Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun
Meandering from the technical to the trivial and displaying a tendency to fulminate redundantly about sexism, Bakewell, a linguistic anthropologist at Brown University, examines Mexican Spanish "under a microscope" to dissect the many idioms demeaning "la madre" in "the land of mother worship." More memoir than monograph, the book describes Bakewell's fixation on this madre paradox and her interest in interactions between culture and language. Friends serve as guides to Mexican slang. Men warn her what she, as a female, may not say (e.g., desmadre, a disaster), while women tell her that girls are taught to aspire to the purity of the Virgin Mary, even though, once married, a bride is transformed into Eve, "the sinner." Most interesting when tackling the question of why "ninety-nine amigas plus el one amigo resulted in los one hundred amigos," Bakewell cites academics and acquaintances to show that "mental perceptions of objects are influenced by grammatical genders." The account of her linguistic journey wanders through such topics as "Wedding," "Love," and "Back to Church," to a weak conclusion: to her, Mexican "madre" slang is "still an enigma." (Nov.) (c)(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC.  All rights reserved.