Jasmine's an entertaining piece: lots of action; short, artfully spliced streaks of narrative match protagonist Jotyi-Jassie-Jazzy-Jasmine-Jane's metamorphoses or incarnations as she slips towards her next attempt at fulfillment.
It reminds me a little of Voltaire's Candide or even de Sade's Justine. The woman's caught in something like Marquez' hojarasca, and seems only partly aware of it. I suppose folks enamored of Jameson's conception of postmodernism could see this as an extension of that. People move, transplanted, before functions that the reader's free to trace to capital.
I'm entertained, but disturbed. The violence around Jasmine and Jasmine seems stylized. Like the protagonist of Gravity's Rainbow, J does follow the trajectory of the missile that has hit her life in India: she goes to America to chase the modernity that begins as her personal autonomy. But it's not clear that she comes closer to it, though I suspect that Mukherjee would claim that she does.
Violence:
- Her family is moved from their town by the violence of the Muslim, Lions, perpetrators and victims of the struggles that swept through India with the fall of empire there.
- Her husband is killed by Moslems in the same extended conflict, decades later and in a different part of India.
- She follows her husband's ambitions back to the USA.
- She's raped en route, as though for good measure or to emphasize the plight of refugees entering the US.
- The rapist gives her an implausible degree of freedom and trust, for which she kills him, with admirable efficiency.
- A couple adventures down the line, she's in NYC babysitting a kid for a couple of fairly stereotypical metropolitans, who, just as typically, will divorce. He falls in love with her, as everyone seems to. She takes off to Europe with a lover, but J sees a Lion selling hotdogs in NYC and decides to head off to Iowa.
- The narrative centers on the episode in Iowa, and the progressive explanation of her current Iowa life parallels the stories of her childhood in India and her progressive flight-quest thereafter. The local banker gives her a job, asks her to lunch, and throws his wife over.
- They adopt a Viet child. Why not? This probably does fix the story at some point in the 1970's and early '80's, since the '70's brought the boatpeople, and Vietnamese refugees were common.
- Banker Bud must turn down farmers' who apply for loans, so he gets shot, crippled. She stays with him and manages to get herself pregnant by him, despite his difficulties with intercourse.
- Another local farmer offers to sweep her away to New Mexico, but hangs himself from the rafters with an electrical cord when she turns him down and before she and Bud can go over to offer him a modified loan.
- Meanwhile, the guy from her NYC days comes a knocking with an offer to take her to California. So she dumps near-beloved Bud and jumps to the next guy, Western-style and very American.
So, what have we seen?
Gender issues, I suppose -- men are nice or vicious, but uniformly needy. But her Good Indian Husband has instilled the idea that she's doing things for herself, and she adopts that. The image of the shattered vase is central here. She keeps saying that once the vase is shattered, one can see that the air is the same inside the vase and outside the vase. Thus one finds that something like Indian Society or Indian Gender Roles or Jasmine's family gets shattered, so Jasmine scuttles from one situation to another trying to find complement.
In truth, there's a kind of diaspora here.
From the POV of a foreigner entering the USA, the broken vase might be taken differently: once one enters, one finds that circumstances within the US resemble those without. People here are equally driven before the artificial arrangement of spreadsheet needs projected by imperial capital rather than directly and coherently responsive to the needs of their mates and families.
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