Bøger af Bharati Mukherjee

"Enchanting! Mukherjee's pitch-perfect ear for character and mood and her storytelling gifts capture the exhilarating restlessness of a young Indian woman's pursuit of happiness. Miss New India illuminates as brilliantly as it entertains." ?Amy TanAnjali Bose's prospects don't look great. Born into a traditional lower-middle-class family, she lives in a backwater town with only an arranged marriage on the horizon. But her ambition, charm, and fluency in language do not go unnoticed by her charismatic and influential expat teacher, Peter Champion. And champion her he does, both to 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 metropolis, and soon 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 in call centers, where they quickly out-earn their parents. And it is in this high-tech city where Anjali ? suddenly free of the confines of class, caste, and gender ? is able to confront her past and reinvent herself. Of course, the seductive pull of life in the New India does not come without a dark side . . . "Each character fascinates, and every detail glints with irony and intent, as Mukherjee brilliantly choreographs her compelling protagonist's struggles against betrayal, violence, and corruption in a dazzling plot." ?Booklist, starred

"Twelve stories of immigrants who struggle against the ancestral past of India to remake their lives-and themselves-in North America. These are stories of fluid and broken identities, discarded languages and deities, the attempt to create bonds with a new community against the ever-present fear of failure and betrayal. 'The narrative of immigration,' Ms. Mukherjee once said, 'is the epic narrative of this millennium.' Her stories and novels brilliantly add to that ongoing saga. In the story, 'The Lady from Lucknow,' a woman is pushed to the limit while wanting nothing more than to fit in. In 'Hindus,' characters discover that breaking away from a culture has deep and unexpected costs. In 'Father,' the clash of cultures leads a man to an act of terrible violence. 'How could he tell these bright, mocking women,' Ms. Mukherjee writes, 'that in the darkness, he sensed invisible presences: gods and snakes frolicked in the master bedroom, little white sparks of cosmic static crackled up the legs of his pajamas. Something was out there in the dark, something that could invent accidents and coincidences to remind mortals that even in Detroit they were no more than mortal.' There is light in these stories as well. The collection's closing story, 'Courtly Vision,' brings to life the world within a Mughal miniature painting and describes a light charged with excitement to discover the immense intimacy of darkness. Readers will also discover that excitement, and the many gradations of darkness and light, throughout these pages from the mind of a master storyteller"

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.

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 Review

All of the authors have written works on exile, home, and memory, using the written word as a tool for revisiting their old homes or fashioning new ones. This work includes five newly commissioned essays offering moving distallations of their most important thinking on these themes.

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.