The Writing Circle by Rozena Maart

Tsar Books, 2007
Review by Suzanne Kamata

The group friendship novel is a staple of women’s literature. Typically, such a novel brings together several women who went to college together (as in Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a classic of the genre) or women who grew up in the same neighborhood (as in Rebecca Wells’ best-selling The Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.) Often the women in these novels are from similar socio-economic backgrounds, although their lives may have veered off in different directions. In her latest novel, The Writing Circle, South African expatriate Rozena Maart, who now lives in Canada, uses a writing group to bring together women of various walks of life. As the urge to writes affects people of all classes and cultures, it’s a clever ploy – one that allows us to see a dissection of multi-cultural South Africa.

The novel is told in five voices - those of Isabel, a counselor of sexually abused women; Jazz, a doctor of Indian descent whose parents are looking to marry her off; Amina, a divorced Muslim from a wealthy family who lives with her mother and son; Beauty, a Xhosa whose husband died at the hands of the police; and Carmen, an English woman who is in a relationship with Jazz’s brother. The book starts off with Isabel, who is hosting the writing group at her home in a suburb of Cape Town. She is brutally raped in her car while the others wait inside the house for her to come home. In her struggle to get free, she manages to grab the rapist’s gun and then accidentally shoots and kills him. The gunshot finally attracts the attention of the other women, who decide to dispose of the body and conceal the crime. Throughout the rest of the novel, Isabel and her writing companions, all of whom have been sexually assaulted at some point, deal with the emotional repercussions of this incident.

In South Africa, which has been called “the rape capital of the world,” women of all classes, ages, and cultures are at risk. Maart drives the point home in this compelling psychological drama.

_________________

Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.