... astonishing ... Despite the beauty of Toews' prose and the constant, delicate humor of August's self-effacing perspective, I resisted [August as the narrator], and by extension the novel, for as long as I could. Why, I kept thinking, is a man telling this story? Why can't the women tell it themselves? But soon I understood: Women Talking reverses the patriarchal structure under which these women live. Until this moment, intellectual discourse in Molotschna has been reserved for men. Now, women's ideas are the center, and they get to make a man write them down ... though Toews' writing is simple and often funny, her ideas are difficult in the extreme ... Toews' emphasis on names and definitions serves to highlight how precise her own writing is, and how smart. The intelligence on display in Women Talking is as ferocious as it is warm. Women Talking is a profoundly intelligent book. It is an indictment of authority and a defense of belief.
... scorching ... Women Talking is a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism and, above all, forgiveness ... [The womens'] conversation is loose, unpredictable, occasionally profane and surprisingly funny ... By loosening the tongues of disenfranchised women and engaging them in substantive dialogue about their lives, Toews grants them agency they haven’t enjoyed in life. By refusing to focus on the crimes that launched this existential reappraisal, she treats them as dignified individuals rather than props in a voyeuristic entertainment. The only problem with this approach is that the grotesque and bizarre crime wave that launches the narrative remains all but unfathomable. It looms in the background, begging to be dramatized and explained. You don’t need an appetite for the salacious to want to know how a handful of men could rape dozens of women in a close-knit community, year after year, undetected. And you can appreciate this smart novel of ideas while also wanting to know how the women might have felt about this profound and intimate betrayal even before they started talking.
... less an indignant manifesto about sexual trauma, or a speculative celebration of female empowerment, than it is a confession of violence as something stitched into the fabric of every community, and an exploration of what it means to claim communal thought—even disagreement itself—as an inalienable human right ... crackles with the energy of consciousness on every page. Its attention is tender and funny, its characters utterly distinct and alive ... The novel is deeply aware of how this simultaneity—the weighty sitting shoulder to shoulder with the daily—is especially inescapable for women ... Toews doesn’t just allow the trivial to live alongside the weighty, she insists on it...By refusing to segregate the mundane from the consequential, Toews implicitly argues that what we call trivial often isn’t trivial at all—that just as much truth lives inside those small moments of care and grace as in our grand philosophizing about authority and justice—and allows her characters to come to life as more than helpless victims or walking thesis statements ... resists false binaries at every turn. Profundity and banality are entangled ... This novel knows that truth: Violence is something more systemic than a few rapists; more like a wildfire than a small burn contained to a few toxic bodies you can lock away for good ... holds the persistence of their grace while refusing to make false promises about the redemption or vindication waiting for them beyond its final page.
This is fiction as deliberation, and yet it feels packed with drama. It also feels infused with a deeply sympathetic understanding of the way women talk — a subject that has drawn the attention of scholars as diverse as Luce Irigaray and Deborah Tannen. Toews captures the Mennonites’ antique way of speaking, a language thick with biblical tropes and Christian ideals challenged by the obscenity of what has been done to them ... Toews conveys not only what these women suffered but how stoically and graciously they endure ... Though Toews remains frustratingly unknown in the United States, she has long been one of my favorite contemporary authors. The compressed structure of Women Talking makes it unlike her earlier novels, but once again she draws us into the lives of obscure people and makes their survival feel as crucial and precarious as our own.
... the Mennonite girls and women of Women Talking have distinctive personalities ... In their fierce, rigorous debate about practical matters, the Mennonite women contemplate profound questions ... On the topic of men, too, Toews offers a more expansive understanding of human behavior ... Toews’s decision to use August as narrator is ingenious. It constantly reminds us of the subjugation of the women—they are illiterate—and also lets us view the events through the eyes of a tremendously sensitive man who has both an insider’s knowledge and an awareness of the world outside ... Despite the unthinkable acts that men have committed, Women Talking refuses to demonize even the perpetrators ... Above all, Toews also offers a generative vision of women’s lives under patriarchy. Her female characters argue fiercely, sometimes rancorously, but their fights are underwritten by compassion and geared toward a shared purpose ... This is the feminist future we should want.
What I have found myself hungering for...is literature that stretches past legal testimonies and sentimental appeals toward what, for lack of a better phrase, I’m calling post-traumatic futurity. What is the situation of survivors who saw the injury proven and exposed—and maybe even punished—and saw, also, that nothing much changed? I am curious about their vision of things. I want to know how they think things should be. In nonfiction ... In fiction, we have books like Miriam Toews’s Women Talking and Rachel Cline’s The Question Authority. Both novels are fictional treatments of real events, both scramble the stultifying formulas we apply to stories of abuse, and both stretch out into subjectivities that feel—if not always hopeful or clear—singular and anchored in the world as we know it ... Sexual abuse also isolates the victim, this too by design. What’s striking about Women Talking is both how clearly the scale of the assaults enables unexpectedly communal discussions of a post-traumatic future and how hard it is to reach a consensus ... If Toews clarifies the smallness of the world these women inhabit, their radicalism sometimes far exceeds our own ... Revelations snowball over the course of the deliberations ... But the novel ends on a note of terrifying hope so pure and desperate and idealistic that it’s almost unbearable. The humility of the novel’s title belies the extraordinary ambition of its characters, who, reeling from trauma, sit, talk, and chart out a future within two days.
... a painful, thought-provoking, strangely lovely gem rendered broadly relevant by our #MeToo moment ... [the] narrative unfolds a horrifying history and a moving interrogation of the fate of women in a society under patriarchal theocratic control ... In a book that is at once allegory and story, the eight women serve as avatars for the roles available to women, but also come alive as personalities whose complex relationships have been formed by decades of insular intimacy and conflict.
[Toews’s] celebrated novels are haunted by her upbringing, but she has never written with such heartbreak, or taken such sure aim at fundamentalism and its hypocrisies, as she does in her new book, Women Talking ... Did I mention the book is funny? Wickedly so, with Toews’s brand of seditious wit ... One wishes, at times, that the voices were more individuated ... few of the women emerge distinctly enough for there to be any drama in their evolution. It’s the chorus that interests Toews, not character, the etiology of violence and the structures — not merely the personalities — that perpetuate it.
... astonishing ... Toews injects a wry humor into these pages, a reflection of her characters and their outlook on life, at once earnest and ironic ... the circumstances are so extraordinary and the dialogue so riveting, that you keep reading to see what the women decide and how they decide it ... You leave a novel about violence and misogyny lifted up by the women and strangely hopeful.
It must have taken guts to write this novel, which could have been exploitative but, instead, proves thoughtful and light on its feet. Rather than dwell on the crimes, Toews wrings unexpected drama from her protagonists’ moral and theological to-ing and fro-ing, as they spar over how best to remain faithful to a system that has been used to betray them so brutally. The improbable, almost magical result creates something redemptive from a subject that seems anything but.
In a narrative so sharp it could draw blood, Women Talking asks an immense, weighty question: How do women who have lived their entire lives in a society that severely limits their agency act when suddenly needing to exercise it? In grappling with this question, Toews, who was raised in a Mennonite town in Canada, has written a heated, heartbreaking story at once fundamental and contemporary ... The book’s passionate ideology can make it feel like a manifesto being composed in real time, but Women Talking is not a polemic dressed up as fiction. This essential novel is as electrifyingly alive for its masterful storytelling as for its clear, pointed critique of the patriarchy and the insidious nature of power. This is due in no small part to the indelible characters Toews has given life to ... In August, Toews has created a vessel worthy of carrying this story, proving it’s as powerful for others to listen, as it is for women to speak.
Toews manages to make room for levity in the darkness of the colony — a darkness both literal and figurative ... The tension in this marvelous work comes less from the decision — to stay or to go? — than from the insular world the women already inhabit.
The book’s confined setting and its tight timeframe combine to superb dramatic effect—indeed, Women Talking could be adapted without much difficulty into a first-rate play. Ms. Toews condenses a unstable array of emotions into the meetings, from bickering and lamentation to riotous laughter and the uplift of communal prayer. Movingly, the women are preoccupied with saving their religious faith in spite of the abuses it has given cover to ... The characters of this outstanding book don’t have the luxury to feel victimized. They have a decision to make, and the rest of their lives to take control of.
The extent of the crimes and their aftermath is unveiled in calm, unadorned language, somehow still lively and familiar as a hummingbird ... I love Miriam Toews; I don’t know how to disguise my stupid love for her with an attempt to sound smart, so I won’t even try. I believe she’s the best writer of our time ... This isn’t the first time Toews has written from a male perspective. Swing Low published almost 20 years ago, is a memoir of sorts, written in her father’s voice after his death ... It took me a little while to guess at a formal link between the two, to see these narrative choices as a way of witnessing the pain that runs throughout both books ... The novel’s humor is a welcome counter to its brutality, but it’s also a testament to a complex and ever-present pain. Toews has a canny ability to depict pain by stepping to the side ... She’s somehow able to communicate the simplest and most complex aspect of being alive: two conflicting things existing at once.
While wrestling with faith and forgiveness, love, compassion and innocence, the women show formidable forbearance, but Toews doesn’t mask pain with perseverance. The trauma here is real ... The weight and authority carried by language and speech lies at the heart of this novel. There’s power in being able to name something for what it really is ... [The women's] experience holds a mirror up to sexual abuse survivors the world over, punished for going public or naming their attackers. Although not born from the #MeToo movement, this beautiful battle cry of a novel is in urgent conversation with the contemporary moment.
Toews did not write a play, but Women Talking often reads like one ... Whatever caricatured perceptions a reader may have of religious women—especially when those women are housewives in modest, religious dress—Toews’s novel overturns. Mennonite women come to full and fearsome life in Molotschna; brilliant and angry and quick-witted, impossible to ignore or diminish ... By fictionalizing a real horror, Toews opens the story up, and moves it from being a simple dissection of power—who wields it, and how it hides the worst sins—to an altogether more radical place. She recasts the first judgment. When God cast Adam and Eve out of Eden, he reserved special punishment for Eve. She would have pain in childbirth, he said, and she would desire her husband, but he would rule over her, always. But not this time.
Because of Toews’s light touch and the thorough reporting of Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, it’s sometimes difficult to keep fictional and real events apart, though they pointedly diverge at certain moments ... would these women really rally together in a secret meeting, conduct a civilised and democratic debate, and then, consciousness-raised and liberated, go off into the night with stolen food and money? We know they would not ... It’s a rare writer who can pull off an optimistic reimagining of such a story without succumbing to meaningless uplift or forcing a happy ending ...The phrase ‘suspension of disbelief’ comes from Coleridge...and the idea is useful here. Both the women and the bereft August are challenged to keep their faith – or suspend their disbelief – despite the cruelties of their circumstances. Meanwhile, the reader is asked to suspend her disbelief – maybe by substituting it with some kind of faith in humanity – in this act of female imagination, beyond a point ordinarily required in fiction.
Ms. Toews uses the narrative device of meeting minutes to great effect, achieving To Kill a Mockingbird levels of courtroom drama and raised stakes, while rarely quoting her characters directly, recreating the speed of thought-to-speech that occurs in the midst of impassioned, values-based discourse. And though there is passion, there is also much method to Women Talking. The thought process the women employ to make their decision plays out as an example of modern feminism, one that doesn’t renounce the value of men, but that grapples with reconceptualizing every part of a world in which women would be able to live as equals ... There is no need for melodrama or overexplaining, and the author knows it. We get the sense that lines were written and rewritten (maybe transcribed?) until she believed them so that we could too, only in the end returning to the central conflict between love and violence, in the voice of August Epp...
Toews’ decision to have a man narrate a novel titled Women Talking appears provocative, but is a complex and often moving feature of the book ... August seems like a technical necessity. How could Toews, given her propensity to write in such a personal, distinctive voice, write convincingly as one of these women? In August, Toews’ perception, oddness and wild joy can co-exist with the transcription of the meeting ... Despite the solemnity of the task, Women Talking is as steeped in humour as any of Toews’ other novels, but the tone of her humour has altered. The jokes in Women Talking, understandably, don’t have the intricacy or risk of the ones shared with her family in her earlier books ... Toews’ occasional disregard for irony can result in scenes that feel a little too wholesome ... Toews’ sentimentality seems part of a deliberate disinterest in sophistication or refined style. It lends her work emotional power, but at times risks undermining the intelligence of her ideas ...
Women Talking is a claustrophobic novel that can be difficult to read but, unexpectedly, it can also delight. Even in the face of sexual degradation, violence and horror, Toews’ irrepressible spirit pours through...
Toews delivers her most damning portrayal yet of the Mennonite community and its devastating impact, most particularly on the lives of its girls and women ... There are even moments of humour, particularly when the women are tickled by the absurd idea of asking the men themselves to leave Molotschna. Toews expertly draws out each woman’s voice and intellect ... It is in these grand moments of clarity in Women Talking that we can hear Toews’ angry authorial voice behind the narration in her condemnation of the failings of the patriarchal Mennonite community.
The reader’s only way to learn about these women is through his male voice — a setup that both heightens the injustice of the women’s situation and keeps readers at a distance from what they think and feel. But even through the filter of a male narrator, Toews shows us how these women, who can’t read or write, are capable of great reasoning and philosophy ... Toews infuses the women’s humor, from broad to subtle, as the group constructs a plan. Even in the midst of their toughest conversations, they cackle together...
...[a] sharp blade of a novel ... Toews’ eviscerating fictionalization of this incendiary reality focuses not on the violence but, rather, on the keen, subversive intelligence of the Mennonite women, their philosophical casts of mind, clashing personalities, and deep concerns about family and faith ... Toews’ knowing wit and grasp of dire subjects aligns her with Margaret Atwood, while her novel’s slicing concision and nearly Socratic dialogue has the impact of a courtroom drama or a Greek tragedy ... Toews’ clarifying novel will help further dismantle the toxic habits of sexism.
What happened to the women of Manitoba is singularly horrifying, but a book written about sexual violence that comes out in America in 2019 has to work hard to avoid being thought of as a '#MeToo novel' ... Toews does not veer away from that classification. Instead, she uses the ghost rapes of Manitoba as a kind of allegory for the position in which women find themselves in the wake of #MeToo ... These are heady, difficult questions, but Toews handles them with fingertip delicacy. She is best known as a comic novelist, and Women Talking, as bleak as its premise might be, is also extremely funny ... Women Talking is as tender and funny and hopeful as it is possible for a book about the aftermath of a string of serial rapes to be.
Author Miriam Toews’ unique narrative takes readers through the thought processes of these women, who will not be coerced into feigning forgiveness for the sins against their families. Instead, they consider both the physical and spiritual consequences of their options as the clock ticks down to the men’s return, reaching a courageous decision that will change their lives forever.
The women’s analysis of what has happened to them, their treatment, their own futures and their children’s, and above all how to absorb these events into their own sense of faith, fills most of the book’s pages, and might seem at times dry. But its territory is so horrific, so stark, so outrageous and contemporary that it magnetizes the reader. Toew’s sensitivity, lucidity, lyricism and wit ensure it ... Synthesizing complex and ancient arguments which also have bang-up-to-the-minute relevance, the book offers a crisp, immersive vision of oppression and survival. Read it as a manifesto for clear female thinking. And for a moving, positive view of the way forward.
To read Women Talking is to be in the hayloft with the women as they comfort and confront each other, and as they acknowledge the trauma they endure and share. Toews does not force her characters to condemn their religion; instead, their experience leads them to reject the ways their religion has harmed them while embracing, in a show of faithful solidarity, the love and community purportedly at the Mennonite faith’s core. By the time the women reach their decision, they are both uniquely rendered individuals and timeless, archetypes of any woman oppressed by her society.
An exquisite critique of patriarchal culture ... it is riveting and revelatory ... [with] vividly compelling characters ... Stunningly original and altogether arresting.
...[a] remarkable new novel ... The real-life scandal burns through nearly every page ... What makes this traumatic narrative bearable is in how the women find their voices and their way forward ... Such women are talking in real life, too, and we’d all do well to listen.
Epp’s observations (such as those about how the women physically react or respond when someone shares a divisive suggestion) are astute, and through him readers are able to see how carefully and intentionally the women think through their life-changing decision—critically discussing their roles in society, their love for their families and religion, and their hopes and desires for the future. This is an inspiring and unforgettable novel.
...the strength of the book lies in the realness of the women. It is difficult at first to distinguish them all from each other, but Toews slowly fleshes out each person, including their flaws as well as their more admirable traits. It reminds us that the victims of horrendous crimes are not defined by their experiences. These women still bicker with each other, sing together, smoke and drink coffee. They survive ... It is a shame therefore that the dialogue has a couple of weaker moments. It drifts too many times into a hypothetical discussion of morality, as though the author is exploring the idea for herself on the page. Conversely the best moments are when we as readers feel like we have been allowed to eavesdrop on the conversation. These often occur when we are suddenly reminded of the severity of the attacks ... These visceral moments are jolting, but they bring the reader right into the scene, forcing us to contemplate what we would do in the same situation.
To read this intelligent, slow-burner of a novel, with its indelible characters and finely calibrated emotionality, is to realize how rarely women are shown, in novels or film, debating anything except relationships. The trope of female hysteria versus male rationality is also subverted: here, logic is the prime tool the women can wield against the men’s deepest animal urges ... Counterintuitive as it sounds to use a male intermediary in a book called Women Talking, as fictional strategy it’s brilliant, for reasons that slowly become apparent. In the same way science fiction can bring our earthly conflicts into sharper relief, the obscure specificity of its setting makes this novel’s uncanny relevance to the present moment ...even more profound. Mercifully leavened with Toews’ trademark wit, it’s her best, most ambitious novel to date.
