\nBlessed are those who have an uncomplicated relationship with their\nmother, for of all human relationships, it must be the one with the\nmost potential for complexity. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nWe owe her our life, yet it is our mother who has the most influence\non the way we navigate the world we entered from her womb. As a\nresult, the mother is, alongside God (and the devil), the most\npowerful symbol in our mythology. God may have created the universe,\nbut mother created us, individually. And this is where the complexity\narises, for our individual mother is not God, or even a god, but all\ntoo human, herself born of a mother. She has her own foibles and\nfailings which inevitably and inexorably warp our way of being. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nTo be clear, Meng Jin\u2019s novel, little gods<\/em>\nis not about motherhood. If it is about anything in particular, it\ncould be about the search for self realisation, part of which,\narguably, is coming to accept one\u2019s parents as human, and to\nlove the mortal person (provided they are worth loving, which\ngenerally they are) and not to remain disappointed by her failure to\nembody the immortal symbol she inhabited when we were children.\nLittle gods <\/em>does raise the\nspectre of what this entails for those of us orphaned before\nthis realisation is able to begin. There are other questions, but\ngiven aforesaid mother issues, this one stands out. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journey undertaken by Liya after her mother\u2019s death is fraught with the discovery of hidden parts of interwoven lives, along with gaps of knowledge that death seals off. Unless one is willing and able to live with ambiguity, this may not end well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nThe grace of Jin\u2019s prose is its lack of sentimentality, as she\nplaces the particulars of Liya\u2019s search to understand who her\nmother was, and by extension who she is, within the sweep of external\nforces. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nLiya was born on the day of the Tiananmen Square massacre, just\nstreets away from where the Chinese government mowed down its own\ncitizens. It was also the day her father disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nThis casts a contextual shadow across events, even contemporary\nstudents playing a game of chess in Beijing. Seemingly untroubled by\nhistory, it nonetheless shades everyone\u2019s experience, not\ndissimilar to the way apartheid haunts South Africa\u2019s born-frees,\neven if the ghosts remains unseen. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nHowever, to say this is Liya\u2019s story alone is to do Jin\u2019s\nstorytelling a disservice. The real protagonist is the one most\nabsent – Liya\u2019s mother, Su Lan. Liya\u2019s struggle to understand\nher mirrors our own. In the same way Liya is assisted by letters,\nphotographs, mementos and one or two of her mother\u2019s old friends,\nwe are assisted by having characters narrate Su Lan\u2019s presence in\ntheir lives. This results in us being privy to more information than\nLiya has. Or so we think. We didn\u2019t live with Su Lan for our entire\nchildhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nWe also seek to better understand the enigma of Su Lan, and so we are\ninadvertently in competition with Liya to open the door behind which\nSu Lan\u2019s complexity is fully revealed and explained, which is about\nas possible as knowing who your mother was before you came along.\nThis in itself is a captivating concept which, wrapped in writing\nclear as a mountain lake that belies its own depth, makes Little\ngods<\/em> wonderfully complex, and\nbrilliant. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nLittle gods is Meng Jin\u2019s\ndebut novel and was published in 2020 by Pushkin Press.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The headline for this review was inspired by Gustave Courbet\u2019s painting, The Origin of the World<\/a>. Do look it up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Blessed are those who have an uncomplicated relationship with their mother, for of all human relationships, it must be the one with the most potential for complexity. We owe her … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[6,10,1],"tags":[1141,1142],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4372"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4374,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4372\/revisions\/4374"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}