Pre-numbered label used for registration.

Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (April 5, 1999)
Language: English

The author was born and educated in Calcutta.

Publisher Comments:
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.

Review:
"Mukherjee has eloquently succeeded in creating a kind of impressionistic fable, a prose-poem, about being an exile, a refugee, a spiritual vagabond in the world today." New York Times
Review:
"A beautiful novel, poetic, exotic, perfectly controlled." San Francisco Chronicle

Varattuna Vampberrylle arvonnasta.

EDIT 3.9:
I started reading this book earlier, but found the writing style "trendy" (feeling there are lots of American writers that write like this). But today in the morning I continued this again in bus; I'm not sure whether I'm going to read this through, let's see...

EDIT 9.9:
Continuing was worth it. I suppose non-chronological order made the beginning a bit confusing, or maybe "black humor" sounded first a bit too tough, or maybe something else happened aroung page 40, some kind of intensity... Finally must say that I liked the story, and Jasmine.

Some quotations from book that have caugth my eyes:
"For them, experience leads to knowledge, or else it is wasted. For me, experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill."

"Big-city men prefer us village girls because we are brought up to be caring and have no minds of our own. Village girls are like cattle; whichever way you lead them, that is the way they will go."

"But as we know from the great historian Mr. Gibbon, where there is a rising there is also falling."

"My mother always warned me that a husband has layers, like an onion, and you'll still find things to surprise you, usually bad things years and years after you marry."

"I was a catalyst, not a cause."

Got this today from Aspen72. Thank you :)

A thought provoking book. A bit hard to get into in the beginning. I liked the flow of the writing.

I'm sending this to Airam67.

This book never made it to the intended recipient. I asked her and she says to release this in the wild so here goes. Enjoy!