In this collection of stories Bharati Mukherjee tried a completely different voice - and I don't think it worked for her. ( )

The Management of Grief is a very powerful tale describing how people take grief differently. After a bomb blew up a plane, there were several different reactions to the news. Some accepted the fact, and those who lost their spouse soon began searching for another, as it was the Indian way. The cultural division was very insightful as to why some of the people performed the actions that they did. A common theme in the story was one of hope, and that as an Indian parent, it is your job to never give up hope. There was almost a binary opposition between the white woman and the narrator. The white woman showed an arrogance to the Indian culture, and could not understand why some individuals were being stubborn and did not want to sign the paperwork. The people who lost their families had a very spiritual tie to them, and many did not want to accept that they were actually gone. From a technical standpoint, they were in the denial stage of grief. Many others had accepted the fact and moved to a different city and basically started over. The story was a very sad one, but very touching, as it gave the reader a new perspective of a culture unlike there own.

Most of the characters in Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories are displaced, foreign born people living in America. They feel odd, out of touch with the world in which they live, yet out of touch with the world from which they came. I can easily see why Mukherjee won the National Book Critics Circle Award for these stories. Highly recommended. ( )

she writes sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, sometimes as an indian, sometimes not. i'm not sure how i feel about this, she left canada because we were too racist. she thought the states was better because the racism is right out there and in canada we try to pretend it doen't exist. ( )