Irma Voth by Miriam Toews

72 World Literature Today reviews irresolute encounter between a man and himself as he was a year previously ; the unforgettable “Wolves” by José Luis Zárate, in which a “blizzard of wolves, thousands, millions” inexplicably descend from the mountains and transform forever the inhabitants of a village in their path; and Carmen Rioja’s “The Nahual Offering,” a veritable maze of overlapping dreams that manipulate time to devastating effect by juxtaposing an ancient ritual against the depredations wrought by urbanization. This sampler suffices to indicate the main features of this collection. First, its contents are “stories” only in the loosest sense of the word. Second , in many stories, elements of the fantastic are understated, ambiguous, and may not be present at all. Third, many require the reader to supply meaning, interpretation, and even closure. Fourth, most are very short. Our sampler also illustrates that Mexican fiction of the fantastic has more in common with the European fantastic than with its anglophone counterparts. Never forced into genre pigeonholes by market forces, writers of the Mexican fantastic were free to adopt any fictional form, from conventional narratives to prose poems, from dream fragments to visionary vignettes. Yet even as they freely adapted narrative strategies such as expressionism, surrealism, and the absurd, many of their stories germinated from legends, ancient myths, and animistic beliefs from Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past. These remarks suggest what general readers most need but do not get in Three Messages: an introduction in which the editors describe their goals and criteria, and story notes that provide essential context about Mexico, Mexican fiction, and the place and nature of the Mexican fantastic. Happily, you can fill this gap with Dalkey Archive’s Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (2009). Its introduction and sixteen representative stories, some fantastic, others not, by authors born after 1945 also fill out the pointillistic picture of the landscape of Mexican fiction created by the thirty-four (much shorter) stories in Three Messages. All readers interested in Mexican fiction will relish Three Messages, as will adventuresome enthusiasts of the fantastic. Keep your mind open, savor each story, and expect the unexpected . You won’t be disappointed. Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Miriam Toews. Irma Voth. New York. HarperCollins. 2011. isbn 9780062070180 Readers familiar with the work of the Canadian writer Miriam Toews will recognize in Irma Voth, her fifth novel, her characteristic use of the female voice, terse dialogue, and insightful if cutting commentary on Mennonite culture, although in a different setting—the Mennonite colonies of northern Mexico. In an isolated community in the state of Chihuahua, nineteen-yearold Irma Voth lives in “forced separation ” from her family, ostracized by her rigid father for her marriage to a non-Mennonite Mexican who now has abandoned her and for her longstanding irreverence toward their Mennonite culture. The arrival of a film crew from Mexico City to make a movie about “beautiful people in a beautiful part of the world” aggravates the situation when Irma becomes the Plattdeutsch (Mennonite Low German) interpreter to the Russian Mennonite who has come from Germany to play the wife of the male lead (a local Mennonite). The presence of outsiders from the city further upsets the tenuous balance when Irma’s thirteen-year-old sister, Aggie, distances herself from her father. And hints of violence underscore the story: the drug connections of Irma’s husband and even some Mennonites, the vague menace of the film director’s pet pit bull, the quick tempers of both Irma’s husband and her father, and the secret that caused the family’s sudden move to Mexico from Canada when Irma was thirteen. The coming-of-age story turns picaresque as Irma abandons her home and the film, fleeing to Chihuahua City, Acapulco, and Mexico City with Aggie and their younger sister, Ximena. In the capital they embrace what Irma comes to understand as the “waking life,” and they learn city and countercultural ways. Aggie studies art and Irma studies people: “I wanted to observe these people and make notes in my notebook.” (Toews’s style, in fact, sometimes feels like a diary.) Aggie’s paintings and Irma’s notes eventually become the catharsis that...

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