Bharati Mukherjee Books

This book contained some of the inner thoughts of India I never knew about. My parents are from India and I,myself,have been to India a few times.The way the girl grew up is unreadable. This book is so good that words can not express my feelings. The way she grew up and worked herself up to her goal, which was to reach America. That was her goal and her destination. That is what I felt about this book.

At the beginning of the story Beigh, an assets hunter, is searching for a long lost diamond that she believes has deeply rooted ties to her family. She goes on a world-wide search for this gem, through which we come to know Hannah, a woman also destined for a world-wide journey. These two women, seemingly tied together only through genes, come to be mirrors of one another. This novel uses elements of history, science fiction, and romance to tell a story of beauty, strength, and bravery that transcend the limits of what "a novel should be". Readers are sure to find the making of a hero in the life of Hannah, beginning with her birth in Puritan America to her feats of strength in battle in India.

This book spoke to me not only as a woman, but also as a young adult, who is on her way into a life unkown, much like Hannah and Beigh. I highly recommend this book to any reader who is looking for a smart and exciting journey into another world.

The Holder of the World failed to entertain me, much less keep my attention for more than a half hour or thirty pages at a time. I made it through it although it was rough and I had to, at times, force myself to keep reading.

The problem is in the style of the writing. Although the book is very well researched and informed, the narrative is stiff and dull. The dialogue seems trite and unrealistic, however little there was. The story had an interesting premise, time travel and fantasy projection, but it failed to deliver the goods in that area. One almost thinks that that author should have left that out completely or commit to it whole heartedly.

On a positive note, the novel does manage to produce a few truly interesting characters and works well as a feminist novel, mostly dealing with symbolism of female emancipation. The author also hinted at the possibility of a high adventure story but cut that off quickly with spare, stale action.

I gave this novel two stars because of the intelligence of language only. But there is a big difference between that and being able to produce a concise, tight novel that tells a story well and commits to it.

This is one of those books I recommend to people if they want a book that has EVERYthing. Romance, scientists, a historical mystery and detective chase, a prince and his mistress, culture clash, the search for freedom, and an amazing set of locales for contrast. You can't get any different from the palaces of India than 1700's Pilgrim America.

I can't describe how much I love this book. The ending is phenomenal, ingenious, genre bending stuff. Totally unexpected and deservedly earns to me the bestowed crown of reviews: one of the best endings of any book I have ever read. The prose is thick, it is not a quick read, but this is a detail oriented book. It is very smartly written, and I would recommend it to any professor looking for a great multicultural studies course novel. The romance of the book is sweeping but also restrained. Mukherjee is an expert at making us patiently wait for a deserved outcome. I can't say any more without giving too much away. Holder of the World is a huge accomplishment of a novel, it is something utterly unique in the number of directions it takes and the number of places we go in it makes us realize that love, however brief, is truly the greatest treasure.

Bharati Mukherjee's "The Holder of the World: A Novel," deals with transitions in geographical and cultural space - from America to England to India, and the personal transformations a young woman experiences as a result. This is also a novel which moves unobtrusively through time and space, between the 20th century and the 17th, with barely a ripple, shifting beautifully between geographical locations, history and human relationships. Ms. Mukherjee interweaves here the story of a 20th century New England researcher with that of her ancestor, a Puritan woman, who roamed from the New World to India.

Beigh Masters is a woman who "lives in three time zones simultaneously." Not Eastern, Central and Pacific Time, but "the past, the present and the future." Her Yale thesis on the Puritans led her to graduate school, and to a figure from the distant past, an ancestor, actually. At grad school she met and began her life with her lover, Venn Iyer. She also began her career as an "asset-hunter," a detective of sorts, who seeks out antiques and other priceless items for wealthy clients. Venn, born and raised in India, and a graduate of MIT, "animates information." He and his team are somehow recreating the universe by the mass ingestion of the entire world's information: newspapers, records and documents, telephone directories, satellite passes, every TV and radio show aired, political debate, airline schedule - well, just about every piece of information ever recorded. When the grid, the base, is complete, they hope to insert a person into time and space through this careful reconstruction of the past by the meticulous build-up of data.

Beigh has a client who hired her to track down the most perfect diamond in the world - "The Emperor's Tear." She has also been searching for a woman, known as Salem Bibi, who lived over 300 years ago. Beigh knows more about Hannah Easton, called Salem Bibi, than perhaps anyone who ever lived, and through her knowledge of this woman, she comes closer to finding the Emperor's Tear." Hannah, born into Puritan society in Massachusetts in 1670, orphaned at an early age because of fierce Indian attacks on her settlement, married an English trader/adventurer/pirate. She traveled with him to England, and then to Mughal India, at the time of the establishment of the British East India Company. There Hannah became the lover of a Hindu raja and took-on the name Salem Bibi. She is the last known person to have seen and held the "Emperor's Tear." She is also an ancestor of Beigh Masters.'

"The Holder of the World" is both Hannah's and Beigh's story. And they are both remarkable women. Hannah lived centuries ahead of her time. She was born into the restricted Puritan world, in a new country with few amenities and much hardship. The New World was a dangerous and alien environment where women knew their place. Hannah, however, was an inquisitive, lively, vital woman, with a knowledge of self and a sense of purpose. She perhaps inherited her spirited nature from her mother, a woman whose terrible secret Hannah kept all her life.

This is a beautifully written, complex novel of history, ideas and adventure. Bharati Mukherjee vividly creates a tale of relocation, the collision of values, transformation and the courage it takes to adapt to new cultures. And here two worlds do meet...and collide - the Puritan American and the Mughal Indian. Hannah guides Beigh, who in turn steers the reader through the centuries to solve ancient mysteries. I would have liked to have felt closer to Hannah. However, the author always seems to keep her at a distance, as a historic figure. I do recommend this novel as it is unusual and makes for excellent reading.
JANA

The more I ponder this book, the more intriguing I find the story. Beigh Masters is an "asset-hunter" in search of a legendary diamond from India, The Emperor's Tear. Her research leads to a connection with a distant relative, Hannah Easton, who lived in Salem, Mass., in the 1670's. Now fascinated by her own familial ties, Beigh traces Hannah's life from New England to the Coromandel Coast and the powerful East India Trading Company. Most extraordinary, Hannah becomes the "Salem Bibi", the white lover of a Hindu Raja, carving herself a place in history.

But there is more: the novel is so brilliantly themed, the premise so unique, that this reader was guided through a journey of staggering originality. Beigh's lover/companion, Venn, is developing a computer program that would allow an individual to experience a few moments in the past, set to a specific time frame, with pertinent information entered into the program. Beigh provides the structural facts, creating the opportunity to ......? Is it really even possible? This is not "time-travel" as usually written, but Virtual participation in real time. Mukerjee actually ties the threads of history together, from one side of the world to the other, suggesting infinite permutations. Not your traditional historical novel, Mukerjee fashions an ending worthy of any mystery-adventure devotee. Experiencing this story is an adventure in itself.

Any reviewer who finds this book boring probably has never read Don Quixote (the world's first novel) let alone much else, and is therefore hardly qualified to comment on the basis of such limited experience. In any case neuro-science tells us that brain-sculpting theta waves predominate during boredom, indicating that learning (whatever one's subjective feeling of lassitude) is in fact taking place.

While this is sometimes a shocking book, only the severely culture-bound and those with no sense of humour will find it boring. I would rate it as an update on Kafka's 'Amerika' - a modern vision of the USA by the latest underclass of arrivals, struggling to carve out their identity in the land of [for them] little peace and [frequently] not much glory. It'll make you laugh and cry - but you'll never see yourself as others see you unless you try .

I recently had to read this book for college. It is probably the worst book that I have ever read. It is so boring all of the stories usually feature a character sitting around not doing anything. There are hardly any events, this book is so slow and boring. I started reading it in June and finished in September and the book is only 197 pages. This was a great waste of my summer. I hate this book.

I think this a really good book for Indians or any immigrant group who has recently traveled to the US. It shows the life in the US and how people live here. i realli liked this book ad i suggestest everyone read it even though there is alotta sex related things in it!

Two of my most prominent reading passions are Asian books and, in particular, those set in India or concerned with the Indian sub- culture (e.g. any of Rohinton Mistry's books, The Namesake, Death of Vishnu, Red Carpet, etc) and collections of short stories.
But what makes this collection so special is that Ms. Mukherjee does not focus on her Indian roots, though several stories do concern people of Indian heritage, but cover many diverse cultures -- Italian- Americans, An Iraqi Jew, a Vietnam veteran in Florida and express a wide range of "voices." These stories are particularly effective in that you find yourself involved in the characters and their circumstances almost instantly. It is as if you had prior knowledge of them as you begin to read any one of the stories.
She also has a literary "trick" of sorts that I really enjoyed in that she will make reference to some little item --almost as a throwaway that was featured in an earlier story in the collection. It is very subtle but a nice little device that I caught on to and served to enhance the experience even more.
And though this collection was published sometime ago I found these wonderful stories still timely. I would highly recommend this collection to anyone who enjoys this genre.
Now on to purchase soem of her other works.

You can hardly call her a "Indian women writer" that seems too narrow. She writes boldly and assumes roles that only a cosummate writer can do. Her Middleman story set the stage and then each story just got better. Forget Divakurani whose books are overarated, if you want to read "Indian women writers", then Bharti Mukherjee has no equal in this genre. She is astounding, fresh, and tanscends her category.

READ "DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS" FIRST.

I'd even go with 3.5 stars -- though perhaps I would have enjoyed it more and ranked it higher if I'd known this was a sequel prior to reading it. I have ordered the first book "Desirable Daughters" and hope that "Tree Bride" comes together more fully after I've read the first installment.

Nothing on my hardback copy of "Tree Bride" indicated it is a sequel -- QUITE disappointing and, as it turned out, it lessened my appreciation of this book quite a bit.

Well-written, definitely -- Ms. Mukherjee is a talented writer. It just seemed disjointed and, I thought, could have benefited greatly from inclusion of a family tree. Perhaps with the first book as background I might not have needed a family tree -- I do not yet know.

This is an enchanting tale of a young Indian woman's search for her roots in old Bangladesh. The search itself is like following the roots of a tree, a fantastical tree that is the husband of her old aunt. Each bit of knowledge takes you deeper into the narrator's past, India's past, the ambivalence of modern Indians whose ancestors had to find identity under the British Raj. How much is fact or fiction in the telling of this history doesn't matter. The story, myth, mystique take us deep into the soul of India, as deep as we can go not having experienced it ourselves.

This book is second in a trilogy (first was "Desirable Daughters). I look forward to experiencing the third.

Reading here for the first time that this is part of a trilogy, I see that there may be a reason why I felt a little let down at the end of the Tree Bride (not understanding, still, why the main character's life was threatened by a bomber). It's sort of like reading "The Two Towers" without knowing about the Fellowship of the Ring or the Return of the King. That said, I enjoyed this book immensely (I bought it in an airport and read it instead of Stephen Sears' "The Landscape Turned Red" -- which is not to say anything against the always excellent Stephen Sears). It is true that The Tree Bride has a large ensemble cast and one must be patient to understand the threads connecting the fabric of the story (the theme of which seems to be the conflict between artificial partition and natural connection) but if you are you will be rewarded. I thought the characters were well developed and interesting and I particularly enjoyed the micro review of Indian independence and partition -- so much so that I would like to read more.

And now that I know this was part of a trilogy, I am looking forward to reading "Desirable Daughters" and the third book.

The writing was prose in this novel but the plot was SO confusing. I really don't know what I read most the time. The only thing I got from the book was the main character's pregnancy in later years and how she dealt with it's changing herself. Other than that, the story was mish mash!

This book is a continuation of the story started by the author in the novel Desirable Daughters (also a great read). It is the fascinating examination by the main character of the history of her great-aunt, Tara-Ma, who died in police custody during the struggle for Indian independence. Tied into the storyline is the main character's own life and the late-life pregancy she is experiencing as she gets back together with her ex-husband. There is an element of suspense as she and her husband try to uncover the location of the man who tried to kill them in the previous book. This book is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who can read!

WHAT REALLY HAPPEND 331 PEOPLE DIED BUT NOW THEY ARE BEAING BROUGHT TO TRIAL THAT STARTED FEB 4 2002 ALL SHOULD BE KILLED

I read the review titled "Sloppy Piece..." and felt cautious in my decision to continue reading this book. I am so glad I did! I loved this book! I loved Mukherjee's insight into her creation of such a beautiful, believable character, and loved the insight it provided on the topic of what it means to be a part of America. I highly recommend this book.

This was my first novel that I have read by Bharati Mukherjee and I found it difficult to read sometimes. There are parts in the beginning of the story that are hard to understand but once you read through the novel everything starts to make sense to you. Mukhejee tends to skip around throughout the novel and this causes it to become confusing.
The story deals with Jasmine trying to deal with the past in order to move on with the future. She has trouble dealing with her past because she has survived so many traumatic situations in her life. She also does not know how to do deal with the past and tends to carry it along with her.
Mukherjee had great themes throughout the story. I found that one of the themes was finding your true identity in a chaotic world. Jasmine goes through many names throughout the story including Jyoti, Jazzy, Jane, and Jase. Her life becomes very chaotic because she has to go from place to place trying to find out who she wants to be in the American world. Another theme that I found intriguing was that we are never satisfied with what we have. Throughout this story Jasmine always wants more. She wants the American lifestyle and in the end we see that. She has the right to choose Bud who she will have a laid back lifestyle and many people believe that he represents the Indian culture or she can choose Taylor who will give her an adventurous lifestyle. She has to choose whether she is happy with what she has with Bud or does she want more.
I enjoyed the story overall because she caught my attention with her vivid descriptions in her scenes. The one scene that always sticks out in my mind is when she compares the room where she murdered her rapist to a slaughter house. She used great vivid details to describe the stabbing.

Don't let the cheesy cover fool you, this book is amazing. It is brutally honest and intense, as well as impossible to put down. The story revolves around a woman with a multitude of identities, one to fit each phase of her ever changing life. "Jasmine" (aka Jyoti and Jane) is a woman who survives poverty and ignorance in a small Indian village, only to be rewarded with brutality. Her journey to America is beyond taxing, and what she must do to survive it is harrowing, if not downright shocking at times.
Jasmine is faced with much turmoil and many choices, none of which are easy. Her life is far from conventional, but it says volumes about what it must be like to forge a new life in a new place with an identity that even she is not certain of.
I found that the ending was a little abrupt, but other than this, I have no complaints. Mukherjee is a vivid and serious writer, one who will leave you with an often times visceral reaction.
Warning: I have heard some complaints about the beginning chapters being mildly confusing concerning character introductions, but I assure you, if you stick with it, what she is doing will become clear quite quickly. This author's technique of introducing characters is very unique and effective and gives the reader a real sense of time without being exactly linear.

This novel captivates its reader from beginning to end. Jasmine, the protagonist of the story faces many challenges and obstacles that she must overcome in order to make sure her catastrophic destiny is not fulfilled. She has survived being married without a dowry (for she is the fifth daughter of nine children), being widowed at less than nineteen years of age, illegally immigrating into a foreign land, raped on her first day in America, and choosing between love and duty.
Mukherjee's style of writing is unique and difficult to grasp at first. She would refer back to the past or fast forward into the present periodically so the reader must constantly `be on their toes.' She leaves `cliffhangers' at the end of paragraphs or chapters that are reunited with their explanations of what would happen in later chapters. Mukherjee would leave her readers in curiosity as she skips around in her time machine within her story.
Mukherjee wrote eloquently as she weaved Jasmine's various identities into one novel. Jasmine, who is also Jyoti, Jazzy, Jase and Jane, is faced between clinging to her `feudalistic traditions' or her `new western-thinking traditions.' Each identity of hers represents a new lifestyle and a new challenge that she must conquer. She experiences a sense of two sides inside her, each competing to grasp the fullness of her whole body and soul.
Jasmine was torn between assimilating into American freedom and society vs. being bound to her deep-rooted traditions. Characters within the novel assist the protagonist in her journey as she tries to battle her fate and destiny. Overall, the book was well written and packed with a journey between Jasmine's duty as an Indian woman and freedom that she desires in America.

I read this book in a literature class on the PostColonial Indian Novel. It has been a while since I read it but I will relate that this book is very special because it is as quick and fun to read as a light beach read, while at the same time dealing with very serious topics and being incredibly moving. This is RARE in a novel.
Jasmine is a novel I would recommend to anyone, it is so beautiful (some of the quotes I have memorized, even!) I didn't ever want it to end... and it unfortunately takes only a couple hours to read!
The story is of a woman who starts out in a very small village in India and eventually is married to a progressive Indian man who convinces her to think for herself and break away from the feudal ideals that make her think she must be nothing but a subservient baby maker/house keeper. Her husband is murdered early in their marriage and Jasmine, who is turning into a real fighter, makes a terrible and unforgettable trip to America to honor her husband's memory. The rest is history as Jamine finds her way and searches personal fulfillment and self-actualization... she becomes to some extent assimilated in this process, though she always carries her past along with her.

And I can attest to the fact that it is not simply a women's novel: my boyfriend and I read this together and he fell in love with the book too!

All writers choose the stories they will tell out of the infinite number that can be told, and this is especially true in short stories, where the number of narratives that can come forth are limited. The best stories read naturally, and we forget that the author has chosen them, that they are deliberate. Mukherjee's stories in this collection fall short, for me, of this criterion.

If Mukherjee were Nabokov, the introduction to this novel would be a trick, a game, something to deceive our reading of the stories to come. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Perhaps I am simply too young to understand the politics surrounding this book's publication, perhaps things have changed, but the rah-rah-USA-nation-of-immigrants vs. o-racist-Canada opposition really irked me throughout the book. (And I am from the US.) Frankly, this collection read to me like it was being written with a certain purpose for a certain group of people, whether intentionally or (much, much worse and less forgivable) unintentionally.

I was most surprised that one reviewer wrote that he enjoyed and understood "Darkness" because, as an Asian man, he can understand such a thing. As someone who thought this book would mainly be enjoyed by enlightened white folk in search of clues to Indian-American cultural identity and pathos, I was certainly shocked especially that someone would proudly claim his affinity to a character I read as weak and emasculated by the strong women close to him, momentarily relieved that some man might have had temporary power over his daughter, terrified to the point of murder when he realized his mistake.

In short (which I haven't been), I was disappointed in the stories, annoyed by some of the unnatural moments in Mukherjee's writing when it is clear she is too aware of her audience and not living deeply within her characters (What Indian person would say "Goa, India" for example, rather than just the obvious "Goa"), HOWEVER, given the other reviewer's easy identification with the characters-- I may be completely off in my charactertization of these stories.

It's really a wonderful short stories. I like, especially, Father. I am a parent and a Asian, so I can understand his feelings. I don't think it is a murder.

Mukherjee writes with sharp wit, presenting her Indian immigrant characters in uncomfortable, absurd, and often terrible situations. Her stories are about people who surrender "little bits of a reluctant self every year, clutching the souveniers of an ever-retreating past" [from her "Introduction"]. Her immigrant characters want to fit in their new America, and yet they want to cling to their pasts, their cultures, their ethics. They want to be American, in the sense of being successful and fitting in, and yet they can't reconcile themselves to it; America, often, rejects them, eats away at their traditions, their values, and even their self-respect. Note, though, that Mukherjee does not moralize; she never loses her sense of irony or absurdity.

This is one of the most unique travel books I've ever read. The first 165 pages are written by Canadian novelist & short story writer Clark Blaise and are followed by a 115 page section by his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, also a novelist & short story writer & Berkeley professor. The book originally appeared in 1975 and documents in two distinct voices a year spent in the company of Mukherjee's family in India, first in Bombay then in Calcutta.
Blaise and Mukherjee met at a writers workshop in Iowa, married, and lived in Canada with their two children until their house burned down which left them homeless and prompted their journey east. Mukherjee spent her formative years in Calcutta and is returning to a largely familiar world but to Blaise everything is new. The first sixty pages of his narrative take place in Bombay and Blaise is never altogether at home there as they are staying with Mukherjees parents and her father is the uncontested head of the household. Blaise's trips into the city are flights from the congestion of stifling family life, his insights into the nature of Indian family life are in equal parts humorous and informative(the family does not even know the first name of a servant who has lived with them for years, nor do they show any interest in knowing). This view of India from an outsider given an insiders access is just one of many aspects of this book that distinguishes it from mere travel narrative. His initiation into the rituals and customs and (to him)peculiarites of Indian family life make for great reading. But the best section is the sustained amazement and energy of the 10-15 page description of Calcutta(where they have chosen to spend the better part of the year in a mission which caters to scholars) as he rides a rickshaw through its cluttered streets. Over the course of the year Blaise will meet many of Calcutta's elite including its most famous(to the west anyway)citizen, the film maker Satyajit Ray. Calcutta is the major city of Bengal, the eastern most province of India, filled with a proud and cultured people, and Blaise spends many fascinating pages analyzing both its culture and polotics:
The Bengali has lived with the English longer than any Indian, and he has absorbed him,while keeping his own soul, with astounding ease. -p.122
Blaise begins with illusions about India but over the course of his year in Calcutta he learns about its culture and people and the contact with this world different in every imaginable way from his own has a profound impact on him, the way he views the west, and the way he views his marriage.
In counterpoint to Blaise's description of the year is Mukherjee's. She is a westernised Indian who has married outside,and according to her father beneath,her caste and in caste conscious India that is often an unforgivable offense. The Mukherjee girls(Bharati and her sisters)are brilliant and Bharati is beautiful and her novel, The Tigers Daughter, just published to rave reviews, has made her famous in her home country. Her year is marked by equally profound realizations which include increased self awareness of her own very personal way of blending if not bridging the two very distinct cultures of which she is a part:
My aesthetic, then, must accomadate a decidedly Hindu imagination with an Americanized sense of the craft of fiction. To admit to possessing a Hindu imagination is to admit that my concepts of what constitutes a "story" and of narrative structure are noncausal, non-Western.-p.298
But perhaps the most fascinating part of her section is her portrait of her former classmates who have stayed in India and married and now make up the elite. These highly educated women are nonetheless stranded in their homes and live cloistered social lives atop an India which has grown restless and intolerant of the wide divisions that separate the rich from the poor. Riots and robbery are always imminent realities. The women Mukherjee observes clothed in silk saris and gold bracelets and diamond earings in their gated community of mansions in the worlds poorest city seem trapped in a world that they know cannot last. They go on as if immune(or wishing to be) from all the realites around them, a social elite with money to burn but drained of contact and significance to the greater India outside their own very high walls.

Rare book by two excellent writers & one that has not gone through too many reprintings so get a copy while you can. I especially like the sturdy(always good for a travel book) '95 Hungry Mind paperback edition with excellent cover art as well as updated prologues and epilogues by the authors.

In the first half of this documentary of a family's trip to India, Blaise paints an anti-feminist and harsh perpective of his wife's Indian heritage. At first compassionate, Blaise soon loses his readers with his inattention to plot and chronology. His story jumps from his time with his family in Bombay to Calcutta and the present with almost no transitioning explanation while his use of Indian words unknown to his reader are not clarified.

If Mukherjee had written this book entirely, readers' interest may not have wandered as far. Bharati's interpretation of their journey is nostalgic and whimsical at the same time, telling of her return to India after a fourteen-year absence. She often visites the idea of what if; for example, what if she'd stayed behind in India and married an Indian? What if she'd led the traditional Indian life?
I feel a bit sorry for her story being the secondary plot in this otherwise difficult book.

Book was in very poor condition. If I order one than one book from the same place at the same time I don't think I should have to pay double postage and handling.

I bought this book at Border's on Friday and it such a great book. I was looking for something unique and interesting, a book that would hold my attention. I would recommend this book to everyone, especially people interested in different cultures. I am certainly going to read the other books in this trilogy!

I picked up this novel in the bargain book section and Im EVER so happy that I only paid five dollars for it. The book started out intrestingly enough yet about 1/3 I just wanted it to be over! I kept reading because I was hoping the quality of writing would improve and by the end of the novel I was disappointed that I stuck it out and finished.

The plot left much to be desired, and was hard to follow at times. There seemed to be no clear resolution to any conflict and random ideas were thrown in haprazordly. However, the description of Bengali life and social status was portrayed accurately and some characters(such as Rabi, the narrators son, was three dimensional). All in all, I could have found a much better book to read on a lazy Sunday afternoon- Dont waste your time on this novel.

I tried to read this many times. Somehow, I got easily bored. Finally I gave up reading it. It was a waste of money.

Mukherjee is one of the lucky few hand picked by the critics in attempting to reform the classic canon. In trying to provide a voice to an unrecognised minority - the literary critics have foisted this trash upon us - and the public say "pull the other one."

Rather than letting the quality of the writing do the talking Mukherjee infuses her tedious prose with cliched cultural references and overblown reinterpretation. Leaves the reader feeling quite angry at how an author could be so presumptuous.

Dimple, the main character of "Wife" is portrayed in such a way by Mukherjee that the reader is left wondering about the attitude that he or she develops towards her. Mukherjee takes us deep into the mind of Dimple as she makes a transition from being single to marrying a husband chosen by her father,and from living in the familiar surroundings of Calcutta to moving to the so-perceived violent city of New York. As the novel progresses, Dimple's hidden unstable personality reveals itself leaving the reader shocked, yet entranced.