SOURCE: "Eyre and Anglos," in Canadian Literature, No. 132, Spring, 1992, pp. 160-61.

In the following review, Boire asserts that Mukherjee's "Jasmine is a tremendously interesting work, not simply because it foregrounds characters and situations and nationalities so often disguised or dismissed in the western/American tradition, but primarily because of Mukherjee's ironic nuance and sinewy revisionism."

Jasmine is Bharati Mukherjee's first novel in fourteen years; like her stories, it is highly crafted, impeccably understated, and virtually seamless in its unfolding. It is also, like many of her public statements and much of her writing, controversial. Like Atwood, Mukherjee has attracted a network of hecklers who pay more attention to her biography than her texts, and who delight in gainsaying as self-promotional Mukherjee's many observations about exclusionary racism and the Canadian literary scene. In this "word of mouth" category Jasmine has already gathered clusters of disagreeing admirers and critics. What...