Lovely and crass and terrible. The chaotic village of the movie shoot in the desert is about the last place I'd ever want to be. And then things get harder for our protag before they get easier.

"...how do I preserve my dignity when nobody else is watching? By believing in a happy ending, I told myself." I think this refers to not being crushed by despair but I'm still thinking it over. ( )

Working my way through Toews oeuvre, Irma Voth continues her exploration of family and experiences of women in Mennonite religious cultures and families. I enjoyed the change of scenery, albeit there was definitely less of a presence of geography taken out of familiar Manitoba, and Irma's unfolding motivations that revealed so much pain and resilience.

I bought this because it was inspired by Carlos Reygadas’s Stellet Licht, which is set in a Mennonite community in Mexico. Toews plays a wife whose husband is having an affair with a younger woman. Toews used the experience of working on the film as a plot for a novel about a young woman who is hired to translate Mennonite Plattdeutsch for a critically-acclaimed Mexican director who is making a film in the Mennonite community. The title character and narrator of Irma Voth has been thrown out of her home after marrying a young Mexican man, and is living in a neighbouring house owned by her father. The film crew live in a third house owned by the father. Irma has a younger sister who still lives with their father, but wants to leave. The movie gets made, although it’s a somewhat chaotic production, and Irma and her sister end up running away to a nearby city. They live rough for a while, but then Irma gets a job as housemaid at a B&B, and the two settle down to a life free from their family and community. However, the real draw of Irma Voth is the prose, which is written in first person, without speech marks. This is the proper way to do a first-person narrative. It’s all about the world-view, it’s about filtering events through the narrator’s personality; and not the cheap and easy story-telling far too many first-person narratives prove to be. The movie described in Irma Voth doesn’t actually map onto Stellet Licht – and I would hope Toews’s director is not a true depiction of Reygadas. I will be watching more films by Reygadas, and I will be reading more books by Toews. ( )

This story was not quite as emotionally involving as I thought it might be. The story is simple enough, but there are gaps in it. The gaps mainly have to do with the characters. This girl has a rough relationship with her father, though he barely talks to her so we don't really get to know why it's so rough, at least not until nearly the end of the novel. She's married, to a man who doesn't really love her. And, who it seems, she doesn't love much either. (My thought of course, is why get married in the first place, and why that young?)

Irma Voth's character is made to be the catalyst for several negative events: the death of her sister, which leads to the estrangement with her father, the abandonment from her husband, the death of another man in her community after she steals her husbands drugs. It's all just a lot, a little too much even, for an 18 year old to go through.

And the fact that they just happened to find all these people so willing to help a couple of runaways, was a little too good to be true. Or maybe I'm just too cynical. ( )

Though I did not love it as much as "A Complicated Kindness", this was a great read, with the strange juxtaposition of the Mennonite family living an 1800's lifestyle in the present time. When Irma rebels, her father's vengeance is frightening, but as sheltered and confused as she is she digs up strength and resilience and saves herself and her sisters. ( )