“Women Talking” at Iranian bookstores

A Persian translation of Canadian writer Miriam Toews’ novel “Women Talking” has come to Iranian bookstores.

Iranart: Avaj is the publisher of the book rendered into Persian by Somayyeh Jafarinejad.

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.

Toews is a writer of Mennonite descent. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba and has lived in Montreal and London, before settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

She studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of King’s College in Halifax, and has also worked as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist.

Her non-fiction book “Swing Low: A Life” was a memoir of her father, a victim of lifelong depression. Her 2004 novel "A Complicated Kindness" was her breakthrough work, spending over a year on the Canadian bestseller lists and winning the Governor General’s Award for English Fiction. 

The novel, about a teenage girl who longs to escape her small Russian Mennonite town and hang out with Lou Reed in the slums of New York City, was also nominated for the Giller Prize and was the winning title in the 2006 edition of Canada Reads.

source: Tehran Times