Told by fictional immigrants, the tales of arrival and survival spun by Mukherjee's protagonists often paralyze the reader with their realism. They come from Italy, Trinidad, Israel, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Philippines and elsewhere to build new lives in such places as Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Manhattan and Miami. For all the troubles the immigrants endure, Mukherjee's portrayal of them as dauntless participants in the American experiment serves to empower them. Even as she's being raped by her employer, Jasmine, a housekeeper from Trinidad, ponders that she has "no nothing other than what she wanted to invent and tell." The Middleman won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.


From Publishers Weekly
As evidenced in her first short story collection Darkness and two novels, The Tiger's Daughter and Wife, Mukherjee's central preoccupation is the problematical nature of personal encounters between East and West. These expertly crafted tales continue to have that focus; all turn on recent Third World immigrant experience in or closely affected by North America. Mukherjee makes the ambitious attempt to narrate through the voices of characters as diverse as a middle-class Italian-American suburbanite, a Sephardic mercenary from Smyrna by way of Flushing, Queens, a Trinidadian mother's helper and an Atlantan investment banker. But in striving for extended range she sometimes undercuts the authenticity and immediacy of her stories. The most successful tales are those told from the point of view of characters from the Indian subcontinent, especially women. It is Mukherjee's keen eye for telling and sensuous detail that make these stories rewarding. Her limpid prose has a capacity to surprise with trenchant wit and delight with finely calibrated lyricism. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Publishers Weekly
[Mukherjee's] limpid prose has a capacity to surprise with trenchant wit and delight with finely calibrated lyricism.


Book Description
Bharati Mukherjee's work illuminates a new world of people in migration that has transformed the meaning of "America." Now in a Grove paperback edition, The Middleman and Other Stories is a dazzling display of the vision of this important modern writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into the center of a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, yet glowing with the energy and exuberance of a society remaking itself.

ANNOTATION

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, these stories explore the new immigrant groups who are changing how America lives, earns and votes. From an aristocratic Filipino woman in Atlanta to an Iraqui Jew in Queens, this stunning book speaks of, to, and from these new citizens.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Funny, intelligent, versatile...profound."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
These beautifully wrought stories reveal a new world that has been created imperceptibly in our midst: a United States transformed by many new faces from Afghanistan and Asia, from Uganda and Latin America. These immigrants have in turn been transformed by the "idea" of living in America. Passionate, comic, violent, and ultimately tender, these stories portray our latest arrivals in all their richness and variety, reflected in American eyes equally varied with fear, love, suspicion, or pure astonishment.
"Stunning...Her characters stand on the shaky ground where East meets West and the sound of cultures clashing could shatter glass."
LOS ANGELESTIMES
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly