Women Talking
Ratings71
Average rating3.7
The internationally bestselling novel based on real events. Now a major motion picture from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. “This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale.” --Margaret Atwood, on Twitter "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." --New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape? Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide. Named a Best Book of the Year By THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (Notable Books of the Year) * NPR.ORG* THE WASHINGTON POST * REAL SIMPLE * THE NEW YORK TIMES (PARUL SEHGAL'S TOP BOOKS OF THE YEAR) * SLATE * STAR TRIBUNE (MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL) * LITHUB * AUSTIN CHRONICLE * GOOP* ELECTRIC LITERATURE * KIRKUS REVIEWS * JEZEBEL* BUSTLE * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY * TIME* LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE AV CLUB * MASHABLE * VOX *
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I would give it a 3.5/5.
I understand what the author was trying to do, but (in all honesty) I found it very boring to read. Sad? Yes. Compelling? Sure. Thought provoking? Absolutely. But boring.
At the end, it would have really helped it altogether for me if we would have seen the reaction of the men once they returned. Then finish with the rabbit and the squirrel reflection. Especially since we are following along with a story told by a man who stayed behind. I wanted to see the consequences, even if it was just a glimpse.
I liked the ending, which cast a new light on what I had been finding annoyingly abstract, unnecessarily philosophical conversations of the “women talking,” their ruminations over whether to stay in or leave their abusive community. Why all this debate, just leave already! But in the end, the question I should have paid more attention to – why one of the women asked a man to record the conversations in a language they did not understand and could not read – was answered as the purpose for the whole exercise, which was quite a neat narrative trick. It almost made me forgive the absurdity of the style of recording, which was completely impossible; there's no way the transcriber would be able to write down word for word dialogue in the way he supposedly did.
Thematically, the question is how, whether, why one can forgive an unforgiveable act. This also was answered in the ending, which showed that one way, at least, is not to try to pay back the attacker, which only continues the cycle of suffering, nor to get back what he stole from you, which is impossible, but to give, give something positive to another who is suffering, give of yourself without being asked or demanded of or attacked. That is my personal experience as well, that difficult as it may be to open up and be vulnerable and real when you've been so wounded, it is the only way to stop the trauma from having control over you.
This was an interesting read after having enjoyed the movie. There are meaningful differences and it's dense enough that it didn't feel like I was just playing the movie through in my head again.
There are a lot of sort of philosophical and religious debates topics here that aren't strikingly original, but are still interesting to explore (if you truly believed in eternal salvation, why would you ever stop trying to save those you care about?). There's a large cast of characters with different viewpoints and experiences, and there is plenty of the titular talk to that kept me engrossed.
I did find it a bit strange that even with this title, the entire thing is from the point of view of a make narrator, but it does make sense in the context of the story, and I found the final monologue to be very moving.
Definitely recommend this whether you've seen the movie or not.
