About the author - Bharati Mukherjee
Born in Calcutta, India, just seven years to Indian independence, Bharati Mukherjee would soon set foot on American shores which would become a catalyst for her literary mind.
She was known to write about the experiences of immigrant Indians mainly in America. Mukherjee explained this shift as "a movement away from the aloofness of expatriation, to the exuberance of immigration." Her early novels, The Tiger's Daughter and Wife, both published in the early 1970s, are stories about the isolation of Indian expatriates.
In Darkness, the stories are centred on a different geographic area which is Canada. There is a pleasantness in the tone and attitude of the tales, but the loneliness away from motherland remains. Other stories explore North America through the alien voices of its various immigrant cultures—Italian, Latin American, Sri Lankan, as well as Indian. With The Middleman and Other Stories Mukherjee gave voices to these nationalities also. In these stories, sometimes with anger, often with violence, sometimes with comedy, often with tenderness, Mukherjee gives voice to the "other" within North America. "The Management of Grief," which deals with the sorrow of the bereaved relatives of the victims of the 1985 Air India disaster, is perhaps the most moving story in the collection. The horror of that tragedy is dealt with in harrowing detail in Mukherjee's second nonfiction collaboration, The Sorrow and the Terror.
After a gap of fourteen years, Mukherjee wrote Jasmine, which explores female identity through the story of an Indian peasant woman whose path takes her from the Punjab, to Florida, to New York, to Iowa, and as the novel draws to a close she is about to set off for California.
In The Holder of the World, Mukherjee turns her attention to one of the founding novels of postcolonial America —Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Reversing the usual binary opposition between occidental and oriental texts, Mukherjee presents Hawthorne's novel as one which has been written out of a knowledge of India.
Bharati Mukherjee is a writer who is at her best when she draws on her experiences of the Old World while writing with insight about the New World to which she now belongs.
Adapted from jrank
The Middleman
“there are aspects of American life I came too late for and will never understand.”
This line may be the very gist of the story about a man who is always on the harrowing line of doing things for others which he doesnt want to but he does so only to eventually be a citizen of America.
"The Middleman" is a story about a man from Iraqi Jew named Alfie Judah. He is working for a land-owner in South America. Alfie becomes a middleman between the land-owner's attractive wife and her lover from her youth in plotting to kill and rob the land-owner.
Narrated by Alfie who is a naturalized American citizen, it is set in an unnamed area which is in the throes of a guerrilla insurgency. The idea for the story came to Mukherjee when she was writing an incomplete novel about a Vietnam veteran who becomes a mercenary soldier in Afghanistan and Central America. The novel featured a minor character named Alfie Judah, a Jew who had relocated from Baghdad to New York, via Bombay, India. Alfie became such a strong presence in the writer's mind that, as she reported in an interview with Alison B. Carb in Massachusetts Review, he "took control and wrote his own story.
"The Middleman," then, is the story of a cynical man who "travels around the world, providing people with what they need—guns, narcotics, automobiles." It is a story of lust, betrayal, and murder, featuring American expatriates, a beautiful woman, and ruthless guerrillas.
Adapted from American expat blog.
After a gap of fourteen years, Mukherjee wrote Jasmine, which explores female identity through the story of an Indian peasant woman whose path takes her from the Punjab, to Florida, to New York, to Iowa, and as the novel draws to a close she is about to set off for California.
In The Holder of the World, Mukherjee turns her attention to one of the founding novels of postcolonial America —Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Reversing the usual binary opposition between occidental and oriental texts, Mukherjee presents Hawthorne's novel as one which has been written out of a knowledge of India.
Bharati Mukherjee is a writer who is at her best when she draws on her experiences of the Old World while writing with insight about the New World to which she now belongs.
Adapted from jrank
The Middleman
“there are aspects of American life I came too late for and will never understand.”
This line may be the very gist of the story about a man who is always on the harrowing line of doing things for others which he doesnt want to but he does so only to eventually be a citizen of America.
"The Middleman" is a story about a man from Iraqi Jew named Alfie Judah. He is working for a land-owner in South America. Alfie becomes a middleman between the land-owner's attractive wife and her lover from her youth in plotting to kill and rob the land-owner.
Narrated by Alfie who is a naturalized American citizen, it is set in an unnamed area which is in the throes of a guerrilla insurgency. The idea for the story came to Mukherjee when she was writing an incomplete novel about a Vietnam veteran who becomes a mercenary soldier in Afghanistan and Central America. The novel featured a minor character named Alfie Judah, a Jew who had relocated from Baghdad to New York, via Bombay, India. Alfie became such a strong presence in the writer's mind that, as she reported in an interview with Alison B. Carb in Massachusetts Review, he "took control and wrote his own story.
"The Middleman," then, is the story of a cynical man who "travels around the world, providing people with what they need—guns, narcotics, automobiles." It is a story of lust, betrayal, and murder, featuring American expatriates, a beautiful woman, and ruthless guerrillas.
Adapted from American expat blog.
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