Beautiful, beautiful writing

I have enjoyed other Toews books more than Irma Voth... but still, despite the at times rambling conversations, I found this to be an interesting look at a journey to independence. Toews reminds us that path can be long, winding, and with lots of potholes. But... if you persevere... you might find success.

“When life is a shit storm your best umbrella is art.”

When I read this in my first year of school, I remember hating it. I couldn’t really tell you why. Likely I bounced off of the unorthodox writing style and made a judgement. I seem to also remember feeling strongly that “not all Mennonites are like that!” which is so clearly not what she’s saying and also misses that like half the story is Voth’s dad being obsessive and controlling. I have no memory of the big final “reveal” and I don’t remember keying into the emotionality whatsoever. I just decided that I’d hated it. I remember having a lot of strong opinions in my freshmen year, and they were almost all dumb and shortsighted.

It’s also possible I was less depressed in my first year. I think I certainly had depression but I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t care to actually feel it at all. I was too busy burying everything to connect to the story of a broken woman reckoning with how disastrous her life has become. I don’t think I understood any of Irma’s choices and I doubt I had cared to try.

Anyways this book is awesome and is basically everything I love from storytelling now. Miriam Toews keeps kind of writing the same story but I’m very into that story so I will keep reading it. She keeps finding new angles to talk about intergenerational womanhood and trauma, about listless people trying to find roots and only seeing them in unlikely communities. And she writes depression very very well.

“The time is 11:02 a.m. My name is Irma Voth. I’m on a plane. I’m not a good person. I’m not a smart person. I may be a free person. If this is how it feels.”

I’m not sure what it is about Irma Voth as a book that sets it apart from Fight Night and A Complicated Kindness, which feel very similar structurally, but I do think it’s something about how Toews is able to convey all the issues bubbling underneath. A lot of Irma’s relationship with her father is told subtextually, which is maybe why a dumb 19-year old bounced off of this while a less-dumb 26-year old was kindly ruined by it. Irma is a narrator who says a lot but always avoids saying the things she actually cares about, leaving the reader to slowly piece her life together. I also think this is the only Toews book I’ve read that has a built-in framing device; I could be forgetting one, but there’s certainly a lot added once you realize Irma is also piecing everything together through her journaling. You are discovering her at the same time she is discovering herself, which is what makes the closing chapter so damn compelling.

“Maybe seeing a movie is like dying, but in a beautiful way.”

Toews camps out in the same part of my soul as Dostoevsky, and maybe there’s just something vaguely Eastern European about being Mennonite or maybe there’s something vaguely Russian about being from Manitoba, but I am in love with these sad religious people finding a love for life in unexpected places. Inject the canon of both these writers into my bloodstream. I think I need it to live.

I love Miriam Toews but this one just didn't work for me. The last 50 or so pages were good, but it was work to get there. I am looking forward to All My Puny Sorrows.

It felt so vivid at first, so urgent. By the end it felt like a blurry, rushed story. But the writing, throughout the novel, is unquestionably beautiful.