Mother for Dinner

Product Information

This review is making no sense - I can do better -should be able to do better -- but my god -- I can't get the visuals out of my head yet. Ważne miejsce w tej opowieści odgrywają rzeczywiste, a nie tylko literackie postaci - aktor Jack Nicholson oraz producent samochodów, Henry Ford.

In this book, he pursues another version of the same theme: the intolerable weight of history, of its deadening solemnity, and the individual’s rage to throw it off. Of course, any of my criticisms could be taken as proof that the author has achieved what he intended but he really was trying too hard towards the end of the story. The book runs on one long chapter with breaks, flashbacks, and background stories of Seventh in one long rhythm - this allows Auslander to properly set the stage for us, and I thoroughly enjoy every bits of the narration.The family have all tried to assimilate to being “American” in different ways, and part of the family mythos is that of Julius, who came from the unspecified Old World and worked in the Ford Factory, with its “Americanization” programme; here turned into the horrors of a pageant involving the immigrants voluntarily going into “the Melting Pot. He struggled with his editing job in a publishing office, reading stories after stories of people crawling back into their boxes (So-and-So-and-So American, Such-and-Such Lesbian, etc.

The story centered on Seventh Seltzer, the (you guessed it) seventh kid of an apparently last Cannibal-American family living in Brooklyn. In his new novel, Shalom Auslander applies his satirical scalpel to the delicate issues of identity politics. Everyone else was climbing into their boxes, writing Keep Out on the outside and sealing themselves up inside. In 1914, Julius Seltzer left the paradisiacal “Old Country” with his sister Julia, who pretended to be his wife and traveled with him to Detroit to work for Henry Ford. Though well-written and humorous, I feel the ability to enjoy this book is dependent on how much casual bigotry you can stomach before it stops feeling like satire and starts feeling excessive.Superficially it’s about families and inheritance but each family member is a microcosm of today’s society and the author poses questions about religion, identity, immigration, ethnicity and minorities. This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions. Their most sacred rites are proscribed by law (the first rule of Cannibal life, we’re told, is “NO COPS”), the media stereotypes them with comical images of bones through noses and bubbling pots, and their history is one of persecution, marginalisation and pursuit by torch-wielding mobs. His mother's last wish is for her children to Consume her, and Seventh was torn between fulfilling his obligation to his people and finally break free from the tradition and identity that he had never wanted. Now that I've gotten over the SHOCK of what it is -- my feeling is -- I'd see the deeper meaning --if I did read it again.

Even in death she is singularly vindictive and sarcastic: you know from the outset somebody will be tasked with the derriere. His mother always taught him he was a link in a chain, thousands of people long, stretching back hundreds of years. A myth about their establishment in the USA is created, embellished and nurtured – by no-one more so than Mudd, monstrous matriarch of a Can-Am family and a parody of every over-zealous orthodoxy, who “loved her people, so much so that, as a matter of pride, she despised all others.Författaren själv växte upp i Monsey, New York, där många ortodoxa judar bor, och det märks att hans bakgrund varit viktig för berättelsen. Esta é a história de uma família canibal americana, os Seltzers , que quando a mãe está a morrer , são confrontados com o seu ultimato no leito de morte : se quiserem receber a vossa herança, têm todos de me comer quando eu morrer. She expects her 12 children, who are likely the last of the Cannibal kind, to carry on the tradition of eating her corpse after her death. As part of the (deliberate quotation marks) “journey,” we learn a great deal about the fractious family dynamic.

Using this large family he shows that in an effort to label everyone, individuals become more isolated. Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the traditions of the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother’s last moments, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: ‘Eat me’.Identity had always been a prison he longed to escape – white, black, brown, American, European, Russian, male, female, straight, gay, They, Them, atheist, monotheist, polytheist – the ever-growing list of cell-blocks from which there was no release. 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.