Review by New York Times Review
IRMA VOTH, the narrator of the Canadian writer Miriam Toews's new novel, has a name that sounds as if she's a plucky 19th-century heroine, and she has a life imported from another century as well. Irma is a Mennonite living on an isolated farm near the city of Chihuahua, Mexico, where her family fled from Canada after the death of Irma's older sister. "We live like ghosts," Irma says of the Mennonites. This strict Christian sect has a history of abrupt departures after persecution by governments that grow tired of their quest to live, as Irma puts it "purely but somewhat out of context." Nineteen-year-old Irma herself is now living completely out of context, having been expelled by her father for marrying a Mexican, who promptly disappeared. She lives alone in a house near her family, discouraged from talking to them, not quite sure how everything went so wrong. But soon a Mexican film crew arrives to shoot an art-house feature set among the Mennonites. As Irma begins working as a translator for the project, the design of this endearingly odd and affecting novel becomes clear. Encouraged by the director to keep a notebook of her ideas so she won't badger him about his, Irma is writing her way to a new understanding of her sad, strange life - and working up the courage to make a new beginning. That will come when Irma and her spirited younger sister, Aggie, effect a daring escape with a newborn sister their exhausted mother has placed in their care, setting out for Mexico City. Can art - the passionate, all-in kind of art that the film's director is trying to create with directives like "I want her eyes to harm me. I want her, I mean her, to be too big for her body, a living secret" - really save a girl as unmoored as Irma? She has nothing to lose as she gropes for words to put in her notebook. Fortunately, thanks to Toews's off-kilter sense of humor, Irma is also in a preposterous situation, surrounded by hilarious characters, including a 41-year-old German actress who tells her that because of an unspecified trauma she "stopped progressing at 14" and has a 16-year-old son who is "spiritually much older. I'd say closer to 80." Then there's the exuberant, manipulative director and his rescued pit bull, a creature that is, he insists, "haunted by his criminal past, a life he would never have chosen for himself." But for all its slow-burn funniness and faith in the redeeming power of art, the novel is built on an awareness that Irma can never fully escape her family's history of pain, suffering and loss - the old, old wounds that, Toews suggests, partly explain the extreme behavior of men like Irma's abusive father, who "lost his family when he was a little kid," his parents and sisters murdered by Russian soldiers and buried in a ditch. This is Toews's fifth novel, and I wonder if she would be marketed as a writer of young adult fiction if she were to begin her career today, when that category has finally been recognized for its literary merit and appeal, even to adult readers. She writes with an instinctive grasp of the adolescent point of view, in which concepts like personal freedom and self-determination have the highest emotional charge and adults are powerful but slightly irrelevant beings. Her most celebrated novel, "An Uncommon Kindness," is narrated by another Mennonite teenager, who also rejects her repressive heritage and is forced to live by her own considerable wits. Like "Irma Voth," it's a sly, humorous but still distressing evocation of a young Mennonite's predicament, which is your standard small-town adolescent crisis magnified by a thousand - depression thick in the air, attempts to navigate any aspect of one's life systematically quashed, shame heaped upon any nonconformist behavior. Later in "Irma Voth," Toews depicts Mexico City, with its freewheeling, artsy, generous culture, as the answer, a fantasia of possibility for Irma and Aggie, herself a budding artist. They arrive penniless, homeless, friendless and with a screaming infant, but are soon taken in by a cheerfully eccentric childless couple who happen to own a bed-and-breakfast and love both art and babies. The girls score employment, shelter and low-key, benignly parental oversight in one fell swoop. I refuse to call this implausible because I fervently hope such an excellent outcome will someday, somewhere be enjoyed by real-life homeless teenagers with a baby in tow. As for Irma Voth, even with such late-breaking luck she still has a great struggle in front of her, a struggle Toews never minimizes. As Irma's mother tells her in a dream: "Just begin." IN Toews's memoir of her father's life, "Swing Low," published in Canada a decade ago but being released for the first time in the United States to coincide with the publication of "Irma Voth," she dives deeply into an adult point of view, that of her own dead father. As we learn in the book's prologue, Toews's father, Mel, committed suicide in 1998 soon after retiring from the teaching job that, it turns out, kept him functioning. He'd received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder early in life and was medicated for it, but still lived with a sense of barely outrunning his demons. He chose not to speak of himself or his pain, to his family or anyone else. Just before he died, Toews heard him mutter the words "nothing accomplished." That despair inspired the writing of a book to "prove my father wrong." The memoir's epigraph is Kafka's lines about the last moment before a person dies, in which he "surveys his whole life. For the first time - and the last time." "Swing Low" works beautifully as a literary exploration of what such a survey might look like. And there's something, yes, Kafkaesque about a bipolar man holding it together in the rural Canadian Mennonite setting in which Toews grew up, which she plays for humor as well as pathos. Mel, the book's narrator, is lying in a local hospital that lacks a psychiatric staff, scrambling to write notes on a legal pad that will make sense of his situation and the trajectory of his life, grasping for words because words are all he has left and because the act of writing helps him avoid the shame of his inactivity. The insular Mennonite community is both a caldron for Mel's illness - a nurse informs him that there are "an unusually high number of Mennonites who suffer from depression" - and, it becomes clear, the reason he was able to have a career and a family. The unvarying rhythms of home, school and church contained the chaos within him, and his need to take to his bed on the weekends, often rising only to attend services and eat dinner, was accommodated by Miriam Toews's mother, Elvira, "a good Mennonite wife" who comes off as a marvel of good humor, constancy and unconditional love. As Mel looks back, other family members seem far less blameless, but the heartbreak of "Swing Low" is that Mel always blames himself. The magic of it is that Toews makes a life that looked ordinary, even grindingly so, seem exalted. The Mennonites, a strict Christian sect, live, as Toews's heroine puts it, 'purely but somewhat out of context.' Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
Toews' unique voice shines in her fifth novel a simultaneously poignant and humorous tale of a young Mennonite woman breaking out of her suffocating cocoon. When Irma Voth was 13, her father brought her family from Canada to a Mexican Mennonite community, where she still lives. Irma's father disowned her when she married Jorge, who dabbles in drug smuggling and is abusive and frequently absent. Her prospects dramatically improve when a film crew from Mexico City arrives, hoping to make a movie about her community. Irma is hired as a translator, and her world suddenly expands as Diego, the director, teaches her about the creative process, and his leading actress spouts philosophy in her off-hours strange ideas that Irma soaks up like a sponge. But her father disapproves of the filthy pornography-producing crew and puts a bounty on Diego's head. Toews perfectly captures this young woman's attempt to find her niche in a world so different from that in which she was raised as she leaves her family behind, filled with hope and certain that her future can only be better.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Toews's (A Complicated Kindness) story unfolds in a remote Mennonite outpost in Mexico, where the strictly observant cross paths with the narcos, creating an uncomfortable cultural mix of Spanish, English, and Low German. Nineteen-year-old Irma tells of her own alienation from the Mennonites after marrying a young Mexican man. Though she still lives near her family, her patriarchal father has ordered her shunned (her spirited little sister, however, continues to visit, half-angry, half-longing for brief contact). After a quick wedding, Irma's husband is rarely home, and Irma is lonely until an eccentric crew of filmmakers arrives to make a movie set among the Mennonites. Irma works as a translator and finds much in common with these artists and lost souls. But her father holds an overblown hatred of the filmmakers, believing them evil. When his menacing opposition begins to threaten the film-and her sister's safety-Irma, ennobled by her experience on the production, makes a radical choice that will greatly affect her family. With her fifth novel, Toews, who was born into a Mennonite community in Canada, combines an intimate coming-of-age tale with picaresque and extremely effective prose. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An unworldly Mennonite girl with a tainted past considers a life without the direction of her father, her husband or God, then implements it, in the latest from Canadian writer Toews (The Flying Troutmans, 2008, etc.).Nineteen-year-old Irma is already breaking away from her Mennonite community in Mexico as the novel opens. Her marriage to Jorge, who is involved in the drug trade, has brought down the wrath of her dictatorial father, and the family chasm only deepens when a film crew arrives and Irma starts working for them as a translator. Irma's voiceminimal, introverted, bewilderedlends poetic intensity, softened by a tragi-comic edge, to the initially slow-moving story. As tensions rise between the bohemian film crew and the rigid religious community and her marriage disintegrates, Irma plans her escape, accompanied by her 13-year-old sister and, then, at her mother's behest, the new baby. Now the narrative springs to life as the girls exchange austerity for freedom and friendship in Mexico City, where students help them to settle. Pleasure and creativity enliven them, but past deeds must still be reconciled, a task which Irma eventually begins to tackle.A literary novel marked by charm, wit and an original approach to language, weakened by polarized characters and a shift from gritty to soft-centered.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
