Miriam Toews, _Women Talking_

SHORT AND POWERFUL. Toews's novel is based on actual events in a small, isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia. Women were awaking some mornings to find themselves battered and groggy. Their community leader told them Satan was punishing them, but it turned some men in the community were knocking them out at night with animal tranquilizers in order to rape them. Grim.

Toews's novel is set up as the transcript of a series of meetings held by women in a fictional small South American Mennonite community after they learn that they have been molested in just the way described above. Should they accept things as they are? Should they fight? Should they leave?

The women are present at this meeting because they have already decided they cannot accept things as they are. How can they fight, though, since the men have a monopoly on the community's resources? But can they leave? They can neither read nor write, and know almost nothing of the world outside their community. And the Bible commands submission to their husbands--there's that, too.

It takes them a while to sort this out. As they do, Toews arranges their discussion so that we get a vivid sense of each woman and of the community's history and values.

There's an interesting word in koiné Greek--katargein--that Paul uses to describe the Christian community's relationship to Jewish law. (In Luther's translation of Paul, he used the word aufheben, which on to have its own rich history with Hegel.) The word means an overthrowing, an emptying out, a negation. Paul seems to be suggesting something subtler, more elusive, but crucial--not simple rejection and replacement of the law, but an overcoming of the law that somehow includes the law, in a transformed sense.

The women of Women Talking have a stark choice: a livable life for themselves and (even more urgently) their daughters, versus maintaining their faith. They cannot imagine continuing to lead the life the men have imposed on them. But they cannot imagine leaving their faith, either--it is almost literally all they know. Is there a way of re-understanding that faith? Can the faith transcend itself, overcome itself in a way that transforms itself?

Toews's novel is set in a barn and is nothing but earnest conversation, but the stakes are gigantic.