Mother India

Relentlessly 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.|Tova Reich writes like no one else I know writing today (or yesterday). She is singular and superb.|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.|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.|Few contemporary writers are truly original. Tova Reich is one of them. Mother India is a stunning achievement.|

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.

|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.|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.|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.|A superbly written novel...incisive and unflinching.|Reich has an unusual imagination, a rich vocabulary…and a knack for story-telling.….This is a novel such as neither you nor I have ever read before.|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....Reich offers us her most poignant and astonishing novel to date.