Mother Land: A Novel

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Eventually, in 1970, unable to take the poverty, local violence and minority status any longer, the family flies out to a new life in Australia and Dimitri forgets most of his Greek and his Turkish. They could offer their wines, carefully paired with the cheese and other tasty treats, and the farm would get an epicurean reputation. Is the author, publisher, editor and everyone else associated with this disgraceful book unaware that India was RIPPED APART during the British Raj?

I fell, hard, for the boy under the drain pipe, the whale’s word for world, the slapping tails of children, the hummingbird in the refrigerator, the cathechist with knife in her teeth, the wife spraying breast milk at the breakfast table, the woodchuck too busy for crucifixions, the piano baptized in molasses, the parakeet’s family jewels, the leathered and lathered Doc Martened butch leading her woman around the dance floor, the lightning that converses with fireflies, and everyone, everything that busts out of the gamebag and into Cheryl Savageau’s poetry. Mother/land, winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize, is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker’s relationship to place, others and self. Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), about his relationship with VS Naipaul, may be only half-true, but it’s also one of the most truthful portraits of the challenges and dangers of friendship. It led to the novel meandering a bit, and that’s a pity because there’s so much to delight in otherwise. 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 .In this familial place, where one haggles over Memere’s house dress, combs her Mama’s hair as if brushing a bird’s wing, employs mother-of-pearl to fill the black hole of her absence leaving buxom hills bare of trees.

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. Not only does it lay bare the cultural divide between people but it gets you thinking about how many ways we constantly experience a "cultural divide. I enjoyed the examination of biases on Indian culture and the descriptions of the country from a Western perspective and how they differ from that of a person born and raised in India. She is a Puerto Rican Jewish American who lives in Mumbai with her Kolkata-born husband, and her perspective informs her latest novel. The sun licks the horizon, painting the sea a misty mauve on which sparkles an oily gold suffused with shades of oyster pink and bronze.

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. Mother Land is a minutely remembered description of a childhood on an Aegean island, marked by the furious opposition of hostile yet neighbouring cultures. They also tackle the idealised images of respectable Welsh women in periodicals and the tragic reality of those who took their own lives as well as showing us the transgressive actions of suffrage rebels.