Now, with Women Talking, Miriam Toews presents another perspective, drawing on an uncharacteristically gruesome inciting incident to craft an ambitious novel that circumvents shock value in favour of a subtler rumination on language and power.īased on the true story of "ghost rapes" in a Bolivian Mennonite colony, Women Talking begins in the wake of an appalling discovery: a small group of male colony members have been using animal tranquilizers to rape hundreds of women and girls in their sleep. Emma Cline’s The Girls sidesteps the lurid and well-trodden ground of the Manson Family murders to meditate on gender and identity Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny takes a more literal approach to a recent child murder in New York, changing superficial details while tracking each intimate step toward the act itself. Any ripped-from-the-headlines premise faces the question of distance: How can an author access real events faithfully and effectively without further violating the people who experienced them? In recent years, a number of novelists have adopted varying degrees of remoteness in their fictionalized accounts of highly publicized female trauma.
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