Word: american
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jyoti-Jasmine-Jane says at one point: "It is by now only a passing wave of nausea, this response to the speed of transformation, the fluidity of American character and the American landscape. I feel at times like a stone hurtling through diaphanous mist, unable to grab hold, unable to slow myself, yet unwilling to abandon the ride...
...Americans live on a vast patch of the earth, a sweep of scattered geography in which states tumble together around barely visible boundaries, and we have no idea who the hell we are. Of course, various people have tried to find out; we have drifted down the river with Huck Finn, poured across the highways with the Joads, maybe followed Kerouac through his woozy continental high-jinks. We somehow believe that there exists a sense, a spirit, something, that defines this tumbled vastness as distinctly American...
Bharati Mukherjee has caught that something, and she portrays an America that actually exists, that exists now. Jasmine is the story of an Indian girl who emigrates to America, shedding selves as she moves to, and through, this country, eventually realizing herself as genuinely American. It's a book about disintegration and change, constant rebirth in the midst of bewildering opportunity: she is Jyoti, then Jasmine and later, in Iowa, Jane Ripplemeyer, though even this is not an endpoint...
This alien world we enter is shown as both merging into the American experience, and as illuminating its more familiar elements. In an Indian neighborhood of New York City, insulated with Hindi video stores and Punjabi fabric shops, Jasmine stifles in an atmosphere of Old World nostalgia. In Iowa, lonely Grandmother Ripplemeyer appreciates Jasmine's Indian sense of strong family ties...
...character says to her, "you are a tornado. You're leaving a path of destruction behind you."--there is a lot of love and warmth coursing through this tale. As an undocumented au pair girl in New York, she adopts the name Jase and becomes part of her first American family--Wylie and Taylor and their daughter Duff...