Tree Bride

From Publishers Weekly
India, past and present, its inhabitants and expatriates, has always formed the framework of Mukherjee's literary world. In this vibrant novel, a sequel to Desirable Daughters and her best work to date, the author has fused history, mysticism, treachery and enduring love in a suspenseful story about the lingering effects of past secrets. Tara Chatterjee, the protagonist of the earlier novel, again narrates. The tale begins as her San Francisco house is firebombed by a man obsessed with killing her, and trails back to her legendary great-great-aunt and namesake, Tara Lata, who was born in 1874 and, at five, married to a tree because her fiancé died. Later, Tara Lata bravely conspired to win Bengal's independence from England. As the narrator gradually discovers why her namesake died in prison, she uncovers much evidence of the British rulers' contempt for the Indians they claimed they were "civilizing"; their cruelty, bigotry and duplicity cut into the narrative like a bloody knife. The plot itself is convoluted in a suspenseful way: the drama begun by Tara Lata's wedding resonates in miraculous interactions over the generations. As Tara Chatterjee's husband, a technological genius, has always told her, there are no coincidences in the universe. Over the course of this story, a dreadful 18th-century sea voyage spawns one man's redemption and another's hatred; honor and courage are met by betrayal; and loyalty to one's family and tradition prove to be the fuel of 20th-century love. The narrative brims with more action and vitality than Mukherjee's previous novels while retaining her elegant and incisive style. It's a good bet that this book will attract wide interest and leave readers eagerly awaiting the third volume in the trilogy. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
Born to a wealthy Calcutta family, Mukherjee lived in Britain as a child and is now a professor at U.C. Berkeley. Her life of migration and assimilation informs her work, but critics agree that grander themes play out in Tree Bride—how to accept assimilation, forge identity, and connect past and present. Critics call Tree Bride dazzling, enchanting, and rich. Mukherjee moves across time, space, and culture, weaving seemingly disparate events in meaningful ways. Those same critics also describe Tree Bride as esoteric, elusive, and confusing, particularly when historical detail engulfs the narrative threads. Fortunately, Mukherjee focuses the novel by grounding Tara’s personal relationships. While Tree Bride is not for the restless reader, it is “a worthy commitment rewarded by a deeply satisfying and eloquently told story” (Boston Globe).Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From Booklist
Tara Lata became known as the Tree Bride because after her child groom died, her quick-thinking Hindu father married her to a tree to spare her the misery of lifelong widowhood. Mukherjee introduced the Tree Bride in her last spellbinding novel, Desirable Daughters (2002), along with Tara Lata's descendent, Tara Chatterjee, who left Calcutta for San Francisco, where her husband became a world-famous cyber-communications magnate. Tara was researching the Tree Bride's life when a bomb blast threw her own life into turmoil. Now, as Mukherjee picks up the pieces, as it were, Tara, scarred and pregnant, seeks an Indian woman doctor, but, fooled by a name, ends up with a white woman whose British family history also connects her to the Tree Bride. So begins the unfurling of an endlessly intriguing web of unforeseen connections and coincidences as smart and resilient Tara continues her revelatory investigation, and Mukherjee imagines the warped psychology of colonial India with both pathos and wicked humor. Improvising brilliantly and with wry intent on the satirical wit of Dickens and the political acumen of Orwell--and making gorgeously metaphorical, and metaphysical, use of communications technologies--Mukherjee takes up the story of the revered Tree Bride, who becomes a freedom fighter in India's struggle for independence. Mukherjee is a virtuoso in the crafting of shrewd, hilarious, suspenseful, and significant cross-cultural dramas. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
From the acclaimed writer Bharati Mukherjee, the second novel in a trilogy that bridges modern America and historical India. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Bharati Mukherjee has long been known not only for her elegant, evocative prose but also for her characters -- influenced by ancient customs and traditions but also very much rooted in modern times. In The Tree Bride, the narrator, Tara Chatterjee (whom readers will remember from Desirable Daughters), picks up the story of an East Bengali ancestor. According to legend, at the age of five Tara Lata married a tree and eventually emerged as a nationalist freedom fighter. In piecing together her ancestor's transformation from a docile Bengali Brahmin girl-child into an impassioned organizer of resistance against the British Raj, the contemporary narrator discovers and lays claim to unacknowledged elements in her "American" identity. Although the story of the Tree Bride is central, the drama surrounding the narrator, a divorced woman trying to get back with her husband, moves the novel back and forth through time and across continents.


About the Author
Bharati Mukherjee is the author of six novels, two non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories, including The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of English at the University of California Berkeley and lives in Berkeley, California.


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A heritage of revenge and violence stalks the protagonist and narrator in Mukherjee's latest, the second of a trilogy (Desirable Daughters, 2002). Tara Chatterjee opens it with a terse account of her reunion with former husband Bish (the computer-genius "Raja of Silicon Valley"), crippled when their California home was fire-bombed by one Abbas Sattar Hai, whose motives are initially unclear. Answers lie in the history of Tara's Indian family, specifically in the story of her Victorian ancestor Tara Lata Gangooly, literally betrothed to a tree when her preadolescent fiance died of snakebite, and thereafter a secular saint who used the wealth of her untouched dowry to finance Indian resistance to British colonialism. The contemporary Tara accesses the Tree Bride's story circuitously, through family papers supplied by Tara's gynecologist Victoria Khanna. Gradually Tara plaits together two crucially related other stories: those of 19th-century foundling "Jack Snow," whose misadventure aboard a Calcutta-bound ship overtaken by Danish pirates led him to a life of dangerous exploits and ignominy as freelance empire-builder "John Mist"; and Victoria's grandfather Virgil Treadwell, a British colonial officer traumatized by an unconventional upbringing, lured by the beauty and mystery of the Indian subcontinent, shaped and stunted by his encounters with both the victims and the agents of his culture's proprietary energies. Mukherjee's tale itself displays similar energies, rising to a spectacular climax when Tara, hugely pregnant, barely escapes death again-and begins to understand how "an indiscriminate killer in India and America, was born and possibly raised in my family's house." The Tree Brideis thus filled with absorbing stuff, and really rather brilliantly worked out. But its past and present are so densely entangled that there's almost too much information for a reader to absorb. Still, it's worth the effort. Mukherjee is a potent writer, and her contrasted and conflicting worlds and times seductively draw us in.


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