Contents
1. Speaking Waskahikan
2. Sailing to Danzig
3. Flour and Yeast
4. On Lastfire Lake
5. Tongue Screw
6. Manhattan
7. Believing Is Seeing
8. Left-handed Woman
9. Table Setting
10. Crossing the Volga
11. Sleeping with Franz Kafka
12. The Holy Community of the Bride
13. Except God Who Already Knows
14. A Plan for Jews and Mennonites
15. The Shells of the Ocean
16. A Tour of Siberia
17. In the Ear of the Beholder
18. My Brother Vanya
19. Birch and Lilac
20. The Hills of Number Eight Romanovka
21. Bones of the Atacama Desert
22. Homestead
23. A Ladder of Angels
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Rudy Wiebe was born on October 4, 1934, in an isolated farm
community of about 250 people in a rugged but lovely region near
Fairholme, Saskatchewan. His parents had escaped Soviet Russia with
five children in 1930, part of the last generation of homesteaders
to settle the Canadian West, and part of a Mennonite history of
displacement and emigration through Europe and Asia to North and
South America since the seventeenth century. In 1947 his family
gave up their bush farm and moved to Coaldale, Alberta, a town east
of Lethbridge peopled largely by Ukrainians, Mennonites, Mormons,
and Central Europeans, as well as Japanese, who ended up there
during WW II.
Rudy Wiebe read as much as possible from an early age; his first
reading materials were the Bible, the Eaton's catalogue and the
Free Press Weekly Prairie Farmer; he also recalls listening to his
parents’ stories of Russia. By Grade 4, he had read through the two
shelves of books available in the one-room schoolhouse. Growing up,
he enjoyed Les Miserables, Toilers of the Sea, David Copperfield,
Tom Brown's Schooldays, Greek myths and Norse legends. Later an
admirer of Faulkner, Márquez, Borges and Tolstoy, Wiebe has always
held to the fundamentals of plot, character and, above all, story.
He believes stories should begin in the specific and local but
expand into “a human truth larger than any individual.”
Wiebe won his first prize for fiction while studying literature at
the University of Alberta, where he enrolled in a writing class and
began producing poems, plays and stories. His winning story in a
Canada-wide contest recounted a young boy’s response to the death
of his sister -- based on Wiebe’s own experience -- and was
published in the magazine Liberty in 1956. After earning his B.A.,
Wiebe left for the ancient University of Tübingen in West Germany
on a Rotary Fellowship to study literature and theology, an
experience that increased his respect for older and richer
communities. Tena Isaak of British Columbia joined him there and
they were married. The couple travelled in England, Austria,
Switzerland and Italy before returning to Edmonton, where Wiebe
completed his M.A. in creative writing. His thesis grew into his
first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many.
In 1962 Wiebe earned a Bachelor of Theology degree from the
Mennonite Brethren Bible College; he considered becoming a
minister. He was editor of Winnipeg’s Mennonite Brethren Herald
when Peace Shall Destroy Many was published. Many conservative
ministers and Mennonites in small towns objected to the novel's
frank and at times unflattering portrait of community life, and
there was considerable opposition to the book. “I wasn't exactly
sacked as editor . . . but the committee came to me and said
‘Ahem.’ I resigned.” The strength of this reaction made him think
hard about the power of the written word, and reinforced his sense
of wanting to be a writer.
Wiebe then was invited to teach at a Mennonite college in Goshen,
an agricultural town in Indiana with a large Mennonite and Amish
population, where he would be Assistant Professor of English from
1963 to 1967. Goshen College was a lively and stimulating
intellectual community where Wiebe committed himself to writing,
study, teaching and travel. “I encountered men and women of real
perception . . . really literate Christians who saw themselves as
Jesus's followers and at the same time were acquainted with the
thoughts of others and had brought that kind of understanding to
bear on what it means to be a Christian. The best thing that ever
happened to me was the meetings we had every two or three weeks in
one home or another – seven or eight of us, a psychiatrist, a
couple of theologians, a couple of literary people. There were the
best theologians there, I think, the Mennonite Church has ever
had.”
Wiebe published his second novel, First and Vital Candle, and began
to explore the western United States and the Mennonite settlements
in Paraguay. He returned to Edmonton as a professor in creative
writing and English at the University of Alberta, and immersed
himself in Canadian literature. He wrote reviews, essays and
articles, edited anthologies and was soon established as a major
figure in Canadian letters. In 1973, his novel The Temptations of
Big Bear won a Governor General's Award. Since then he has
continued to win the highest praise for his books of fiction and
non-fiction. He has written numerous film and television scripts,
lectured internationally from Denmark to India, and given readings
from Adelaide to Puerto Rico to Helsinki and Igloolik. For thirty
years he taught literature and creative writing at colleges and
universities in Canada, the United States and Germany. Now retired
from teaching, his former students include such accomplished
writers as Myrna Kostash, Aritha van Herk, Thomas Wharton and
Katherine Govier.
Wiebe was called the first major Mennonite writer to place his
community’s experience in a broader framework. Mennonites assert
the fundamental authority of Scripture, especially the New
Testament, as a practical guide to life. But while Wiebe imbues his
work with a deep moral seriousness, his focus has always been on
narrative. “I never consciously think of writing a so-called
Christian novel. I don’t think Albert Camus ever thought of writing
an existentialist novel, either. I think of getting at, of
building, a story.” As a prairie writer, he has often concerned
himself with Native stories, feeling place of birth to be more
important than blood ancestry. “Those Mennonite villages in Russia
are my heritage, but not my world. The world I feel and sense in my
bones is the bush of northern Saskatchewan, of prairie Canada.”
Native spirituality, with its vital links to the physical world,
has always attracted him. But his fiction manages to transcend
nationality and locale to explore the struggles of communities and
individuals; his books and stories have been translated into nine
European languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Hindi.
Whatever Wiebe’s focus in a given work, he has always chosen
ambitious themes, and his work rewards readers with an intensity
seldom rivalled. He is a voice of Canadian fiction that cannot be
ignored, and whose work promises to endure.
“A creative exploration of the interrelationships between personal
identity, religious faith and historical particularity…. Wiebe
is…successful in crafting a range of haunting and evocative
images.”
–Mennonite Brethren Herald
“A beautiful, moving book….there is some absolutely lovely stuff
here….The descriptions…are marvellous….the book achieves a
wonderful cinematic clarity…”
–Mark Sinnett, The Globe and Mail, Saturday, October 27, 2001
“With the audacious confidence of a mature writer, [Wiebe] breathes
life into a series of Mennonite characters, who tell their stories
from beyond the grave, in the first person and in present
tense.”
–Maclean’s
“This is a profoundly serious book. It is a many-voiced
testimonial, a discrete series of monologues, and it functions by
accumulation, one horrific tale after another, augmenting into a
chorus of witnesses…. Sweeter Than All the World is a construct of
iron tongs and stone, a testimony to what Italo Calvino called …
“the virtues of weight.”… [T]his novel deserves respect. It is an
important work; a fictional compilation of voices from Mennonite
history, and a resonant portrait of a contemporary man inflicted
with a chronic (and, it would seem, inherited) sense of
brokenness.”
–Margaret Sweatman, Ottawa Citizen
“His great strength lies in meticulous research, passion for his
subjects, and a powerful narrative sweep….Fascinating.”
–Quill and Quire
“Intellectually and psychologically challenging….a difficult
exercise is ultimately rewarding….
–Calgary Herald
“A panoramic examination of Mennonite history through the story of
one particular family.”
–Saskatoon StarPhoenix
“Wiebe is a writer who does his homework…There is much of interest
here, unusual and pertinent points of history, and they are vividly
revisited…. the book rises to poetic heights as Wiebe’s unerring
sense of place allows it to soar…”
–London Free Press
“There are breathtaking scenes infused with poignant beauty…”
–Times-Colonist (Victoria)
“Rudy Wiebe has written his epic….richly satisfying and worth
reading and pondering again and again.”
–Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“Wiebe succeeds in making [history] dramatic, intriguing, romantic
and tragic.”
–Calgary Herald
Praise for A Discovery of Strangers:
“A work of extraordinary originality and beauty.”
–The Globe and Mail
“A pleasure of the first order — the pleasure of true art.”
—Edmonton Journal
Praise for Stolen Life:
“So rich...I couldn’t put it down.”
–Ann-Marie MacDonald
“The most powerful book I’ve ever read.... Insightful, poetic,
gripping.”
— The Hamilton Spectator
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