The women in the book (named after Toews’s family members) do not relate the story a man does, one of literature’s more reluctant narrators. Miriam Toews, whose latest novel, “Women Talking,” was inspired by a series of brutal attacks in a Mennonite community. In “All My Puny Sorrows,” a woman giving a eulogy is interrupted by her toddler, who opens the urn and scoops the ashes into his mouth. In her novel “A Complicated Kindness,” one sets her bonnet on fire while smoking a cigarette and has to be dunked in a water barrel. Angela Carter wrote that Grace Paley’s women were made of “flexible steel” your average Toews character is equal parts Silly String. They smoke, sing hymns together and weep.ĭid I mention the book is funny? Wickedly so, with Toews’s brand of seditious wit. One woman, impregnated in an attack and beset by morning sickness, keeps vomiting into a bucket. The women comfort and snipe at one another. Stay and fight - but with what resources? Leave? Impossible they cannot read, they possess no maps and they cannot think of abandoning their sons. Should they stay and forgive? Unfathomable a 3-year-old was raped and infected with venereal disease, an old woman so savagely attacked her teeth crumbled. They have two days to make a decision for the female members of the community. Forgiveness is dictated by the religion the women know they must absolve the men or face expulsion, even damnation. Eight women from two families gather in a hayloft. The men have left for the city, to raise and post bail for their brothers. The novel is set in the aftermath of the crimes. Her 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.”

I could easily have been one of them.” Toews was also raised in the sect - “rigged for compliance,” she has put it - and is descended from the same Mennonite group as the colonists in Bolivia. “I felt an obligation, a need, to write about these women,” the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews has said. When the eight culprits were put on trial, in 2011, the women were forbidden to testify their fathers and husbands spoke against the defendants instead. At least 300 female members of the colony had been attacked, from toddlers to grandmothers. The elders dismissed their complaints or blamed them on “wild female imagination” - until it was discovered that men from the community had been creeping through windows at night, sedating whole households with bovine anesthetic and raping the women. They were called the “ghost rapes.” In 2005, Mennonite women living in a secluded colony in Bolivia reported waking up bleeding, with dirty fingerprints on their bodies and fraying rope around their wrists.

Women Talking by Miriam Toews