Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

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The mother of a boy in the same year group as the other parents'. She also comes on the school trip, but gets confrontational with Liz when Liz accuses her son for being racist towards Meg's daughter Jade. Swati slept with her best friend’s son she slept with a man that is the same age as her own son and they grew up together and then she slept with him and she hooked up with a boy who was practically like her own son I do not understand what that was at all what she whyyyy????? A strange book, it made me feel slightly uneasy - like listening in to a conversation I shouldn’t have been privy to.

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. Mother Land focuses on motherhood and immigration. I noticed that it's written in first person and from the perspective of and immigrant mother to an American child. 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. 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. Julia meets a former colleague, Caroline, outside the gates of her children's primary school. Caroline does not remember Julia. However, Julia is keen to impress her, so Julia becomes involved in a school fundraiser which Caroline is organising, despite Julia hating such things. Kevin becomes a "human cloakroom", wearing several coats simultaneously, causing him to become uncomfortably hot. Liz puts a great deal of alcohol in the punch. A "promise auction" leaves Amanda red-faced.

Swati is the last person Rachel Meyer expects to find at her front door in Mumbai. Swati is also the last person Rachel’s husband, Dhruv, expects to find at home after work one day. Swati, a native of Kolkata, is Dhruv’s mother and Rachel’s mother-in-law, and she’s moving in. So starts Leah Franqui’s novel, Mother Land, a story of trying to find oneself in another country and placing the success of that on another person.

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 a selfish, petty tyrant. 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 one hundred, her brood struggles with and among themselves to shed her viselike hold on them. Leah Franqui's Mother Land is a delightful exploration of cultural expectations and the way they shape identity. The basic set-up is simple. After meeting and marrying in New York, Rachel and Dhruv move to Mumbai. Dhruv grew up in Kolkata, so the move is a return home for him; for Rachel it's sudden immersion in an unfamiliar culture. To complicate matters, shortly after the couple's arrival, Swati, Dhruv's mother, shows up on their doorstep, announcing that she has left Dhruv's father and will be living with them. What follows is a fierce, if well-meant, battle of wills as Rachel and Swati each try to shape the other to meet cultural expectations.premise > book: The premise about 2 women carrying immense but incredibly unique cultural differences and colliding and this collide being conflicting and educational and beautiful and one-of-a-kind fascinating for the other and them (hopefully; presumably) accepting each other’s differences was more interesting than the way the author actually ended up carrying it out: