Problematis matres

Recent weeks have seen me plough through a substantial number of novels.  I use the word plough advisedly because like all books some have found greater favour with me than others.  I have compiled the list of books to blog and grouped them by theme.  Often the theme is an expediently broad one but here I choose two titles where the mother figure is a principal member of the cast.

In Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, which made it to the Man Booker Short List 2016, two women arrive in a Spanish village - a dreamlike place caught between the desert and the ocean - seeking medical advice and salvation. One suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair, her legs unusable. The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother's illness.

Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat and the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr Gomez. Hot Milk is a melee of violent desires, primal impulses, and surreally persuasive internal logic. Examining female rage and sexuality, the novel explores the strange and monstrous nature of motherhood, testing the bonds of parent and child to breaking point.

Searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront and reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity. 

"My mother is sleeping under a mosquito net in the next room. Soon she will wake up and shout, 'Sofia, get me a glass of water', and I will get her water and it will be the wrong sort of water."

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout was also a Man Booker nominee appearing on the Long List for 2016.  My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author demonstrates how a spell in hospital which provides abundant time for reflection and introspection sheds light on the universal and often complex relationship between mother and daughter.

The central character is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Her unexpected visit forces Lucy to confront the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of her life: her impoverished childhood in Amgash, Illinois, her escape to New York and her desire to become a writer, her faltering marriage, her love for her two daughters.  Knitting this narrative together is the narrative voice of Lucy herself: astutely observant, deeply human, and memorable. In My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author shows how a routine hospital visit can throw up an opportunity to shed light on the universal and often painfully complex relationship between mother and daughter.