Mother Land: A Novel

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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. Throughout the book, Rachel (protagonist) was portrayed as “an independent and loving spirit with a curious mind.” Jays Mutter ist wunderbar. Für ihre Kinder war sie eine liebevolle Mutter, die ihre Familie zusammengehalten hat. Auch wenn das Geld meistens knapp war, haben sie und ihr Mann es geschafft, ihren Kindern alles zu geben was sie sich wünschten. Die Familie hielt zusammen und die Kinder haben die Eltern mit kleineren Jobs unterstützt. Und nach dem Vorbild ihrer Eltern haben auch sie Familien gegründet und leben dieses Vorbild weiter.

Heartfelt, charming, deeply insightful and wise, Mother Land introduces us to two complex women from very different cultures . . . who maybe have more in common than they realize. Critical Praise 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. 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. Mother is an incredible cheapskate. On the other hand, she expects the best. Jay brings her a pineapple as a bribe at one point, which actually works as she's delighted. The opening quote has to do with her reminiscence of Fred's enrolling her in the Fruit of the Month Club. So, what she really meant was more along the lines of “I expect a nice piece of fruit!”After losing her mother's help with childcare, Julia faces a far bigger role in her children's lives than before. She initially tries to become part of the Alpha Mums group, but realises she has more in common with parenting "misfits" Liz and Kevin. She has two children: Ivy and James, and is married to Paul. Heartfelt, charming, deeply insightful and wise, Mother Land introduces us to two complex women from very different cultures . . . who maybe have more in common than they realize.

In this book, we follow the journey of two women starting over in their own way. Rachel, a young Jewish American, has recently moved to Mumbai, India with her new husband. And Swati, Rachel’s new Mother-in-Law, has just left her husband and moved in with her son. The two women could not be more different and clash early on as they both have their own ways of running a home. But as this beautiful dual narrative book so eloquently displays, they are experiencing the same things, just in their own ways. But it’s also a phenomenally strange novel, maybe one of the most repetitive I’ve ever read, with words (indirection, teasing, frugal), accusations and anecdotes recurring to the point of fatigue. Is this an echo of the nature of family life, of our ability to nurse grudges and fuel hobbyhorses, or just writerly indiscipline? Is Theroux evoking a son’s obsessive quest for his mother’s love, or is he fantastically unaware of her as a person who exists outside of him? Mother Land, despite its author’s fondness for an anthropological stance, does not allow us to see: but perhaps it never could. An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. 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 ReviewI'd recommend this book to everyone but as it's pure art and some may or might not understand the concept of the book! To those in her Cape Cod town, Mother is an exemplar of piety, frugality, and hard work. To her husband and seven children, she is the selfish, petty tyrant of Mother Land. She excels at playing her offspring against each other. Her favorite, Angela, died in childbirth; only Angela really understands her, she tells the others. The others include the officious lawyer, Fred; the uproarious professor, Floyd; a pair of inseparable sisters whose devotion to Mother has consumed their lives; and JP, the narrator, a successful writer whose work she disparages. As she lives well past the age of 100, her brood struggles with and among themselves to shed her viselike hold on them.

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): Is the author, publisher, editor and everyone else associated with this disgraceful book unaware that India was RIPPED APART during the British Raj?

Wilson, Benji (7 November 2017). "Motherland reaches similar comedy heights to Fawlty Towers". The Telegraph . Retrieved 8 November 2017. I have known the confusion and pain of moving. We moved my senior year in high school. I always joke that it took me ten years to recover from the devastation but it’s hardly a joke. My life changed and derailed in mysterious and beautiful ways that I still feel 25 years later. And then, later in life as a newly married woman, I moved again with my husband and our three kiddos. From a city to the country, from the sea to the mountains, away from family and friends. It wasn’t to a foreign land as described in this book, but to me it might as well have been.