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"An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling. Once again, Bharati Mukherjee prove she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative."--Amy Tan This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, "a person undreamed of in Puritan society." Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, "translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja. It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an "asset hunter" who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with "sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography...."… (more)
User reviews
As a novel about history, this is wonderfully written, engaging, and compelling; the fractured and fragmented narrative—which sometimes jumps back and forth in time rapidly and lacks an overall cohesiveness—can be dizzying at first, but this is part of its structural integrity. The project of building one's history is never linear, and Mukherjee's project in bringing colonial America into dialogue with colonial England—and placing Hannah in the direct center of the Native Americans and native Indians as she journeys throughout her life—is a sophisticated attempt to discuss how power and narrative can be subverted. Not only are the stereotypical traits assigned to race and mapped on to gender at play here, with Hannah navigating her way through them, but these "negative" attributes are actually sources of freedom, movement, and liberation, both for this seventeenth-century woman and for the narrator who is intent on constructing this woman's history.
The source material is varied and rich; the historical settings are always visceral and enhanced by archival material—whether real or not, as Mukherjee seems to want to get the reader involved in questioning whether all truths are necessary in constructing a history or histories. I really enjoyed the book, and would highly recommend it to those interested in the problematical task of writing and constructing personal and cultural histories, and how the same problems at work in these attempts to reach back through time are also at play in the time period in questioning, allowing for a concurrent analysis of power, class, race, gender, and imperialism to take place while still conducting a very personal project close to one's heart.