Paula Ramon is a Venezuelan journalist and in this harrowing and deeply fascinating memoir she recounts her relationship with her family and troubled country. Venezuela's story is one of riches to rags and the slow decline of the nation is reflected in the story of just one family, making the headlines so much easier to relate to. Deeply personal but at the same time objective, the book offers an insight into how such a potentially wealthy and successful country descended into chaos. I was vaguely aware of what was happening in the country, but I appreciate the situation so much more now. The book expertly explores what happened – and is still happening – with Ramon’s journalistic skills always to the fore. Although she decided to leave, her stubborn mother refused to, creating so many problems for her beleaguered daughter who was left to care for her ailing mother from a distance. Paula Ramon had the patience of a saint – I’m sure I wouldn’t have been so forbearing. But it is this level of personal detail that makes the book so compelling, and setting the politics against the lives of individuals. Although this is about Venezuela in particular, I felt that the book has a greater relevance and universality, as Venezuela’s plight is that of many failing states in the world today. Highly recommended.

Venezuela was her mother's motherland, and her own; it was also her father's refuge after WWII and the Spanish Civil War. And when Ramón was a child, it was still a land of promise and wealth. Ramón left, more by chance than by choice, but not before living through the beginning of her country's spiral downwards. "Motherland" tells of Venezuela's fall from stability through the lens of Ramón's family, who in turn went from relative comfort and stability to struggling to find jobs and food and medicine. The story gets a little bit repetitive, not through any fault of the author but because it's hard to find new ways to describe a situation that keeps getting worse in the same ways. It also provides so much fascinating context and history, though, and (how to put this?) while I'd rather the book not be necessary, I'm delighted to see a personal take on the matter.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

This book is an excellent explanation of the current situation in Venezuela, and how a nation can go from great prosperity to utter chaos and poverty in a few short decades. The author is a skilled journalist who details the rise of Hugo Chavez, and shows the impact of his politics on a middle-class family.

Half of the book, however, focuses on interpersonal relationships within Ramon’s nuclear family, and it gets pretty tiresome. Everyone resents everyone else, it seems. The elderly matriarch, who refuses to leave her home even though she is confined to a wheelchair and has very iffy support from a maid, ekes out support from her three children with guilt and complaints. There’s not a lot of joy or evident love in the family. This makes it hard to wade through the long narratives of in-fighting.

Nevertheless, I kept noticing how the decline of Venezuela mirrored what Jamaica experienced in the 1970’s, when it appeared that the island might be going down the same path. The shortages, increasing violence and financial instability were all-too-familiar.

If you can get past the parts about family dynamics, this book will help explain how a country can become a failed state. It provides a good cautionary tale for our times. How many other nations must go through this demise due to an authoritarian regime? And how many more millions of people will be forced to emigrate because their lives have been made impossible by fear, hunger and hopelessness?

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance review copy.

Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

It’s my first book read for #NonfictionNovember and it was amazing. It’s a memoir by Paula Ramon who is a journalist from Venezuela and her complicated relationship with her mother, family and the spiral collapse of their homeland.

It is a memoir that made me realize that I have to keep decolonizing my bookshelf. There is so much that I need to learn about all the hardships that so many countries have gone through. I’ve seen Chavez and Venezuela come up on the news but I had no idea how bad it was.

I also highly recommend if you love reading about complicated familial relationships. No matter their political differences and frustrations, the love that Paola Ramon has for her family really shines in this book. In a way I could relate to that with my family members that were not born in the US. I have taken many things for granted that they can’t.

I’m a sucker for a memoir - but as an immigrant who also escaped a Communist country (albeit a very different one in Eastern Europe) - I felt like this book called to me.

Reading this felt like a conversation between me and Paula - even our names are similar! I might have left Poland with my parents at age 3, but I spent many a summer there, and still have relatives who live there. So many of the emotions and experiences that she writes about - I know them in my bones!

As an immigrant and an immigration lawyer, I am fascinated by the immigrant experience and I truly enjoyed this one!

Paula Ramon truly captured the Venezuelan experience in a way that read as genuine and raw, and I am grateful that she wrote her story and shared it with the world.

People often joke about Zimbabwe’s $100,000,000,000,000 (it’s like spelling Mississippi) note, or make clever comments about the parallels between Venezuela and Zimbabwe—but these jokers and commenters do that rather at the expense of real people, of real lives ruined be economic catastrophe. It’s like being caught up in a war, but without the world’s empathy. Instead, citizens are shamed, scorned, mocked—somehow taking the blame for authoritarian leaders’ failed policies. I know, because I lived it, and still do.

I feel that shame in Ramón’s account—and who better to understand what Venezuelans went through (apart from other Venezuelans) than a Zimbabwean? Because the parallels between our experiences are frightening. I realised, towards the end of the book, how much of my own trauma I was reliving. Like Ramón, I was lucky: I had a university education, and I managed to leave—so I was able to help support my family from outside the country. Although I came back home just before the worst of it (2007-8), my savings may have saved our lives. I experienced or watched happen to the people around me all of the terrible things that Ramón relates: lost savings, pensions, property; a broken healthcare system leading to deaths and disability. Starvation, empty supermarkets. The black market for everything: food, even cash. How incredibly far a tiny amount of forex could go, and people working a whole month to earn enough to buy a loaf of bread. Queues for basic foodstuffs—sugar, maize meal—with no guarantees. (Milk and margarine were a fantasy; we once baked scones without.) Shopping across the border if you wanted to get anything. I even travelled in the back of a private truck between cities, and also over a border, because public transport was a dream—no fuel anywhere. Absolute desperation. And the toll on one’s mental health? Incalculable.

So, this book hit me on so many painful levels. Ramón‘s experience is my own, and personal. It’s that of so many Zimbabweans, and, from her account, many Venezuelans. Her brothers’ experiences as less well-educated migrant workers are the experiences of my cousins, and so many fellow Zimbabweans. In that, I am an unusual reader; perhaps this memoir may have less appeal to people who haven’t lived through this. But we can always all bear witness, stand in solidarity, and learn something when fellow humans suffer. And if it’s not you or yours today, tomorrow it may well be: nothing on this troubled planet is ever perfectly secure.

Thank you to Amazon Crossing and to NetGalley for access.

This is a great read for anyone who has ever casually wondered how Venezuela got into its modern predicament, but never took the time to look into it further. The translators have done a good job too.

Although I was engrossed in the book from start to finish, during the first half I found myself pondering whether it was really a memoir, as it was so heavy on the history, politics and economics, with comparatively scant personal/family detail. But I'm glad I pushed through, because all of that context was essential to understand the negative forces at play, leading to the 'disintegration' of the author's family (as the subtitle labels it). The second half was very much the memoir I was hoping for. It was then that the significance of the title became achingly apparent; the first half of the book about the country as the motherland, and the second half about the land of the (author's) mother.

I finished this book feeling much better informed and compassionate towards those involved in the seemingly neverending exodus from one of the most beautiful countries on Earth.

I learned a lot from this memoir and have thought about it since finishing it several times, but there was something missing from it. It felt somewhat dry and disconnected. But I did overall appreciate it!

i love a good memior and this is def above average ! I think that people who may not read a ton of nonfiction would enjoy this book!

This memoir outlines the complicated relationship with what many refers to as home - family as well as country, in this case Venezuela. Through the strained relationships within a middle-class family we see how Venezuela becomes increasingly more difficult to live in.

What I know about recent Venezuelan history is what I've learned through the headlines in Swedish media. The memoir takes you through some main events, but if you are here for a political analysis and details this is not it. History is shared through the eyes of the people, not from the view of the powerful or through someone pretending to have insight into the decisions made. The memoir places you in the understanding of the everyday citizens, what it was like struggling to make sense of going from a prosperous country to struggling to find food and provide for basic needs.

The memoir is both distant and personal, which made me reflect on how we grieve and how we express ourselves. At times I wished for more reflection, discussion, and angles, other moments I believed I completely understood why we couldn't be brought closer.

Yet there are passages that are heartbreakingly beautiful that touch on our love for family, even in desperate times.

The Venezuelan history shared in the memoir feels both unique and yet universal. There were sections discussing how the older generation held beliefs based upon their own life experiences in a different economic climate - sound familiar to anyone?

"By the time I turned twelve, I had lived through as many coups as presidential elections." (loc. 60*)

Venezuela was a home Ramón never wanted to leave. It was her mother's motherland, and her own; it was also her father's refuge after WWII and the Spanish Civil War. And when Ramón was a child, it was still a land of promise and wealth. But over time, through incredible amounts of political mismanagement, that promise turned to dust, and opportunities—and bare necesseties—became scarcer and scarcer. Ramón left, more by chance than by choice, but not before living through the beginning of her country's spiral downwards.

"To this day, I still have trouble figuring out what was normal and what wasn't. Venezuela was falling to pieces by the minute, but I had no points of reference. I had learned how to be a journalist in Venezuela during the revolution." (loc. 1271)

"Motherland" tells of Venezuela's fall from stability through the lens of Ramón's family, who in turn went from relative comfort and stability to struggling to find jobs and food and medicine. I read this in large part because, every time I've seen Venezuela in the news in recent years, it's been bad news, and...I wanted to understand better. Like Ramón's mother—who went from being able to buy a house with her pension to being unable to afford dinner on the same amount of money—I struggle to grasp the realities of the hyperinflation that Venezuela experienced; like Ramón, I understand that there's a point at which none of that *matters* because the thing that matters is your parent's wellbeing.

"I'd stopped doing the math. I didn't know what was cheap or expensive anymore. I just wanted one thing, for my mother to have food in the fridge and staples in the pantry. Though it may seem boring to talk only about groceries, that's the situation we were in." (loc. 2148)

I'm reminded a little of "The Last Resort" by Douglas Rogers, who grew up in Zimbabwe and later chronicled the political and economic turmoil that beset the country. There's both more and less of a political narrative here—at some point, I think, the politics of it all just stop mattering, because what matters is that houses are no longer safe without multiple security doors, and medication has to be shipped into the country hidden in hollowed-out books, and only the elite can afford to buy food—or can find food to buy in the first place. The story gets a little bit repetitive, not through any fault of the author but because it's hard to find new ways to describe a situation that keeps getting worse in the same ways. It also provides so much fascinating context and history, though, and (how to put this?) while I'd rather the book not be necessary, I'm delighted to see a personal take on the matter.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.