One thing that stands out about the parentheticals is their inconsistent nature, as though August himself cannot make up his mind about how much he should or wants to insert himself into the story. The parentheticals that August includes throughout his “minutes” ask us as readers to question from the novel’s outset the structure of the novel as a set of objective minutes and whether these minutes (or any narration) are objective or can ever be objective. And at the end of the novel, we learn that the reason August has been asked to act as minute-taker is maybe not because the women actually want some record of their discussions, but because they are concerned that he will die by suicide and want to give him some task to prevent this, making the narrative itself largely irrelevant. This potential narrative powerlessness is reinforced by the parentheticals: August as narrator frames the story, but much of his incursions come in the form of parenthetical asides.
But a close read of the parentheticals that form a unique structural feature of this novel suggests that Toews is not only commenting on how narration, no matter how objective it claims to be, can never be unbiased, but also on how narrators themselves may not have the power they believe they have. The choice to filter the story through the perspective of a man, even one who lacks the same power as other men in the story, and to set up the novel so the only record of the women’s discussion and decision-making is captured by him at first feels like another act of disempowerment. August, although a man, is treated as an outsider by the other men in the colony due to his parents having been banished years before, and due to August having thus spent time outside the colony, including in prison, before returning. The women, who cannot read or write, have convened a series of secret meetings that form the bulk of the novel to discuss their choices, and have designated August, the colony’s school teacher, as the minute taker. In Toews’s novel, August Epps, a man and the novel’s narrator, acts as “minute-taker” for meetings of women in a Mennonite colony as they try to determine whether they will leave the community after a series of rapes committed by men in the colony.
Parentheticals may seem like a lowly subject, but Miriam Toews uses them to great effect in her 2018 novel, Women Talking, as a tool to explore and undermine ideas about objective narration, reflect on power in narration, who gets to narrate particular stories, and how the person who appears to have power in a particular story may not have power at all.
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