Women Talking

thenextgoodbook.com
Woman Talking by Miriam Toews
216 pages

What’s it about?
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote Mennonite community in Bolivia, a series of sexual assaults were perpetrated upon the women and girls of a Molotschna. The victims are sprayed with a cow anesthetic while they sleep and then are violated. Upon waking they know that something has happened but can not put the pieces together. A man is finally caught breaking into a bedroom in the middle of the night and he confesses to the crimes. He also implicates seven other men who had been taking part. It is believed that in this community at least 130 women and children were raped in this time period. The victims ranged in age from 3 to 60. The perpetrators, and other community members, tried to make the women believe that the attacks were being made by ghosts. Further on, it was said that God was punishing the women for their sins. This actually happened. This novel is an imagined conversation between a group of the victims. The women must decide about how to go forward with their lives in the aftermath of these attacks.

What did it make me think about?
So- with a little research I found that Miriam Toews was raised in a Mennonite community in Canada. Interesting. She says, "What is harmful in the Mennonite tradition resembles what’s harmful in any religion—when religious leaders use the authority of God to scold, shame, punish, silence, and shun people. In extreme cases, they use God’s authority to justify the most depraved crimes. It’s that abuse of authority—and witnessing first hand its destructive effects—that alienated me from the church." ​This story is all about what complete and authoritarian power can do in a community.

Should I read it?
I loved Toews earlier book, All My Puny Sorrows, and was looking forward to reading this. This novel is an imagined conversation between a group of women who have been consistently denied any type of autonomy over their own lives. It is an interesting book that will appeal to some readers, and not to others. This book is not plot driven but it is very thought-provoking.

Quote-
"I remember how my father, two days before he disappeared, told me that the twin pillars that guard the entrance to the shrine of religion are storytelling and cruelty."

If you liked this try-
The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon
​​The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
The Animals by Christian Kiefer
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

“When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

This book made you think!!! Through the dark devilish behaviors, you see a group of women come together to decide what is best for the group. They debate over long hours and bring up deep contextual psychological and theological debates. You can tell the women are educated enough the way they speak and use their grounds for arguments. They try to balance their emotion minds with logic minds all while keeping the group in mind and faith at the forefront. I loved to watch the different characters develop in the book although at times I wasn't sure who was who and was easily confused. It was an emotional rollercoaster and felt myself cheering on some of the woman's thoughts and arguments especially after I found out it's based on true events. Short read, medium level vocabulary and difficult constructed sentences when the women were talking and debating. I loved the main character telling the story. It balanced out the story from that perspective.

The themes were interesting (freedom, forgiveness, love, faith) but the story telling just fell flat. It was so hard to get through. The women talked ad nauseam and seemed to change their minds every few minutes. It was also hard to keep track of who was who. The most interesting moments were the back stories that were told by the narrator (although why a book about women had to be told by a man is also another problem with the book). I've read All My Puny Sorrows by this author which was a hard read in a different way. I was disappointed with this book.

This one was a little more dense even though there were fewer pages than what I normally read. Based on a true story that was so bizzare that I had to go out and do my own research just to clarify that I’d read it correctly! The writing style is different than a lot of novels and is set up to be similar to someone’s journal entries which took a while to get used to. It’s also set after the major precipitating factor and is about how these women plan to proceed with their lives and the consequences of their choices.