![]() Its plot, which turns on an unwanted pregnancy, scandalized the Mennonite Brethren. That suggestion led to Wiebe’s first book, Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962). His adviser told him that many people write bad papers on Shakespeare, “but perhaps only you can write a fine novel about Canadian Mennonites.” ![]() At the University of Alberta he wanted to write his master’s dissertation on violence in Romeo and Juliet (“I still think a blood-feud is a stupid basis for a play”). ![]() He grew up speaking Low German, High German, and English. Wiebe’s parents were Mennonites who fled Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1930 and homesteaded in northern Saskatchewan. ![]() The new volume incorporates a discontinuous thread of autobiography (one of the few literary genres Wiebe has not attempted at full length) his scattered recollections of “the only lifetime I presently know I have” are inevitably connected to his religious beliefs. Where the Truth Lies interprets the category “essays” rather broadly, but certainly digs down into the mind and methodology of a figure whose books, without exception, deserve close attention and always repay the reader’s effort. In that time, he has naturally accumulated drawers full of fugitive pieces: lectures, talks, prefaces, newspaper articles. Rudy Wiebe, admired and revered for both his fiction and non-fiction, has been writing for publication since the 1950s. ![]()
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