Mumsahib: A Novel in Stories

Marcia Sweet is head of the Information/Reference Unit, Douglas Library,
Queen’s University.

The narrator of this collection of related stories is a tough
51-year-old divorcée who makes an odyssey to India to trace her
mother’s and grandmother’s lives over a period of two generations.
She returns to Canada, having finally understood the importance of the
cultures in which the women in her family, including herself, have lived
and loved.

Montagnes’s gift for authenticity is revealed in her description of a
hot and dusty day-long wait in a crowded and oppressive train station in
India. The memorable account of the narrator’s swimming in and out of
consciousness is typical of the immediacy of this author’s writing.

The novel moves backward and forward in a sometimes confusing time
frame. But far from being gratuitous, the incidents serve to create a
large, painterly canvas full of turbaned people in a hot country, and a
small, cool drawing of a family of women in a cold country. My complaint
about the book is that there are too many characters, important and
incidental, scattered throughout the book and separated by time and
geography; and not enough expansion of the Indian characters. All in
all, though, it’s a rich and interesting book.