Mother Land: A Novel

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The goats were out of the barn, picking their way around everything, displaying a calm lack of concern that disappeared when Flora got out of the car and started shouting for Eric. Franqui paints Rachel and Swati as open-minded characters from different backgrounds who get off to a rocky start but ultimately forge a friendship — with plenty of vicissitudes along the way. While Rachel’s digressive, dishy narration and keen eye for cultural details contrast with her initial bumbling, Franqui smartly shows how Rachel recognizes her limits. Rachel, an American, marries Dhruv, an Indian expat, because he provides the decisiveness that she's always lacked in her life. Westridge made a first-rate pinot noir and Flora thought she’d contact Fain, smooth out any remaining bad feelings.

A delightful tragi-comic novel, primarily about a mother/daughter relationship (hence the title) and also about coming of age and disillusionment . Even her late husband, whose death kickstarts the novel, was so alienated from the reality of his life that he developed an alter ego, the minstrel in blackface who was the subject of Theroux’s short story Mr Bones. The novel is a quick read, driven by a plot that will pique readers’ curiosity about how Rachel and Swati’s disagreements, large and small, will resolve . The resolution is equally unsatisfying-it wraps up super fast with a sense of "oh well" from all parties who end up back where they started, happy with their ends, it nothing actually resolved.Mother Land is a minutely remembered description of a childhood on an Aegean island, marked by the furious opposition of hostile yet neighbouring cultures. Savageau’s “unhistory” tells the stories of her people without privileging the moment of contact with Europe as the defining moment for viewing the culture. But as this beautiful dual narrative book so eloquently displays, they are experiencing the same things, just in their own ways.

mae'r llyfryddiaeth wedi'i ddiweddaru yn dangos bod 'Our Mother's Land' yn parhau'n llyfr hanfodol ar hanes menywod yng Nghymru. Which is exactly the point: Theroux’s great hurts and rages may be difficult to behold but they are nothing if not readable. Let me also clear that “𝙎𝙡𝙪𝙢𝙙𝙤𝙜 𝙈𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙚” DOES NOT DEFINE INDIA WHICH IS MADE BY A BRITISH DIRECTOR. 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.

Told in dual POVs of both Rachel and her mother in law, Swati, we are present when Swati shows up one day to live with Rachel and her husband Dhruv. They examine how women carved out space within movements such as temperance and track the fluctuating fortunes of women's employment and domestic life from the Great War to the eve of the Second World War. The everyday challenges faced by Rachel, a main character in Leah Franqui’s second novel, Mother Land, may resonate with anyone who has spent considerable time in a new country or even in a new community. 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.

But the ex-pat American’s sense of adventure is sorely tested when her mother-in-law, Swati, suddenly arrives from Kolkata—a thousand miles away—alone, with an even more shocking announcement: she’s left her husband of more than forty years and moving in with them. She has freelanced for The Guardian, BBC and Médecins Sans Frontières, and has chaired and spoken at science conferences. He’s frightened… He wants to have what his reflection has and yet still retain the essence of his self.

For example, Swati is unyielding in her view that a proper household needs both a full time cleaner and a cook. This technique allows the author to illustrate the significant gap between Swati’s worldview and Rachel’s, though a reader who shares Swati’s Marwari heritage — and, to be clear, this reader does not — may not find all of Swati’s inner monologues entirely plausible . English communes with Portuguese, shaping a language that is musical and enchanting, though not without tension. This may be one of the best literary depictions of New England to date, certainly the finest one to challenge whatever is new and English about the place. Early in the book, I wondered, for example, whether a Marwari woman who’d lived her entire life in India would really describe her new American daughter-in-law as “slightly ethnic” when she turned out to be an olive-skinned brunette rather than a stereotypical blonde.