Mother India Tova Reich is a fiction book that brings together character, conflict, and storytelling. It may appeal to readers looking for a character, conflict, and storytelling reading experience.
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Literary, lyrical, and cuttingly satiric, Mother India is a brilliantly original novel about Jews who go to India to find transformation and eternal release from the sufferings of life. Narrated in luminous prose by Meena, a Jewish American lesbian who has claimed India as her home, the novel is vividly populated by the darkly comic universe of three generations of women along with other family members, as well as by the Indians whose world they seek to penetrate.
There is Meena’s religiously observant mother, Ma, whose desire to remove herself from the wheel of life plays out in a Faulknerian funeral procession and cremation on the banks of the holy river Ganges; Meena’s daughter, Maya, a misunderstood child coming of age in an emotionally treacherous household; her ex-wife, Geeta, a privileged and hedonistic Indian woman who enters their world with devastating consequences; Meena's twin brother, Shmelke, a charismatic rabbi turned guru and international fugitive; and the Indian servant, Manika, whose loyalty to the family both sustains and shackles them.
ldentifying with the humanity of its characters, the reader is drawn into a vast, tragicomic, and fascinating epic, Homeric in scope, drama, discovery, and surprise. Universal yet intimate, brutal yet tender, satiric yet sympathetic, Mother India evokes reactions—intellectual, emotional, visceral—that are complex, even contradictory, containing the might and bite that our current cultural hubris and self-involvement deserve.
In Mother India , Reich offers us her most poignant and astonishing novel to date.
ReviewRelentlessly daring and stylistically hypnotic, Mother India from its earliest passages releases imaginative floods of extravagant pageantry―the turbulent sounds and smells and colors of the Varanasi ghats seem to float up from the page to dizzy the senses. And yet bloody contemporary headlines are also in the mix: the jihadist bombing of Mumbai. In this, her newest novel―passionate and hilarious and wildly original―Tova Reich dazzlingly surpasses even herself. (Cynthia Ozick award-winning author of Foreign Bodies )
Tova Reich writes like no one else I know writing today (or yesterday). She is singular and superb. (James Morris Editor of the Wilson Quarterly)
Within each surging, antic, visceral scene, rendered with ferocious specificity, Reich, on the same frequency as Cynthia Ozick, maintains the focus of a sharpshooter, targeting the power of the guru, the corruption of faith, the hubris of do-gooders, epic poverty, sexual violence, and life’s endless cycle of sorrows. Reich’s saga of family, loss, and the search for enlightenment is unrelenting in its invention, jolting clarity, dark absurdity, and deep compassion. (Donna Seaman Booklist (Starred Review) )
Sensual, satiric, and deeply reflective, Mother India is Tova Reich at her most provocative and wise. "Nobody comes to India and is not in some way changed," her main character tells us; nobody can read a Reich novel and not be utterly transformed. (Tara Ison author of A Child out of Alcatraz, a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Rockaway, featured as one of the “Best Books of Summer” in O, The Oprah Magazine )
Few contemporary writers are truly original. Tova Reich is one of them. Mother India is a stunning achievement. (Howard Norman author of My Darling Detective )
Mother India is brilliantly allusive, boldly irreverent, and mordantly funny. Tova Reich once again lifts her woman's
naked voice, this time to situate three generations of strong-minded heroines amidst the rickshaws, ashrams and cremation pyres of Varanasi and Mumbai, home to American Jews and Israelis, firewalkers and gurus. (Ilana Kurshan author of the 2018 Sami Rohr award-winning memoir If All the Seas Were Ink )
The endlessly brilliant and inventive Tova Reich has written a totally unexpected yet deeply characteristic novel. Mother India is the story of three generations of Israeli Jewish women in India―the imperious Ma; her daughter the gay activist Meena; and her radical activist granddaughter Maya. Each is committed to a series of quests―for a child’s admission to a good college, for a good death, for a lost daughter, for spiritual release―in which the traditions and values of Judaism and India inter-assimilate. The book is at once fantastical in the magic transformations of its characters and grittily realistic in rendering the shocks of Indian life. Though Mother India, like all Reich’s work, is richly witty it is also deeply philosophical in its examination of exactly what holds us to life, a question made exigent by its Indian setting. (Judith Plotz Professor Emerita of English, George Washington University )
Powerful, evocative and daring, Mother India is a hypnotic tale of family, culture and identity, a compassionate portrayal of the ties that bind us then ultimately set us free. Reich’s language is resonant and sensorial, her characters vivid and memorable. An unflinching, often hilarious novel that manages to be both political and personal, while daring to explore some universal truths of our humanity. (Jaimee Wriston Colbert author of Vanishing Acts and Wild Things, 2017 CNY Book Award in Fiction, and the 2018 International Book Award in Fiction-Short Stories. )
From the value placed on motherhood in orthodox Jewish and Indian traditions to Meena and her twin brother’s dynamic, Reich juxtaposes unexpected elements of faith, society, and personal identity to harrowing effect. (Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers Foreword Reviews )
A superbly written novel...incisive and unflinching. (Howard Freedman J. The Jewish News of Northern California )
Book DescriptionA NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST
Follows three generations of Jewish women seeking transformation in India.
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