Customer Reviews

My Mother Never Dies

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I must admit that I have to struggle to find anything positive to write about "My Mother Never Dies", but that may just be me. Throughout the book, I maintained hope that there would be something redeeming. It never happened. These snippets of the worst examples of mother/daughter relationships and humanity in general just kept coming, each either equally bad or worse than the last. I have to wonder why someone would choose this subject matter. Oh yes, shock value, and it does have plenty of that. I usually read for pleasure though, and entertainment, and I would not use either of these words to describe this book.

The author, Claire Castillon, does have her own, not totally unappealing style, though I found the sentences broken and difficult to follow at times, possibly due to translation to English. I would consider reading her work again if on other, more pleasant, subject matter.

If you are seeking an off-beat, shocking, book of short, easy-to-read stories, you may consider giving this a try. But be forewarned, it is not a "feel good" accounting of mother and daughter relationships. I came away with a sense of great gratitude that neither my mother, nor any women that I have known, vaguely resembled any of those in this book. Maybe that was her goal.

Edit: In fairness, the one star would be for this books subject matter. As a writer, I would give her three.

Here we have every kind of bad mother cliche you can think of. There is the pill-popping mother, the mother who overlooks incest, the mother obsessed with appearances, the mother who refuses to act like an adult. There are a few messed up daughters as well. A lot of these stories are extreme cases of the conflicts every family experiences from time to time. Others are just strange.

I suppose there are people who will find all this melodrama fascinating. I wasn't really very interested in it.

These short, sharp stories are almost a sucker punch to the images of the glowing mom, or the yummy mummy, or the perfectly happy mother-daughter pairs, the ones who refer to themselves as best friends. Castillon captures women's ambivalence about parenthood, even hatred of it, as well as the complexity of being a daughter with tight prose that makes you both long for more to each story, and thrilled at the exquisiteness packed into each one. Chilling and snappy, and nothing like what you'll see in the tabloids.

My Mother Never Dies by Claire Castillon is a collection of quirky short stories dealing with mother/daughter relationships. Not the typical feel good type material (which in my mind made these stories much more interesting and thought provoking). I liked the short story format and the way a story or two can be digested in one sitting. Then the reader is released so to speak and can go about his or her day and think about what was read. I am still thinking...these stories have a way of tumbling around in one's mind long after being read.

Claire Castillon is a very good writer. She presents a disturbing vignette for the reader to ponder. The subject matter may be a bitter pill to swallow but it goes down smoothly with her excellent writing to ease it on it's way.

Unusual subject matter on a sometimes trite topic made this book stand out. Yes...it was dark, it was troubling, but isn't life? A thorough examination of a subject can cover so many different aspects. I found it refreshing that this writer choose to look at all parts of a subject instead of sticking with one or two perhaps more palatable points of view.

This book was excellently written. Each word fit, each story was moving in its own way. The layout of where each story fit in the book was appropriate, also. I just found the book to be *so* heavy that it was hard for me to enjoy. It put me in a very strange head-space to read. If you are in that zone, and okay with going there, I highly recommend the book. I just don't think I could handle it, especially not reading it straight through. I should have taken a break at every other chapter and read some cartoons. Each story is beautifully written, though. And each story left me thinking about it long after I had finished reading.

I admit that when I first started reading this book I was very disturbed by its content. I had the expectation that it would be a collection of heartwarming stories, but it was the complete opposite. Claire Castillon's book really explores the absolute darkest realms that any mother-daughter relationship could have. Even Jerry Springer would have difficulty matching up to most of these stories. If you have ever had any moments of being on the brink of an emotional hysteria and the ruminations that go through your mind during these times, this is what is captured by the stories.

Despite the dark subject matter, the book was punctuated with moments of lightness and humor. This is a relative term of course, I probably would never find myself chuckling at these outside the context of these stories. Occasionally, I did find some awkwardness in the wording of some of the stories, perhaps due to some loss in translation. But overall, Castillon's book kept me glued and I could not get myself to put it down.

This collection has 19 short stories within 163 pages, so the stories are very short. My first impression was that the author was trying too hard to be provocative and cynical. This is especially true with the second story "The Insect" (which I assume was inspired by Kafka's "Metamorphosis").

After the author gave up trying to imitate Kafka things got better until "Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy" which for me was so bizarre it was painful. I was aware that it is a real syndrome so I unfortunately knew where the story was headed. I enjoyed the humorous stories best, and there are several. The author does irony and absurdity well, and there is some wordplay that is fun and well translated.

Since the stories are short if there are a couple you don't like you won't have invested too much time. Except for the two stories mentioned I enjoyed the collection quite a bit.

I sped through this book....all of the stories were mesmerizing, the writing taut and elegant, and many of them about extreme situations. All center around the mother/daughter relationship. In one, a mother suspects her husband of molesting her daughter; in another, a teen copes with her mother's impending death; in another, a woman confides in her mother about the suspected adultery of her husband---and all of these have surpising endings. The characters' actions and thoughts offer the reader an almost-uncomfortable honesty, frankness and intimacy---the kind of things you might not even tell your best friend---and the result is a sexy, subdued undercurrent. Well worth the read!

If you watch a very capable seamstress handle fabric, she will move, drape and assess her yardage. And then, without ever having seemed to measure, she'll take it in her two hands and rip. She always rips it exactly where she should.

This writer has that same gift.

Every story in here is good and at least half are excellent. They are harsh, rife with reversal and ambivalence. Be warned, this is not a feelgood examination of the mother/daughter connection. It's more of a cutting into of that connection. I found it riveting and recommend it to people who want to be unsettled, challenged and repeatedly creeped out by how tangled and knotty the ties are that bind mothers and daughters.

First, I have to admit my mistake. I thought this book was about the relationship between real life mothers and daughters and the impact on both of them. It is not, it is fictional, short stories from the various viewpoints of mothers or daughters.
The writing pulls you in, but I found the subject matters disturbing. A mother suspecting her husband of incest and trying to justify it to herself, a mother is is physically abused by her daughter, a daughter who discovers her husband is having an affair with her mother - this is just a sampling of the offerings. I didn't feel much of anything except for disgust for most of the characters. Obviously the writing is good to evoke such a response, but the stories are not for me. It's not just because I thought the book would be about real folks - it's just that the women are so passive and everything happens to them. They don't try to change the situations, but remain stuck. No one learns anything.
I'd recommend this book if you're into this type of fiction. If you're trying to figure out your relationship to your own mother, I'd give this book a pass.