![]() ![]() ''Collaborators'' begins with a slightly altered version of Janet Kauffman's powerful short story, ''My Mother Has Me Surrounded,'' which was included in her 1981 collection of stories, ''Places in the World a Woman Could Walk.'' Andrea Doria's mother tells her she is lucky to be a girl, that men ''have a hard time just living. Her accomplice.'' She becomes the vessel that holds her mother's stories and dreams, that acknowledges the power of her mother, who ''swallows God or rolls him around in her mouth, or lets him disperse through the avenues of her brain.'' ''Any time of day, I am my mother's apprentice. Her mother reinvents reality, adjusts it to suit herself, expecting her daughter to submit to it. ![]() ![]() She fights the merging with the mother - the ecstasy of it, the suffocation - tries to find the boundaries where her mother ends and where she begins. And I lick my own arm, which is a lifeless arm, not my own at all, not anyone's. ''I feel on the tip of my tongue the trace of the hairs of her arm, a print of her sea-swimming arm. After swimming in the ocean, her mother extends her arm and asks Andrea Doria to taste the salt. ![]() Her life is defined by her mother's actions, her mother's thoughts, even her mother's taste. Andrea Doria, named for a sinking ship because her mother liked the sound of it, finds it impossible to recognize herself as separate from her mother. I must be hers.'' Janet Kauffman's stunning novel, ''Collaborators,'' explores the bonding between a mother and her young daughter. ![]()
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