Mother Land: A Novel

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Back then the islets seemed like sailors, braving the immense savagery of the sea that darkened and swelled in winter, battering, overwhelming everything, sending thick sheens of spray into the air and threatening to tear down the foundations of the land, and rake out to the depths the thin soil, the grasses and the yellow cat’s ear flowers that sprouted in warmer months. It tangles with the knotted roots of sea grasses, and gently rolls across the seabed forgotten amphorae, coins, bejewelled crowns, the empty shells of crabs and limpets and the skulls of soldiers. Initially the pair of women are predictable in their actions and thoughts but it is not long before we see them each being affected by the other. Photograph: Steve McCurry/Reuters View image in fullscreen Paul Theroux … one example of how to cope with literary longevity.

His narrative is vivid and gripping, his characters rounded and human in a way “village literature” seldom achieves.Heartfelt, charming, deeply insightful and wise, Mother Land introduces us to two very different women from very different cultures .

I thought the alternating chapters between Rachel and her mother in law worked really well and helped me keep turning the pages. She has freelanced for The Guardian, BBC and Médecins Sans Frontières, and has chaired and spoken at science conferences. From this childhood where one might wear a dress of fall grass, cut ankles on witchgrass, and peer into a refrigerator to delineate a hummingbird from a moth; in the land of mothers, grandmothers, and their later lineal offspring, we come to terms with crossroads and swallows, rivers and oceans, and they lead us back home from which we began—the Motherland.

Maybe her most damaging characteristic is her ability to foster division among her six children (the seventh, Angela, died in infancy and is therefore venerated), whose squabbles, estrangements and reconciliations are constantly being reconfigured in new patterns. Upon meeting her now-husband Dhruv in a Manhattan bar, Rachel instantly fell in love with his boyish charm and assertiveness. Not that a woman shouldn’t lust after anyone at any age, but given the way this character developed, it was too much a flight of imagination. Mother/Land is restoring the world through the retelling of patterns passed woman to woman like songs to lips.

And Swati makes changes in her own life based in part on how she views her daughter in law and son’s relationship. Franqui, herself an American woman living in Mumbai with her Indian husband, takes a risk by alternating between Rachel’s perspective and Swati’s each time she starts a new chapter. One of them says the below statement and Rachel just sits and listens, no response, only "her face had drained of blood. Just as she’s barely getting acclimated to this new country and way of life her mother in law shows up saying she’s just left her husband and she’s here to stay forever. mae'r llyfryddiaeth wedi'i ddiweddaru yn dangos bod 'Our Mother's Land' yn parhau'n llyfr hanfodol ar hanes menywod yng Nghymru.

On the other hand it will also surely be required reading for everyone wanting original anthropological insights into the daily life and tensions of minorities in the Levant a generation ago.