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Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #88
Granta 88: Mothers
Collection & anthologies of various literacy from John MCGahern on his mother's struggle for health & happiness in Catholic Ireland, Alexander Fuller on bearing a child in Africa, Ryszard Kapuscinski on his memories of the Second World War plus writings from Edmund White, Paul Theroux, Jim Lewis and others.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
About the author
Ian Jack
141 books10 followersIan Jack is a British journalist and writer who has edited the Independent on Sunday and the literary magazine Granta and now writes regularly for The Guardian.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 5, 2019
What made her uncertain were the proper boundaries between children and adults, love and sex, work and play. p51 Edmund White The Merry Widow
A generous 4 for this laudable collection of essays, mostly about mothers, mostly difficult mothers.
It's a shame that this 'magazine of new writing' was not able to include more than 3 women. Everyone, at some point, has had a mother.
The essays that were included mollified me somewhat because most of them were unexpectedly fascinating, but the long photo essay of old objects, cramped and out of context, (sepia as I remember) puzzled me as to its thematic connection. Yet is this not how we tend to remember our mothers: labelling her quaint idiosyncrasies; relegating her as quickly as we can to the past, which in our brash youth we are certain we have overcome. No one is over-idealized or denigrated as much as mother in our nostalgic fabricating.
Jim Lewis was another puzzling inclusion. His essay on sleep put me to sleep. I'm not sure if this was his intention and although there is a profound connection between mothers and sleep, it was not elaborated here.
The essay on James Barrie, 'Never Neverland' by Rodrigo Fresan gave me the chills. With a mother like Barries, it amazes me to think on how he managed to turn his angst to delight. Peter Pan is perhaps the flip side of all caricature, the motherless child that rejects growing up. Now why is Wendy, the mother substitute for Peter and the lost boys, always so conveniently overlooked?
More interesting to me even were the comments on the act of reading:
Barrie opens books like windows...to let the light of a story into his gloomy life. p113
and he ponders " what happens when a book closes, when the story it tells is interrupted?" and "what the book's speed is: is it the author's speed as he was writing, or is it the speed readers reach as they read?" p117
The one story I cringed from just reading the title was How To Stop Your Mother-in-law from Drowning by Richard Beard. As I feared, it was full of cliches and mother-in-law jokes. The surprise was that the jokes were pretty funny and he makes some good points as he investigates the inbuilt unpopularity of the mother of the spouse.
The rest of the stories are more autobiographical, with a few wonderful photos to supplement each essay. Weep for Theroux; wonder at the same time if his compassionate genius owed a lot to his awful mum. Chimamanda Ndozi Adichie seems to have worked out a truce, but at what emotional cost? Even John McGahern in an idyllic setting has some issues, and Alexandra Fuller beats rather long about the bush before admitting motherhood to one of her roles.
The last story in the book concerns war and memory. It is a powerful refutation of the lets-just-carry-on with our stiff upper lips and revisionist histories.
For those who live through a war it is never over, not in an absolute way....p252
For the mothers that provide wars casualties and who are left to grieve, this is something worth working to change. The dynamics are universal and timeless. Much hinges on the respect we have for our own mothers and the mother of all, Mother Earth. Without that, as these essays indicate, we dont have much at all in the way of a solid base, and we will likely struggle all our lives to determine some kind of meaning to nurture our spirits in contradiction of our reality.
A generous 4 for this laudable collection of essays, mostly about mothers, mostly difficult mothers.
It's a shame that this 'magazine of new writing' was not able to include more than 3 women. Everyone, at some point, has had a mother.
The essays that were included mollified me somewhat because most of them were unexpectedly fascinating, but the long photo essay of old objects, cramped and out of context, (sepia as I remember) puzzled me as to its thematic connection. Yet is this not how we tend to remember our mothers: labelling her quaint idiosyncrasies; relegating her as quickly as we can to the past, which in our brash youth we are certain we have overcome. No one is over-idealized or denigrated as much as mother in our nostalgic fabricating.
Jim Lewis was another puzzling inclusion. His essay on sleep put me to sleep. I'm not sure if this was his intention and although there is a profound connection between mothers and sleep, it was not elaborated here.
The essay on James Barrie, 'Never Neverland' by Rodrigo Fresan gave me the chills. With a mother like Barries, it amazes me to think on how he managed to turn his angst to delight. Peter Pan is perhaps the flip side of all caricature, the motherless child that rejects growing up. Now why is Wendy, the mother substitute for Peter and the lost boys, always so conveniently overlooked?
More interesting to me even were the comments on the act of reading:
Barrie opens books like windows...to let the light of a story into his gloomy life. p113
and he ponders " what happens when a book closes, when the story it tells is interrupted?" and "what the book's speed is: is it the author's speed as he was writing, or is it the speed readers reach as they read?" p117
The one story I cringed from just reading the title was How To Stop Your Mother-in-law from Drowning by Richard Beard. As I feared, it was full of cliches and mother-in-law jokes. The surprise was that the jokes were pretty funny and he makes some good points as he investigates the inbuilt unpopularity of the mother of the spouse.
The rest of the stories are more autobiographical, with a few wonderful photos to supplement each essay. Weep for Theroux; wonder at the same time if his compassionate genius owed a lot to his awful mum. Chimamanda Ndozi Adichie seems to have worked out a truce, but at what emotional cost? Even John McGahern in an idyllic setting has some issues, and Alexandra Fuller beats rather long about the bush before admitting motherhood to one of her roles.
The last story in the book concerns war and memory. It is a powerful refutation of the lets-just-carry-on with our stiff upper lips and revisionist histories.
For those who live through a war it is never over, not in an absolute way....p252
For the mothers that provide wars casualties and who are left to grieve, this is something worth working to change. The dynamics are universal and timeless. Much hinges on the respect we have for our own mothers and the mother of all, Mother Earth. Without that, as these essays indicate, we dont have much at all in the way of a solid base, and we will likely struggle all our lives to determine some kind of meaning to nurture our spirits in contradiction of our reality.
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