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.[return][return]Deceptively simple, lots of cultural differences, and Jasmine's struggle to find her way to and in a foreign country ( )

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." ( )

I'm halfway through and still don't know who Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane is. This might be intentional -- the author seems to be making some sort of point about immigrants, especially female ones, having to mold themselves to the desires of their American hosts -- but it doesn't make for an engaging book.

What's more, it is exactly the sort of depressing story about hopeless lives that is the reason I don't read adult fiction. In this book, women are at best symbols, at worst transactions -- never people. I have no doubt that this is true for a lot of women in the world. But I have learned that it does me no good to read novels that make me want to give up on humanity. If I'm going to read a made-up story, it may as well inspire rather than depress me, right? Depressing things aren't by definition more true. I'm giving up on this one.

“We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the image of our dreams.” (29)

This is, for me, the most powerful sentence in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. In this one sentence it summarises the story of the novel by embodying the nature of transcontinental lives and living.

The main protagonist in Mukherjee’s novel has a name for every person she has ever been: she is the village girl Jyoti; Jasmine to her first husband; Jane; Jase; Jazz; Kali; Widow; Wife; and Day Mommy. These names represent not only her fluid identity, but how she the people around her perceive her identity and in some cases her culture. The only name that Jyoti ever really gives herself is Sage: a foreseer of truth and fate. The beginning of the book opens with her meeting a sooth sayer who foretells Jyoti’s future. He claims that it is fate that will guide her life, although Jyoti is not convinced and from this point she is sent off in a whirl-wind of adventure and experience that leaves her both fulfilled and drained.

Jyoti’s identity is never really defined by her alone. Her names are given to her by the different men in her lives and she seems to accept these names, going along with the flow. It is hard to say if Jyoti really comes to finding her own identity or not though, and I felt that this was a difficult question for me to answer with certainty.
Jyoti moves to the U.S.A. and finds herself to be brown and othered. She feels the pressures of meeting Western expectations and whilst she is treated with respect and love from a lot of the white people in her community, there is is somehow still a feeling of not quite belonging.

“Educated people are interested in differences; they assume that I am different from them but exempt from being one of “them,” the knife-wielding undocumenteds hiding in basements webbing furniture.”

Here we can already see that racism does not always function and work the same in each country and that there isn’t one single group of “other”. One can conclude that Mukjerjee is probably talking about Hispanic immigrants here. The issue of racism and othering is further complicated by the sheer size of the USA, where there are instances of minority groups feel safer in certain states or regions than others.

If you’re interested in learning about the issues that face Indian immigrants in the U.S.A. then this is a great book to start to expand your knowledge about race, immigration, and non-Western religions. I am a firm believer that books can have the ability to change people, and to change people for the better. This is a book that will change you. ( )

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. ( )