Women Talking by Miriam Toews

 Women Talking by Miriam Toews

A group of women in a Mennonite community meet secretly in the loft of an old barn to talk about the attacks they are being subjected to nightly. Men have been using an animal sedative to knock out entire families so they can then rape their women and children. One of their victims is a 3 year old child. They wake up sore and sick from the drug with rope burns on their wrists and ankles, wondering what had happened to them. 

At first the leaders of the community (all men) tell them they must be imagining it, or it could be they're being punished for their sins, but eventually there is too much evidence to ignore and the police are called. As the rest of the men raise bail money to get the perpetrators released, the women meet to decide what their response will be. Will they do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the community? Pros and cons of each option are weighed with careful consideration of their duty to their children and to God. Forgiveness, what it means and how to do it, is a major factor in their deliberations. They believe that if they don't forgive they will not be forgiven, and will risk losing their place in Heaven.

Back stories come out in their conversations, and some of them are hard to hear. Maybe like me you'll get so angry you want the women to exact a vicious vengeance, or maybe you'll be compassionate and graciously want healing for both victims and offenders. Either way, their story - knowing these crimes really happened to real women and children - will break your heart.

It does conclude on a hopeful note, but only in the book. The real story is more grim. Though the women were offered state counseling, the leaders refused it saying it wasn't needed since they were asleep while being raped. The rapists went to prison, but one article I read said they still claim their innocence, and that even with them out of the community, attacks continued. You can read more of the story here.  

This is a hard one to read - for the subject matter not the writing - but it is worth it. I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.  

The Librarianist

 The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

Bob Comet, retired librarian, steps into a convenience store where the clerk tells him a woman has been standing staring at the beverage cooler for the last 45 minutes. Bob stands next to her and asks if she's alright but gets no response, then notices the tag she's wearing that identifies her as a resident of a local senior's home.

He helps her back to the home and then wonders if he might be of some use as a volunteer there. Having no family or friends it might be good for him to be around other people.

"Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it."

He asks Maria, the woman in charge, if he may come and read stories to the residents, but when his first book selection proves so dull it drives listeners from the room, she tells him to forget the books and just mingle and chat. Being neither a mingler nor a chatter, Bob is unsure, but he gives it a try and begins to make friends.

Then the wandering lady goes missing again, on page 83, and we don't get back to that story until page 379. Instead we move into Bob's past - his growing up years, finding a best friend - the only one he ever had, and meeting, marrying, and losing his wife, Connie. Then we go even further back to an incident in his childhood when he ran away from home and spent four somewhat unlikely days in the company of two actresses preparing for a play. When we finally do get back to the missing senior, it's close to the end of the book. 

The intervening stories are good - so interesting that when the first story picked up again on 397 I had almost forgotten about the wandering lady. I don't know why it's structured the way it is, but in the end it all does come together.

And the writing! I paused often to appreciate the phrasing. He has a way of articulating his thoughts with simplicity and accuracy that makes what he's saying easily relatable. An enviable gift. I would sigh and think 'I wish I could have said that'.

"There had been evidence of an odd-shaped fate running through the day, and both Linus and Bob were taken by unspoken potentiality." 

"It felt paranoiac, by also commonsensible..."

"It was a very small post office with a single employee sitting behind the counter wearing the somber look of a man wondering where the magic had gone."

"An hour and a half passed, and he paused, looking out to sea and having looking-out-to-sea thoughts.

The story was great but the ending felt vague - more like a pause in the middle of a continuing story - so I'm wondering if there will be more. I would like to get better acquainted with some of those quirky residents. 

In any event, this one is very good on its own. 

Delta Wedding

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

In the heat of a Mississippi summer, the Fairchilds, a busy household of ten plus servants and extended family coming and going, are making preparations for the wedding of their daughter, Dabney. Visiting is 9 yr. old Laura McRaven, daughter of the recently deceased Annie Laurie Fairchild. She arrives by train, having traveled from Jackson by herself, and tries to fit into this boisterous family who all talk at once and seldom hear what anyone else is saying. They're kind, but not what we would call emotionally present. 

They seem a happy family, and think of themselves that way, but in occasional moments of solitude they question themselves and one another.  There is little time, or inclination really, for introspection and any doubt or sadness that rises is soon dismissed again in the busyness of everyday life. This quote says it all: "Now he was dancing, even a little drunk she believed - this was a time for celebration, or regret, not for talk, not ever for talk." This happy family, celebrating a happy occasion, left me sad. 

There were so many characters it took me a while to sort them out. There's the main Fairchild family, the father's brothers and sisters and their families, the servants, and a number of dead relatives who are referred to enough that you have to know where they fit. As I do with a lot of books now, I made a list to keep them straight and remind me how they were all related. Still, at the end I was left with questions. Why did daughter, Shelley, refer to her parents as both Mama & Papa and Aunt Ellen & Uncle Battle? Why is cousin Mary Denis' little girl called Lady Clare? And why is Aunt Jim Allen called Jim Allen? 

Most of the characters were interesting enough, though not terribly likeable. They seemed shallow people who thought mostly of themselves, with very few showing any evidence of a more thoughtful, inner life. Connections with each other were formed more from habit and history than from any deep feeling for one another, which I suspect is true of many families, even most. Cynical perhaps, but it's what I've seen; most of the deeply connected and loving families I've encountered are in books or on tv.  

But I digress. I enjoyed reading the first half of this book, then in the latter part I began to wish it would hurry up and come to an end. I grew tired of their easy dismissal of one another, but was also disappointed in myself for not getting more from the book. This is my first of Eudora Welty's and it came highly recommended as her best, so I'll attempt one more and try to do better. 

Heat Wave

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively

A novel of perception, subtle, quiet, and deeply moving. Tension mounts through restrained dialogue, wordless eye contact, and the  perfectly articulated thoughts of the narrator.

The story is simple: a mother watching her son-in-law stray from his marriage to her daughter in much the same way her own husband had been faithless to her. But what happens on the surface is only the ten percent of the iceberg that is visible; it's what doesn't get addressed that creates a taut undercurrent of tension running though every page, and that's the brilliance of this book and of Penelope Lively. Her acute observations are elegantly understated while pin-point sharp. 

I've read two others of hers, The Photograph and Judgement Day, and both have the same quiet eloquence and keen insight. This one, though, is something else; it should be studied in writing courses. I really have to read the rest of her books now.   

Very, very good reading.

Devorgilla Days

 Devorgilla Days by Kathleen Hart

The journal of a woman who has suffered more than most and found help and healing in a remote Scottish town. Wigtown and its people (Devorgilla is her cottage, named after a fierce Scottish princess) gave her time and space to process all that had happened to her and to transition from an invalid to a vibrant woman living life on her terms. What she went through with her health and all the repercussions from that is unthinkable; it's incredible that she survived it at all, let alone to thrive the way she does now.

I loved this book. Her candor is refreshing, and her descriptions of life in rural Scotland - the way people took her in, the countryside, the flora, the lochs, the forests - I want to be there. I am homesick for a place I've never been. 

Read this one.