The Holder of the World
Bharati Mukherjee's 1993 novel sends a twentieth-century American woman back through time to seventeenth-century India via the travels of an emerald. The book links colonial Massachusetts, Mughal India, and the New Jersey suburbs in ways that are ambitious, occasionally disorienting, and openly interested in how identity is traded, inherited, or imposed. It is less tidy than Jasmine and more fun because of it.Random House's edition presents the novel in a standard hardcover format, appropriate for a book that wants to be taken seriously as historical fiction. The emerald itself becomes a kind of unreliable narrator, passing through hands that each read its meaning differently. The result rewards readers who would rather be lost in three centuries at once than comfortably settled in one.
