The Rice Mother
Rani Manicka, 2002
Penguin Group USA
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142004548
Summary
Winner, 2003 Commonwealth Prize for Southeast Asia & South Pacific
At the age of fourteen, Lakshmi leaves behind her childhood among the mango trees of Ceylon for married life across the ocean in Malaysia, and soon finds herself struggling to raise a family in a country that is, by turns, unyielding and amazing, brutal and beautiful.
Giving birth to a child every year until she is nineteen, Lakshmi becomes a formidable matriarch, determined to secure a better life for her daughters and sons. From the Japanese occupation during World War II to the torture of watching some of her children succumb to life's most terrible temptations, she rises to face every new challenge with almost mythic strength.
Dreamy and lyrical, told in the alternating voices of the men and women of this amazing family, The Rice Mother gorgeously evokes a world where small pleasures offset unimaginable horrors, where ghosts and gods walk hand in hand. It marks the triumphant debut of a writer whose wisdom and soaring prose will touch readers, especially women, the world over (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Malaysia
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Commonwealth Award for South East Aisa and
Pacific Region
• Currently—London, UK; Malaysia
Rani Manicka is a novelist, born and educated in Malaysia and living in England. Infused with her own Sri Lankan Tamil family history, The Rice Mother is her first novel. It recently won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2003 for South East Asia and South Pacific region. It has been translated into 17 languages. Her second novel, Touching Earth, was published in 2005. Rani is also an economic graduate. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Manicka's luminous first novel is a multigenerational story about a Sri Lankan family in Malaysia. In the 1920s, Lakshmi is a bright-eyed, carefree child in Ceylon. But at 14, her mother marries her to Ayah, a 37-year-old rich widower living in Malaysia. When she arrives at her new home, she promptly discovers that Ayah is not rich at all, but a clerk who had borrowed a gold watch and a servant to trick Lakshmi's mother. Ayah is for the most part a decent man, however, and Lakshmi rallies and takes control of a sprawling household that soon includes six children of her own. There is a period of contented family life before WWII and the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, during which Lakshmi's eldest and most beautiful daughter, Mohini, is abducted and killed by Japanese soldiers. The family unravels as Ayah withdraws and Lakshmi falls prey to fits of rage. Mohini's twin brother, Lakshmnan, becomes a compulsive gambler, leaving his own wife and three children impoverished. The story is told through the shifting perspectives of different family members, including son Sevenese, who can see the dead; youngest daughter, Lalita, neither pretty nor gifted; Rani, Lakshmnan's fierce and beleaguered wife; and Lakshmnan's daughter, Dimple. Their voices are convincingly distinct, and the prismatic sketches form a cohesive and vibrant saga. Manicka can be a bit syrupy on the subjects of childhood and maternal love, but she also has a fine feeling for domestic strife and the ways in which grief permeates a household.
Publishers Weekly
When 14-year-old Lakshmi marries a widower of 37, she believes that she is leaving her Sri Lankan village for a life of luxury in Malaysia. Instead, she endures hardship and poverty, giving birth to six children in the years before the Japanese invasion of World War II. In this gripping multigenerational saga, the tumultuous history of Malaysia becomes the backdrop for Lakshmi's indomitable spirit. The barbarity of the Japanese, postwar prosperity, the bursting of the Southeast Asian financial bubble, the vice trades of opium, gambling, and sex-all take their toll on Lakshmi's children and grandchildren. However, while her husband and ultimately all of her children prove to be disappointments, Lakshmi continues to love them and do what's best for all of them, even if it seems cruel. First novelist Manicka's sympathetic portrait of this larger-than-life matriarch is based on her own grandmother. Her page-turner, narrated in turn by Lakshmi and various family members, is not only a portrait of one family but also a tantalizing glimpse of an unfamiliar world. Strongly recommended for most public libraries. —Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Library Journal
Graceful, engrossing, and peopled with memorable characters, this novel is sure to attract a wide audience. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
Loosely autobiographical, multigenerational first novel: exotic, sensual, sometimes sentimental, often searing, and ultimately universal in its depiction of an Indian family in Malaysia. It's 1931, and 14-year-old Lakshmi leaves Ceylon in an arranged marriage to the much older Ayah. When Ayah turns out to be not the rich businessman Lakshmi expected but a lowly clerk whose sweet, simple nature keeps him from professional advancement, bright and ambitious Lakshmi quickly takes charge of their financial and domestic affairs. By the time she's twenty she has six children whom she feeds, clothes, and educates with iron-willed devotion. There are the twins, brilliant oldest son Lakshmnan and his twin sister Mohini, with her otherworldly beauty; pretty Anna; the adventurous outsider Sevenese; Jeyan, who is perhaps not as simple-minded as everyone assumes; and the homely, shy Lalita. The children all remember their early years as close to idyllic. Then WWII breaks out. When Mohini is raped and killed by the Japanese (whom Manicka, with a loss of perspective, portrays as unrelentingly monsterlike), the family begins to fall apart. Lakshmi has fits of rage that approach madness, while Lakshmnan's early promise fizzles into dissolute gambling and an unhappy marriage (his wife is an almost cartoonish villain among otherwise highly nuanced characters). Except for the happily married Anna, life does not work out as Lakshmi planned for her children. Yet they all revere her, even Lakshmnan; and Ayah's gentle love provides an emotional ballast that Lakshmi does not understand until too late. Lakshmnan's daughter Dimple, whose beauty recalls Mohini, tape-records her aunts' and uncles' (as well as her parents' and grandparents') memories—and shifting perspectives—to preserve the family legacy for her own daughter. Toward the end Manicka falters, forcing the story of Dimple's unhappy marriage into plot manipulations that feel forced, but, still, the story's richness and careful accumulation of detail are reminiscent of a very different family chronicle, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Read this one slowly, to savor.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What was your favorite part of the birds'-nest story that introduced the novel? How did it echo throughout the novel? Give some examples.
2. Did you feel that the author's use of the first person was an effective way to tell this story? Why or why not?
3. Lakshmi says this of Mui Tsai: "I had found a friend, but it was the beginning of a lost friendship. If I had known then what I know now, I would have treasured her more. She was the only true friend I ever made." Discuss this passage and its implications. Do you think Lakshmi could have been a better friend to Mui Tsai? Why and how? Were there any authentic friendships between women in the novel?
4. Consider the scene in which Sevenese explains "Rice Mother" to Dimple, and tells her that Lakshmi is their family's Rice Mother. Give examples of how Lakshmi is a Rice Mother. Were there any other Rice Mothers in the novel? What about in your own life?
5. Rani Manicka filled her novel with symbolism and motifs. Name a few images that continually emerged—such as spiders, bamboo, and the colors black and red—and discuss what they might have meant. Did they represent different things to the various members of your reading group? What does this richness of symbols say about the novel?
6. hysically, Dimple is described as being almost a mirror image of Mohini. How do you think this altered the course of her life? What do you think drew her to Sevenese, and, for that matter, to Luke?
7. Which characters resonated most powerfully for you? Were there other characters that you would have liked to know more about? Why?
8. "It is true that your mind can float out and hover over you when it can no longer endure what is happening to your body." Dimple says this as Luke rapes her. How does this one line illuminate one of the novel's themes? What do you think the author is saying about grief, and coping with tragedy? In what ways do the characters escape their grief? Do any face it head-on?
9. What do you see in the future for Nisha? Do you think she will become a Rice Mother? Why? Has the author left any clues for the reader?
10. How resilient is the human spirit? Does time heal all wounds? Do we do the best with the skills we've been given? In your opinion, could the lives of the characters in The Rice Mother have been any different? Or, even if Mohini had lived, would they have fallen prey to the same vices that consumed them in the end?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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