Irma Voth
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3.5 • 17 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Miriam Toews is a master storyteller at the height of her powers, who manages with trademark wry wit and a fierce tenderness to be at once heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny in Irma Voth.
Banished to a neighbouring farm for the sin of marrying a non-Mennonite Mexican, Irma Voth lives apart from the other Mennonites in her colony. Her new husband soon abandons her, and her only reprieve from isolation comes from the occasional secret visits of her younger sister Aggie and the little gifts sent by her mother. But change comes when a film crew from Mexico City moves into the empty house next to Irma's to make a film about Mennonites. Irma is hired on as translator and cook, and her involvement with the bohemian film crew sets her on a path that will push her into dangerous conflict with her strict, religious father, and out into the unfamiliar, exotic world of the big city.
Brimming with Toews's dazzling wit, Irma Voth tells the story of a young woman's turbulent journey towards self-discovery. It's a book that will grab you from the first page, and won't let go even after the last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
