Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

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Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

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I enjoyed the story and the writing although the character of Rachel seemed a bit immature and whiny and not always likeable. I had fun watching Swarti takes risks to break through her cultural norms to give herself a better life. While I enjoyed having a 'tour' through Mumbai, I didn't get as deep a sense of the city as I would have liked, but I think that might be harder to do with contemporary fiction over historical fiction. Despite this, I still enjoyed 'exploring' the city with Rachel. I appreciate that the author uses her experience to write this story as that always adds another level to my enjoyment as well. A strange book, it made me feel slightly uneasy - like listening in to a conversation I shouldn’t have been privy to. One can read Mother Land, then, in a state of appalled fascination, the transgression of full-on family hatred licensed, but also safely displaced on to another family. The portraits of Mother’s children, themselves ageing and succumbing to illness as she lives on past a century in fine fettle, are especially well done, and the novel’s climax, with its hints of an inversion of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, are sharp and subtle.

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. Lively and evocative, Mother Land is a deftly crafted exploration of identity and culture, with memorable and deeply human characters who highlight how that which makes us different can ultimately unite us.”—Amy Myerson, author of The Bookshop of Yesterdays and The Imperfects Mother/land is an Own Voices collection of poems by Ananda Lima. As far as content is concerned, Lima focuses on the experience of parenting in a foreign land; as far as style is concerned, Lima experiments with form and writes in both English and Portuguese. Her tone is tender at times and then piercing and poignant. I love how this book did such a wonderful job of showing how connected we truly are. In an age of so much division and finger pointing, this book gently reminds us that we may look different but we are the same. We feel hope and experience loss and need love, even if we may do all those things differently. Franqi poignantly highlights the cultural differences of America/India and unique stresses of the MIL relationship while still honoring both.I don't believe she was actually stillborn, but never made it out of the hospital alive. Mother declares that Angela is “the only child who actually understands me!” At one family gathering, an outsider (new in-law) asked about the empty place (think: Passover), being awkwardly shut up with “It's for Angela.” At a later event during the story, Mother graciously offers to channel Angela for individual messages. While Rachel would define herself as a modern, western, woman with the ability to stand up for herself, she comes to find that she can learn from Swati. And Swati makes changes in her own life based in part on how she views her daughter in law and son’s relationship. In an interview, Mr. Theroux stated that 60% of the book is autobiographical, and how can it not be as it seemed he was witnessing my childhood, the various aspects of growing up under Mother's watchful and seemingly controlling nature, observations that were spot on. Meanwhile, “Translation” and “Moving Sale” experiment ambitiously with form, re-imagining the structures of the sestina and the pantoum by replacing moments of pure repetition with Portuguese translations. Additionally, though I was initially skeptical of Lima’s enjambment choices, I came to appreciate how her collection-wide style of short broken lines seems to evoke the effort it takes to learn and speak English as a second language (with her own language itself remaining ever graceful and poignant):

I'd recommend this book to everyone but as it's pure art and some may or might not understand the concept of the book! Mother, already an “ancient fossil” when the book opens in Cape Cod, where her seven children were raised (eight, if you count Angela, the daughter who died just days old, but who Mother calls her Angel, full of advice and wisdom)—is the formidable matriarch of this latest novel by Paul Theroux. Let go of your idea of dysfunctional family and get ready for a vitriolic blast from first to last. Mother is 82 or so when the novel opens, and her seven living children—two are writers—are a product of her conniving, belittling, manipulative, wrathful-deity ways. Mother Land is as much a treatise on what it means to belong to oneself as it is a story of two women from opposing cultures.... [The] women discover they are not so different and learn from one another a secret to happiness that surprises them both.” — San Francisco Book Review

Julia’s uninvolved husband and the father of her two children. Paul only appears on the phone to Julia, making excuses for why he cannot help with the children, until the final episode of series three. I’ve been reading a lot of character driven stories this month and I am getting kind of bored of them. So unfortunately I may have read this one at the wrong time. If you have any good plot driven stories, please let me know!

Wilson, Benji (7 November 2017). "Motherland reaches similar comedy heights to Fawlty Towers". The Telegraph . Retrieved 8 November 2017.a b Martinson, Jane (6 October 2016). "BBC's Motherland to return as full series". The Guardian . Retrieved 25 October 2016. Franqui doesn’t demonize either Indian customs or American ones. Yes, Swati inserts herself into Rachel’s life in Mumbai, but she’s accepting when Rachel drinks alcohol, smokes cigarettes, and associates with male friends. When Rachel calls Swati by her first name and not an honorific for mother-in-law, Swati holds her tongue: when Swati was a young bride, she could never have gotten away with any of these things, nor would she ever even have thought of doing them in the first place. This realization is what convinces Swati to divorce her husband, Vinod, after forty years.

Let me also clear that “𝙎𝙡𝙪𝙢𝙙𝙤𝙜 𝙈𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙤���𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙚” DOES NOT DEFINE INDIA WHICH IS MADE BY A BRITISH DIRECTOR.

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I liked the ending? I liked that Swati and Rachel went on to live independently and remained friends, but this is pretty much the only part of the book I enjoyed. Engaging... [Rachel and Swati’s] credible learning from each other make this a worthy tale of bridging a cultural divide.” — Publishers Weekly



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