Jasmine: 30th anniversary edition

This novel is a really moving tale. This is my first time reading Mukherjee's writing but it won't be the last. I found it to be a compelling read from start to finish. The story of how a young Indian girl becomes an American is intriguing. The evolution of Jyoti into Jasmine into Jane is gripping. I enjoyed the way Mukherjee wove this tale. She includes flashbacks to her past to let the reader see the past of Jasmine. It allows for empathy as the reader is led through the tragedies of her early life. Her resolve is extraordinary. She has to overcome the murder of her husband, terrorism in her homeland, a rape and many other hardships along the way. You can see how different events shape her views and attitudes. She begins to think and act for herself. There is sorrow and pain on the way but it is ultimately a tale of liberation. It's another example of the indomitable human spirit. Definitely a book that should be widely read.

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.

Jasmine is a wonderful idea, and is told in a remarkable way (non-linear), but ulitmately falls short of having any major impact. The beginning, when Jasmine is in India, is beautiful, and is steeped in culture and knowledge. It is easily the most powerful part of the book, since the reader gets to see what life in India is really like.
The parts in America are where this book falters badly. For one thing, the story has a tendency to ramble and not move anywhere. If the characters were better fleshed out, or if the stakes were higher (i.e. not just Jasmine being too insecure to be content with her lot in life), the limbo of the last 2/3rds of the book would be understandable. However, it is very hard to care about any of the characters (even Jasmine) and this makes the book more of a chore to read than a pleasure.
Also, there is the issue of foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is an integral part of this book, and it is not only used too much, but is used in a sloppy and ultimately amateurish way. Foreshadowing is effective only when it is subtle and unexpected, or when it is used sparingly. Not only does this book use foreshadowing in the most blunt and obvious way possible, but Mukherjee uses it endlessly, and this numbs the reader to the point of not caring about the narrative because we know Mukherjee is using foreshadowing, and is using it every chance she gets.
Also, the fact that the foreshadowing is so obvious ends up making the non-linear style meaningless. At one point, Mukherjee will have two events that are a year apart, and one clearly foreshadows the other. Now, this is fine, but the two events happen only five pages apart from each other! This is almost offensive, and implies that the reader has no ability to remember events from more than a couple of pages before. The sad thing is that this happens several times throughout the novel.
So is Jasmine worth reading? My answer would be a definite no. Even though parts of it, like India, are powerful and well-written, there is too much sloppy writing and boredom in the last 2/3rds of the book for me to be able to seriously recommend this. The sad thing is that I want to recommend the beginning of the book, but it will pull you in and make you want to read the rest, whih will definitely disappoint.
So if you enjoy good, well-written literature, do not read this valiant attempt. If you are in the mood for an interesting, thought-provoking read, you can try this book, but you can do much better. Try Richard Wright's Black Boy or Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.

Jasmine, at points, sounds like a soap opera that no one watches because it is so aweful. This book makes everything sound so miserable and blown out of shape. If a man and woman meet, then they are secretly in love, the woman is pregnant, or they kill each other. This book is pointless and rambles on about how different America is from India as if she expected them to be exactly identical. As for Jasmine's character, who has about 10 names in the book, she is a bland fool. No characters are ever developed in this book and they all die prematurely. To add to that, the ending is unrealistic, and reminds me of the end of Pearl Harbor. Jasmine's final decisions are without reason, and seem faulty even to the SIMPLE READER! The only reason this book didn't get one star is that she didn't make any spelling mistakes.

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 "[[ASIN:0312442718 The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction]]" and read the seed from which it grew.

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.

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.

Jasmine is a quirky unspectacular novel that completely failed to capture an audience. I just couldn't help but not like the main character. It comes off as a sob story, of a woman who simply bounces from whatever can make her life easier to the next sucking the life out of everything she encounters. The two word sentences and abysmal flow of the book makes it a surprise that I ever finished it. A terrible novel.

I bought this book after I read Bill Moyers' interview of Bharati Mukherjee in his "World of Ideas" (vol. 2, I think). I read this book while in India, visiting the cities of Calcutta and Bhubaneswar. Her story of the plight of a woman in India is real. Women are oppressed, and must learn to survive. The flight to America seemed a tad far-fetched, with the brothers willingly coming up with big bucks. But the journey itself was quite powerful to read. It is credible. Why only three stars? Too much time talking about transitions: from Jyoti to Jasmine to Jase to Jane. Supposedly there are changes, but in the end the character running away does so perhaps less out of fear, but is still running. The ungluing from Bud is hard to fathom. Is she running because she sees what kind of businessman he is, or for the sheer excitement of being with Taylor? And with Bud's baby? But I loved the flow of the story. I like her style of writing. There is the evident humble manner of Mukherjee which is part of the beauty of an Indian woman. She is very human. She is simply telling her story, as an immigrant, a runaway. To demand a complicated plot with deep character development would make the story unreal. Yes, the whole story is untidy and loose, the end is unclear. That is what makes this book real.

The plot is mixed up, the main character is unrealistic and her actions are illogical. The author vacillates between hindu spiritualism and midwest american dreariness. This book is depressing, racist (at one point one of the characters calls chinese girls 'ugly' and also makes negative comments about people of other races). I dragged myself through the first few chapters and then the switching from India to Iowa became so tiresome, the characters were so boring, that I just read the end and threw the book away in the garbage so nobody else would have to go through the torture of reading it.