I started
Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters back in late October. I read it for a week or two and I was enjoying it, but this was during the period when I was about six weeks out from my move with a vacation to Italy right in the middle and I was just terrible about reading. As readers of this blog will know, I measure my reading in years. I suppose many people do. I have a sort of tradition at the end of the year, when I allow myself to give up on books that I started at some point during the year and never got around to finishing. Some books don't even make it to this stage, I'll just abandon them outright, but this annual reset keeps me from feeling the weight of unfinished books hanging over me indefinitely. The process for me formally abandoning a book was to mark it abandoned in Goodreads (I've stopped using Goodreads this year and moved things over to
The Story Graph, so I guess now it will happen there) and to either get rid of the book or, in some cases, to return it to my shelf (usually with the bookmark still in place, so I guess these cases aren't really total abandonments).
Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters would have been destined for this fate except that, surprisingly enough, my Women In Translation book club selected it as our next book. (I was the person who added it to the list we voted on, but I didn't really expect it to win.) And so I kept it out, knowing I needed to return to it in time for our next meeting in early March. Last Thursday I did return to it and I finished it this past Wednesday.
Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters is the second Brazilian novel I've read, but in many ways it felt like the first. (The actual first was Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart, which I read some 20 years ago.) It spans 500 years of Brazilian history told, as the title suggests, matrilineally. Each chapter picks up the story of a new mother/daughter, following them down through the generations, and through their lives and experiences we get a full history of Brazil since the arrival of Europeans. But along with the story of the country, we get intimate portraits of these women some with wonderfully long lives, some with tragically short; some wealthy, some poor, some enslaved; some urban, some rural. I believe Silveira attempted to capture every angle of Brazilian life, every corner of the country as much as could possibly be done in under 400 pages. It's an impressive feat.
Before my return to
Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, and while also in the midst of reading two other books, I took a little break and read Jasmine Guillory's latest book,
Drunk on Love. It delivered in all the ways I expected it to – funny, relaxing, with a satisfying end. Jasmine Guillory's books always include plenty of food, and this one – set in Napa – left me craving arancini and wine. Her books are escapist for me, not just because of the romance but every character is out there doing their best. Friends are supportive in exactly the ways they should be. Family dramas exist, but are resolved or turn out to be one big misunderstanding. The conflicts that arise loom large for the characters, but are on some level trivial and you know they'll be worked out. I never knew this was something I was looking for in books – and, to be honest, most of the time it's not. But now and then it can be pure pleasure to read something that's comforting, that you know will resolve in the way that you want it to, and that will make you laugh along the way.
