This was the choice for my new bookclub with Liz's friends and we meet Jan. 6 to discuss it. When I read about the subject matter I wasn't thrilled about reading this around Christmas time...it didn't seem like a very joyful story! But rather amazingly, Toews leavens it all with humour and I felt the novel was excellent. I look forward to our discussion.
Between 2005 and 2009, more than 130 Mennonite women were drugged and raped by men in the community. In new novel Women Talking, the ex-Mennonite tells their story
Miriam Toews describes her latest book as an “imagined response” to crimes perpetrated against Mennonite women in Bolivia. Toews (pronounced “Taves”) grew up in a small Mennonite town called Steinbach in the prairie province of Manitoba, Canada, somewhere that wasn’t as closed to the world as the Bolivian colony but was still rigid and righteous – a place for an aspiring writer to flee, as Toews did, at 18.
She was living in Toronto, in 2011, when a trial revealed the horrific extent of these crimes: between 2005 and 2009, more than 130 women had been repeatedly anaesthetised with a sedative spray meant for animals and raped in their homes at the ultraconservative Bolivian Manitoba Colony. The women would wake bloodied and aching, but when they spoke up, they were told that perhaps the devil had attacked. Or maybe nothing had happened, and these tales were merely an invention of “wild female imagination”.
“I felt an obligation, a need, to write about these women,” says Toews who, like the Mennonites in Bolivia, is descended from the Molotschna colony in what is now Ukraine. “I’m related to them. I could easily have been one of them.”
Article in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/10/mennonites-rape-bolivia
Article in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/10/mennonites-rape-bolivia
