The Writing Circle.

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern
Languages and Literatures at Laurentian University.

The writing circle is comprised of five very different professional women who live in Cape Town, South Africa. Isabel (a social worker), Jazz (a neurosurgeon), Carmen (a psychodrama therapist), Amina (a fashion designer), and Beauty (a sculptor), meet weekly “to share their experience of writing memory, of writing the body.” As the novel opens, Isabel is attacked and raped at gunpoint in her car just as she arrives home where the group is waiting for her. In the struggle she manages to shoot and kill her rapist. The women of the writing circle rush to help their friend, then clandestinely get rid of the body and deal with the repercussions of Isabel’s trauma and their participation in this horrible experience. As they do, their own stories of hope, fear, despair, successes, and disappointments, are revealed and woven together in surprising ways. When the body unexpectedly turns up and is identified, more shocks ripple through the group and the women have to confront their own fears and stereotypes as well as those of the others.

The individual and interwoven stories of these five women play out as part of the violence that permeates South Africa in the 1990s, each one stepping forward with her personal experiences of sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological abuse, yet still finding the strength and courage to survive, endure, and overcome.

Maart has all the requisite elements for an absorbing narrative: five women narrators, each of whom describes events from her own perspective; a merciless examination of the covert violence in women’s lives; the condemnation of the overt violence and racial and sexual discrimination of the times; intrigue; suspense; and unexpected and shocking revelations and outcomes. It is a pity that her writing style—often stilted, awkwardly burdened with excessive adjectives and an inappropriate formality of description—distracts the reader. Yet, if one can get past the stylistic impediments, The Writing Circle is still a strangely compelling novel.