Mother for Dinner

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However, toward the end the grotesquerie got just a bit much for me and rather obscured what Auslander was trying to say. Diving into the new lives of the 12 siblings and their conflicting views on their cultural heritage, this story gets chaotic and can be sometimes hilarious.

As in the brilliant Hope: A Tragedy, Auslander uses an outrageous premise to illustrate what he sees as the dangers of relying for one’s identity on a sense of both current and historic oppression and injustice.

really interesting concept, i liked when they talked about the history of Can Am’s and how contradicting they all are. and 2nd -go at it -(argue) -- 7th said 2nd MUST eat mama -- he doesn't care if he converted to Judaism.

A deliciously appalling satire on the hazards of tribalism, religion and tradition – and eating your relatives. In his new novel, Shalom Auslander applies his satirical scalpel to the delicate issues of identity politics. It means he reads a lot of work with a lot of hyphens, and if they are published Time magazine hails them with “It was about time…” The reason for his grievance is that Seventh was born into the most shunned, marginalised and feared of all minorities.

Auslander has published a collection of short stories, Beware of God and a memoir, Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir. Having disposed of a mother and walked away from a family - and possibly a lucrative future - there was much in here I could relate to, and a massive amount that I could not.

if you are a chain breaker in YOUR family -- (hard knock truth) -- you just might be seen as a NOBODY! Using this large family he shows that in an effort to label everyone, individuals become more isolated. The novel does use our language of eating to great effect: Mudd will torment bullies by asking if they can have them for dinner, or telling children she’d like to gobble them up). Of practical concern, she’s six-foot-two and weighs over thirty stone – even divided up between Seventh and his eleven brothers, that's a lot of red meat.I re-read Faulkner after reading Auslander, and it’s a far funnier, sadder and more profound novel than my younger self’s memory of it. Beyond the practical, Seventh struggles with the sense of guilt and responsibility he feels – to his mother, to his people and to his unique cultural heritage. I loved the first third of the book, stuck with the middle part to see what would happen and got bored with the final third.

The tale is, of course, a parody with each sibling’s (and therefore society's) traits in receipt of satire. Cuando la madre fallece, sus 13 hijos deberán comérsela para cobrar la herencia, siguiendo con las costumbres de su pueblo. Auslander uses Mother for Dinner to make serious points about everything from the blandness of modern society to religious extremism .The matriarch of the persecuted group the Am-Cams has died leaving the children to dispose of the body through traditional means. Auslander, in interview, described his rejected ultra-orthodox upbringing as being raised “like veal,” and this novel captures and analyses the ambiguities around what one is given and what one is offered magnificently. I've not read anything by Auslander before this, and this is definitely not what I thought it was - I guess I thought social parody by way of body horror and straightforward storytelling - but I find that I have very much enjoyed being push-pulled in verious directions by this mulling, this thought experiment, this conversation amongst rabbis, wherein nothing is solved, nothing is concluded, we simply lay out various points for consideration without nailing them down too tightly or judging them without examining their various facets.