Women Talking

 By Miriam Toews

Bloomsbury     2019

227 pages     Literary

If there is such a classification as “real-life dystopia,” Women Talking is a perfect example. This ironic, iconic, and timeless story about abused women was the book we discussed at book club this week. I read the book after I saw the movie, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture and won for Best Adapted Screenplay. I watched the movie again just before book group. Those friends who had not seen the movie struggled a bit with the book.

A brief summary. There are several large Mennonite communities in the countryside of Bolivia. (Who knew?) Most of these communities are ultra conservative. Between 2005 and 2009, more than 150 women and girls were raped at night in their home by a group of colony men who sedated them with animal tranquilizer. Miriam Toews used this horrible story as the foundation of her novel, Women Talking.  In the novel, the women are meeting in the hay loft of a community barn to discuss these attacks and how they should respond to them. They ask August, the local schoolteacher who grew up in the colony, to help them keep the minutes of their meetings because they can’t read or write. That doesn’t mean they aren’t smart.

The book is primarily discussion, with few plot devices to move the story forward. The women do not talk about their rapes but what they should do to get out of there. Some of the men have been arrested, and other men of the community have gone to the city to bail them out. The women see this as an opportunity to escape.

“The women have come up with three competing plans. They can remain in the colony and live exactly as they did before the assaults, they can stay and fight for change or they can hitch up their buggies and leave. Although they disagree constantly and sharply, there’s one point on which they concur: They have been treated like animals — and it didn’t start with the rapes. ‘When our men have used us up so that we look 60 when we’re 30 and our wombs have literally dropped out of our bodies onto spotless kitchen floors, finished, they turn to our daughters,’ a woman named Salome says. ‘And if they could sell us all at auction afterwards they would.’ Fierce, articulate Salome often gets the last word, but the novel is a choral ensemble piece in which each woman chimes in with a distinctive voice.” This is from the New York Times review.

 The reader becomes totally caught up in these discussions, and as the sparse plot begins to thicken, the reader’s anxiety rises. The ending has the women leaving the colony, and the reader is left not knowing what will happen to them. Yet, the plot is not the most significant aspect of the book. The role of women in this society is the most important piece. The burning question is whether or not their faith means that they have to forgive these men who have attacked them. Faith is the theme of the book. Of course, the role of women is the most important talking point of the novel.

Book group had an extremely lively discussion about the book and the movie. The major gripe my friends had concerned the difficulty the readers had keeping track of the women. The problem is that their names are difficult to remember. This is not such a problem in the movie, because the viewer sees the faces of the women, and the names are not so important. In other words, it all made more sense in the movie. The movie stays pretty close to the book, although a few things are altered.

Reader reviews on Goodreads are all over the place on this book, but most professional reviewers gave the book high marks. Toews comes from a Mennonite community near Manitoba Canada. She left the colony when she was 18 and thus she is the perfect person to tell this story. She said that she had to write this story because it could have happened to her. Here is an interview with Toews that helps explain her desire to tell this story.