is astounding, fresh, and tanscends her category. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Half of Book lacks DIRECTION and INTEREST!!!!
In the first half of this documentary of a family's trip to India, Blaise paints an anti-feminist and harsh perpective of his wife's Indian heritage.At first compassionate, Blaise soon loses his readers with his inattention to plot and chronology.His story jumps from his time with his family in Bombay to Calcutta and the present with almost no transitioning explanation while his use of Indian words unknown to his reader are not clarified.

If Mukherjee had written this book entirely, readers' interest may not have wandered as far.Bharati's interpretation of their journey is nostalgic and whimsical at the same time, telling of her return to India after a fourteen-year absence.She often visites the idea of what if; for example, what if she'd stayed behind in India and married an Indian?What if she'd led the traditional Indian life?
I feel a bit sorry for her story being the secondary plot in this otherwise difficult book.

Home and the World
This is one of the most unique travel books I've ever read. The first 165 pages are written by Canadian novelist & short story writer Clark Blaise and are followed by a 115 page section by his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, also a novelist & short story writer & Berkeley professor. The book originally appeared in 1975 and documents in two distinct voices a year spent in the company of Mukherjee's family in India, first in Bombay then in Calcutta.
Blaise and Mukherjee met at a writers workshop in Iowa, married, and lived in Canada with their two children until their house burned down which left them homeless and prompted their journey east. Mukherjee spent her formative years in Calcutta and is returning to a largely familiar world but to Blaise everything is new. The first sixty pages of his narrative take place in Bombay and Blaise is never altogether at home there as they are staying with Mukherjees parents and her father is the uncontested head of the household. Blaise's trips into the city are flights from the congestion of stifling family life, his insights into the nature of Indian family life are in equal parts humorous and informative(the family does not even know the first name of a servant who has lived with them for years, nor do they show any interest in knowing). This view of India from an outsider given an insiders access is just one of many aspects of this book that distinguishes it from mere travel narrative. His initiation into the rituals and customs and (to him)peculiarites of Indian family life make for great reading. But the best section is the sustained amazement and energy of the 10-15 page description of Calcutta(where they have chosen to spend the better part of the year in a mission which caters to scholars) as he rides a rickshaw through its cluttered streets. Over the course of the year Blaise will meet many of Calcutta's elite including its most famous(to the west anyway)citizen, the film maker Satyajit Ray. Calcutta is the major city of Bengal, the eastern most province of India, filled with a proud and cultured people, and Blaise spends many fascinating pages analyzing both its culture and polotics:
The Bengali has lived with the English longer than any Indian, and he has absorbed him,while keeping his own soul, with astounding ease. -p.122
Blaise begins with illusions about India but over the course of his year in Calcutta he learns about its culture and people and the contact with this world different in every imaginable way from his own has a profound impact on him, the way he views the west, and the way he views his marriage.
In counterpoint to Blaise's description of the year is Mukherjee's. She is a westernised Indian who has married outside,and according to her father beneath,her caste and in caste conscious India that is often an unforgivable offense. The Mukherjee girls(Bharati and her sisters)are brilliant and Bharati is beautiful and her novel, The Tigers Daughter, just published to rave reviews, has made her famous in her home country. Her year is marked by equally profound realizations which include increased self awareness of her own very personal way of blending if not bridging the two very distinct cultures of which she is a part:
My aesthetic, then, must accomadate a decidedly Hindu imagination with an Americanized sense of the craft of fiction. To admit to possessing a Hindu imagination is to admit that my concepts of what constitutes a "story" and of narrative structure are noncausal, non-Western.-p.298
But perhaps the most fascinating part of her section is her portrait of her former classmates who have stayed in India and married and now make up the elite. These highly educated women are nonetheless stranded in their homes and live cloistered social lives atop an India which has grown restless and intolerant of the wide divisions that separate the rich from the poor. Riots and robbery are always imminent realities. The women Mukherjee observes clothed in silk saris and gold bracelets and diamond earings in their gated community of mansions in the worlds poorest city seem trapped in a world that they know cannot last. They go on as if immune(or wishing to be) from all the realites around them, a social elite with money to burn but drained of contact and significance to the greater India outside their own very high walls.

Rare book by two excellent writers & one that has not gone through too many reprintings so get a copy while you can. I especially like the sturdy(always good for a travel book) '95 Hungry Mind paperback edition with excellent cover art as well as updated prologues and epilogues by the authors. ... Read more

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"Mukherjee combines the journalist's grasp of contemporary culture with the magic realist's appetite for myth....Her book is a hybrid of history and gossip, of high and low culture."

--The Boston Globe

"In Leave It to Me, Mukherjee takes the themes she has previously explored a step further. Destroying the concept of ethnicity altogether, she creates a complex new, transnational definition of self....Devi will know who she is no matter what or whom she has to destroy. But the discovery does not prove to be easy in a region where ethnic boundaries slide over each other like snakes in a basket and many people have discarded the names they were born with....The novel becomes a meditation on the Indian concept of karma and the Greek idea of destiny."

--San Francisco Chronicle

"Some readers will see in it visionary vengeance on American hubris, a triumph of alien genes, Devi as a force of nature. Yet it also seems to contain a mocking attack on the very notion of speaking for outsiders. Devi suffers from multiple personality disorder--and what's more Western than that?...Devi Dee...merges fearlessly with the human flotsam and jetsam....When she identifies with people she steals their life stories, or at least the bits she wants. She's a psychic scavenger."

--The New York Times Book Review

"Mukherjee is inspired here in connecting the residues of 1960s culture: the self-described idealists who used civil disobedience as a road to selfish excess; the scarred veterans of Vietnam; and, between them, the damaged children of that generation. She's especially adroit in recalling the Berkeley counterculture and capturing its later expression in the alternative lifestyles and self-serving rationales with which ex-hippies defend their current lives. Her most impressive feat, however, is in rendering her self-destructive heroine with brilliant fidelity to the American vernacular. Profane, brash and amoral, Debby/Devi is not likable, but she is recognizable and true."

--Publishers Weekly

"This is the Electra story updated. The apocalyptic bloodbaths in which Devi consummates her furious revenge on her parents are every bit as vicious as those that befall the House of Atreus. But Mukherjee's singular achievement is to suffuse them with an almost slapstick, cartoon sensibility that is disturbingly contemporary in its detachment from both reality and morality."

--New York Daily News

"Everyone keeps inventing themselves, playing roles in which 'movie lines merge with memories.' Who isn't waiting for the call to something more special?"

--BooklistAmazon.com Review
India-born author Bharati Mukherjee has long used fiction toexplore issues of identity and culture, often through displacedcharacters--Indians coming to the West (Jasmine) orWesterners heading to Asia (The Holder of theWorld). In Leave It to Me Mukherjee approaches the sameissues from a fresh angle; protagonist Debby DiMartino grows up in amiddle-class, Italian-American family in Schenectady, NY, yet she is"a tall girl in a small school, a beautiful girl in a plainfamily, an exotic girl in a very American town." Debby isadopted, abandoned as a baby by her American hippie mother andEurasian father in India, where she was placed in a Catholic orphanageuntil the DiMartinos took her in. Growing up, Debby identifies herselfby what she is not; at age 23, after a brief, disastrous love affairwith a Hong Kong ex-movie star, she decides to find out what sheis.

Debby's search for her birth parents takes her to SanFrancisco, where she lifts a new name off a vanity license plate andbegins a new life as Devi Dee. Along with her old identity, Debby/Devisheds her old conventions, becoming a "Tenderloin prowler, allallure and strength and zero innocence" as she lives out of hercar in Haight Ashbury, befriends the crazy, the strung-out, and theparanoid who populate its streets, and begins her hunt for the womanwho gave her life--a search that will lead Devi into an apocalypticconfrontation with a most unexpected demon. In Leave It to MeBharati Mukherjee has created a hip, violent, and darkly funny look atwhat it means to be an American at the end of the 20th century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

The Epitome of Anger
Mukherjee's novel "Leave It To Me" was quite literally the epitome of anger. The story follows Devi, a woman who was adopted as a baby trying to find her natural parents and answer her questions on why she was given up. The simplified plot, however, is further complicated by older lovers (and I seriously do mean older-- girl had a serious daddy complex), crazy and unrealistic twists, and Devi's erratic behavior.

The thing I really disliked about this book was that the novel's main character Devi was just unlovable. She doesn't seem to have very many redeeming qualities; she's naive, jealous, irrational, and using this as an understatement, angry. Her mental processes jump every which way throughout the novel making it hard to follow what she is thinking.

On top of all this, the plot itself is ludicrous. The introduction was misleadingly interesting, but it has nothing to do with the story itself . The story's plot has alot of wierd, nonsensical twists which is frustrating. And though the ending is far from predictable, it's not "real".

The undertones of this book was very angry, so if you really don't feel like wasting your time to just get pissed off, don't bother with this book.

possibly the worst book i have ever read
I would give this a big old zero, if I could.
The writing is not even up to the level of supermarket pulp novels.The main character is an utterly unsympathetic self-described "waif" who isn't even particularly interesting.I can't make myself care how many men she slept with, much less why her tastes run from movie producers to shell-shocked Vietnam vets.No motivation is ever given for Devi's tendencies toward shoplifting, promiscuity, or murderousness (which in itself is apparently intended as pop-psychology shorthand for self-destructiveness) except that she is the abandoned daughter of an American hippie and an Asian pseudo-cult leader, and at one point she states that she believes in nature over nurture.Maybe she's just a horrifyingly immature brat.In chorus with Mukherjee, Devi drags us on her bad trip that promised an intriguing premise, but quickly turned into an exercise in unintelligent absurdity.If this book really was a work of pulp rather than a novel with pretensions to mythological allegory, it would probably be a lot more fun.
I didn't pay a dime for this book, just pulled it out of a box of throwaways from a friend who was moving, and I can see why it was destined for the garbage pile.

Beautiful prose, terrible plot
I think one of the main problems with this book might be Debbie/Devi herself. She is simply not likeable. She is smug, smarmy, ungrateful, self-absorbed, and luckier than she ever seems to comprehend. Aside from a few moments here and there, I had trouble feeling any real sympathy for her. I could not understand most of her motivations. Just like I could not understand this novel's plot. Mukherjee sets up all the players brilliantly...then lets them crash into each other haphazardly, leaving the reader confused and unsatisfied. The true climax of the book should be when Devi finally confronts her birth parents, but when that scene finally occurs everything just dissolves into a nonsensical bloodbath that doesn't particularly resolve anything. The only thing that keeps this book from being a waste of paper is the fascinating prose. I didn't like Devi, but I loved hearing her talk. Her voice is unique and distinctive, hip and dark and poetic. Even when she isn't making any sense, her strange little riffs on revenge and adoption and forces of nature are a pleasure to read.

Waste of Time
Bought it cheap from a bargain book table, read it fast and regretted almost every minute.If you like language for its own sake, you might like this novel because there are some awfully pretty and interesting turns of phrase.But if you actually read because you like reading an interesting, well-told story about characters that at some level seem human, skip this book.It's worse than a violent pulp novel, because at least those types of books make you work to reach the end of your bad story.Reading this felt like hard labor, and I'm not even sure how it ended after reading the ending twice.

Insufferable
How this book got published is a mystery to me.This has got to be without a doubt the worst novel I have ever read.There are no redeeming qualities here.The story line is ridiculous.The coincidences are too much to bear.Debby, who is adopted by an Italian couple as a toddler, never develops much love for them, even though they are decent, loving people.She saves her love and sick fascination for her birth parents, a Fresno woman who went to India in the 60's looking for a guru, and the guru himself, a serial killer currently in prison.She wants to meet them and then do some sort of damage to them, as payback (for what?She was better off growing up in Schenedctady).Debby graduates from college and manages to become the lover of a filthy rich ex-Jackie Chan of sorts.He doesn't give her the respect she "deserves" so she torches his apartment.Then she escapes to California, in search for bio-parents.While in the Haight-Ashbury, she manages to charm a film producer who happens to know her bio-mom.Debby is the luckiest person on earth!!!There are 30 million souls in CA and she happens to bang the guy who is banging her mom.Debby (now named Devi) will not know this until later in the story, when the private eye she has hired reveals the whole mystery, and soon disappears, and at this point I had had enough of this poor excuse for a novel and threw it across the room.The only thing that really piqued my interest is the reference to Ashrams in blue collar Napa.Wow.Other than that, this was a waste of pulp. ... Read more

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Anjali Bose is “Miss New India.” Born into a traditional lower-middle-class family and living in a backwater town with an arranged marriage on the horizon, Anjali’s prospects don’t look great. But her ambition and fluency in language do not go unnoticed by her expat teacher, Peter Champion. And champion her he does, both to other powerful people who can help her along the way and to Anjali herself, stirring in her a desire to take charge of her own destiny. 

So she sets off to Bangalore, India’s fastest-growing major metropolis, and quickly falls in with an audacious and ambitious crowd of young people, who have learned how to sound American by watching shows like Seinfeld in order to get jobs as call-center service agents, where they are quickly able to out-earn their parents. And it is in this high-tech city where Anjali—suddenly free from the traditional confines of class, caste, gender, and more—is able to confront her past and reinvent herself. Of course, the seductive pull of modernity does not come without a dark side . . .

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Contributed articles on the works of an Indian English author. ... Read more

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The first naturalized citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940), born into a rigid hierarchy as a Bengali Brahmin and raised in the elite of Calcutta society, joined the American masses by choice. This journey from a privileged yet circumscribed life to one of free will and risk supplied the experiences she has turned into literature.

From her first interview, originally published over three decades ago in her native tongue Bengali in the Calcutta journal Desh and appearing here for the first time in English, to an in-depth interview in 2007 granted specifically for this collection, this volume provides a candid look at the woman who has been called the grande dame of diasporic Indian literature. ... Read more

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"A fascinating study, and a major contribution to critical discourse on the literature of exile." - Professor John C. Green, Chair, Department of Theatre, Butler University "A welcome addition to academic library collections in literacy criticism (especially comparative literature), ethnic and immigrant studies, exile and diaspora literature, as well as cultural studies." - James Vroom, Librarian, Carnegie Mellon University"In yoking together with her unsparing research, keen observation, and clearly empathetic stance of three seemingly dissimilar postcolonial writers, Cristina Dascalu has done far more than provide an excellent academic tool and fascinating reading. She has identified and redefined a metaphor for our time." - Professor Francine Ringold, University of Tulsa; Editor-in-Chief, Nimrod International Journal, and Poet Laureate of Oklahoma"Cristina Dascalu writes with a fine touch and knowledge a solid book about exile literature that is clarifying without oversimplifying, convincing, intelligent, poignant.an essential, satisfying reading.a compelling book of extensive scholarship and clear, well-expressed thoughts.A must have, must read book." - Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Poet Laureate of Russia and Distinguished Professor of University of Tulsa"One of the most lucid and concise examinations of exile that I have ever read. Dascalu's meticulous theoretical groundwork allows her to articulate her position in the clearest of terms so that any educated and literate scholar could understand her argument." - Professor G. Matthew Jenkins, Director of the Writing Program, English Department, University of Tulsa"This book holds solid, extensive documentation with an impressive bibliography.the author's daring, courage, and the freshness of her approaches as well as the originality demonstrated in her superb analysis of the texts from Rushdie, Mukherjee and Naipaul is outstanding." - Prof. Dr. Odette Blumenfeld, Chair, Department of English, Al. I. Cuza University of Iasi, Romania ... Read more

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At once sly and tragic, these twelve extraordinary stories chart the complex and shifting lives of the new immigrants to America--some helpless, some hopeless, others ambitious, beautiful, all striving for something they can't quite name, something more....
"Mukherjee writes with beautiful precision...neaty needlepointing a malevolent world."
THE VILLAGE VOICE
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Darkness
All writers choose the stories they will tell out of the infinite number that can be told, and this is especially true in short stories, where the number of narratives that can come forth are limited. The best stories read naturally, and we forget that the author has chosen them, that they are deliberate. Mukherjee's stories in this collection fall short, for me, of this criterion.

If Mukherjee were Nabokov, the introduction to this novel would be a trick, a game, something to deceive our reading of the stories to come. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Perhaps I am simply too young to understand the politics surrounding this book's publication, perhaps things have changed, but the rah-rah-USA-nation-of-immigrants vs. o-racist-Canada opposition really irked me throughout the book. (And I am from the US.) Frankly, this collection read to me like it was being written with a certain purpose for a certain group of people, whether intentionally or (much, much worse and less forgivable) unintentionally.

I was most surprised that one reviewer wrote that he enjoyed and understood "Darkness" because, as an Asian man, he can understand such a thing. As someone who thought this book would mainly be enjoyed by enlightened white folk in search of clues to Indian-American cultural identity and pathos, I was certainly shocked especially that someone would proudly claim his affinity to a character I read as weak and emasculated by the strong women close to him, momentarily relieved that some man might have had temporary power over his daughter, terrified to the point of murder when he realized his mistake.

In short (which I haven't been), I was disappointed in the stories, annoyed by some of the unnatural moments in Mukherjee's writing when it is clear she is too aware of her audience and not living deeply within her characters (What Indian person would say "Goa, India" for example, rather than just the obvious "Goa"), HOWEVER, given the other reviewer's easy identification with the characters-- I may be completely off in my charactertization of these stories.

Darkness
Mukherjee writes with sharp wit, presenting her Indian immigrant characters in uncomfortable, absurd, and often terrible situations.Her stories are about people who surrender "little bits of a reluctant self every year, clutching the souveniers of an ever-retreating past"[from her "Introduction"].Her immigrant characters want to fitin their new America, and yet they want to cling to their pasts, theircultures, their ethics.They want to be American, in the sense of beingsuccessful and fitting in, and yet they can't reconcile themselves to it;America, often, rejects them, eats away at their traditions, their values,and even their self-respect.Note, though, that Mukherjee does notmoralize; she never loses her sense of irony or absurdity.

4 Stars
It's really a wonderful short stories. I like, especially, Father. I am a parent and a Asian, so I can understand his feelings. I don't think it is a murder. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

YAWN
I had to read this book for school and the whole class agreed with me that is was incredibly BORING.Nothing really interesting happens, u keep expecting something, but nothing.Then it stops at certain parts when itcould easily go on and it gets annoying. I am also a person who enjoysreading books, but this one was just lame.

Examination of another culture
I had to agree somewhat with the reviewer from Houston, TX, that The Tiger's Daughter is hard to understand in spots.However, having read Jasmine, I can follow her showing the reader the effects of moving from oneculture to another.I think some sociologist has written of the"marginal man," that is the first-generation immigrant who is notat home in his new culture, but cannot comfortably return to the old oneeither.

Aside from this, I liked learning about Indian culture.I knownothing about the lifestyles of about a half billion people.Jasmine iseasier reading, once you pick up on the succession of name changes for themain character, but I'd recommend either book if you want to get acquaintedwith some other-than-Western writers.

Disappointing
Reading this book was like eating meringue -- sweet, pleasurable, but in the final analysis - no substance.

Maybe I'm just too dense, but I didn't get "it".I couldn't identify, or even empathize witht heheroine.I couldn't appreciate the significance of what the things thathappened to the heroine.I got the feeling that the lovely prose wassupposed to set the stage, let us feel the strangeness and familiarity ofthe India our heroine was returning to -- but I missed it.It got close,but in the end, I was just confused and disappointed.I felt like theentire book was a build up for the "real" story... ... Read more