SOURCE: "Mukherjee's Jasmine," in The Explicator, Vol. 55, No. 2, Winter, 1997, pp. 114-17.

In the following review, Leard states that, "With the connotations of both dislocation and progress within the tangled framework of the narrator's personal history, journey as metaphor in [Jasmine stands for the ever-moving, regenerating process of life itself."]

Despite postcolonial readings of Bharati Mukherjee's novel Jasmine, Western critics have not placed in context the pivotal play of migrations, forced and voluntary, literal and figurative, found in the plural female subjectivity of the novel. With the connotations of both dislocation and progress within the tangled framework of the narrator's personal history, journey as metaphor in the novel stands for the ever-moving, regenerating process of life itself. In presenting a woman capable of birthing more than one self during the course of her lifetime, Mukherjee invests her novel with the unique form of a Hindu bildungsroman, where the body...