Matriarch of Malaysia

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Unlike fellow former British colonies India and Pakistan, Malaysia has yet to produce a Vikram Seth or an Arundhati Roy. There has been no writer of international stature, or even a literary canon—in Bahasa or English—that one could call Malaysian. The Rice Mother, a delicious fictional cocktail packed with Malaysian flavors, may finally put the country on the global publishing map. Plainly, debut novelist Rani Manicka has studied other Asia-themed best sellers such as Wild Swans and The Joy Luck Club to produce a family saga centered on the tempestuous relationships between mothers and their children. Her central female character undergoes horrible suffering but triumphs in such a way that professors will undoubtedly be including Rice Mother on the reading list for Gender Empowerment 101. But Rice Mother is more than a sarong saga. Its characters are original, its canvas broad, and Manicka's radiant prose brings out all the dark lushness of her ultimately tragic tale. Manicka's Malaysia is an exotically magical land, where ghosts and gods walk together hand in hand.

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The novel begins in pre-World War II Ceylon, when the 14-year-old Lakshmi leaves her family and moves to rural Kuantan with her new husband, Ayah. Lakshmi bears six children, and the narrative voice soon jumps from Lakshmi to her children, who paint a divergent and complex portrait of their mother. Daughter Anna recounts how Lakshmi stood up to the Japanese invaders, started a business and hid her earnings, coated with bird droppings, at the top of a palm tree. "The Japanese made us all very resourceful," she relates, "but Mother was an undefeatable force." Sevenese, Lakshmi's son, sees a very different character. "I look at my mother with horrified fascination," he soliloquizes. "Material ambition is the compulsion that drives her. Is it possible, I think to myself, that she does not know how ugly a beast she clasps so close to her breast?" After the Japanese rape and murder one of the daughters, the family starts to drift apart. Lakshmi grows into a formidable matriarch, towering over her scattered, resentful clan, eventually becoming the rice mother of the title: "The Giver of Life … In Bali her spirit lives in effigies made out of sheaves of rice … She is the keeper of dreams. Look carefully and you will see, she sits on her wooden throne holding all our hopes and dreams in her strong hands."

The Rice Mother is at its most poignant when Lakshmi loses power over her brood. Her granddaughter Dimple marries Luke, a rich Japanese-Chinese businessman in Kuala Lumpur. Their romance starts off passionately, but Luke's eye wanders and their union turns into a frosty farce. Luke pays a waiter to sleep with his wife and Dimple complies, hoping the assignation will lead to divorce. To her horror she finds she has stepped into her husband's new kinky obsession. Luke and Dimple's twisted relationship provides startling scenes that save the novel from reading like it's been cooked up from a best-seller recipe book. Some might feel uncomfortable with the way U.K.-based Manicka has exoticized Malaysia to woo Western readers, but if you have no hang-ups, you'll find The Rice Mother a beautiful read.