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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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09118900.049
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1990-09-17
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BOOKS, Page 84Overloaded
JASMINE
by Bharati Mukherjee
Grove Weidenfeld; 241 pages; $17.95
So much brilliance crowds this ridiculously brief novel -- so
many calamities and astonishments, so much shifting of exotic
scenery and violent plot, such skillful shading of so many
characters -- that the axles creak and the wheels threaten to fall
off. They remain in place, but the author's fictional vehicle is
far too slight for the weight of what it carries.
The reader is led from a poor farming village in Punjab to a
provincial Indian city, to the swamps of South Florida, to an
Indian enclave in Queens, to Columbia University in upper
Manhattan, to an Iowa farming town -- all of this sharply and
vividly sketched -- and then on again toward California. The
heroine, a pretty and precocious Hindu child named Jyoti (later
Jasmine, still later Jane), kills a mad dog, marries at 16,
survives a terrorist's bomb that kills her husband, finds her way
to Florida, where she is raped and kills her rapist with a knife,
moves on and becomes pregnant by an Iowa banker after he has been
paralyzed by a rifle bullet fired by a bankrupt farmer.
This gloss omits several subplots, one of which has Jane, in
Iowa, dealing with the adolescent pride of a teenage Vietnamese boy
who is her adopted son. The author also provides clear expositions
of Sikh and Hindu tensions after the partition of India and
Pakistan and of the roles of women in India and bankers in Iowa.
Novelist Bharati Mukherjee, born in India but long a resident
of the U.S., seems unable to write a false or flat sentence. She
is especially good at describing the morning scene as Punjabi
village women plod out to the fields together to squat and relieve
themselves and to gossip, joke about the puny sexual equipment of
their husbands and tickle one another's bottoms with weeds. But
there is simply not enough room in a small, realistic novel for all
that the author has to tell. Too much compression makes repeated
plot coincidences clang. Could a bigger, looser narrative have
contained the intensity better? Maybe not, but the sense is strong
at the end that a truly extraordinary book has floated by, just out
of reach.