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Rudy Wiebe has written award-winning fiction for decades. He is recognized as one of Canada's finest literary treasures. Twice he has received Canada's most prestigious prize for fiction writing: The Governor-General's Award (equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for fiction).

Now comes new recognition for Wiebe's nonfiction writing. His recently released childhood memoir, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, has won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction (considered to be the country's most prestigious literary nonfiction prize).

The book holds Rudy's memoirs of growing up through age 12. His immigrant family cut a farm out of stony bushland in remote Saskatchewan. They hand-dug their well, climbed a ladder to their beds under the rafters, farmed with horses, and traveled by sleigh on the frontier.

Stories and singing and food from their native Ukraine and Poland held them and filled their bodies and souls.

Of This Earth is written with "spare and eloquent prose," say the jurors who chose the book for the Charles Taylor Prize.

Wiebe "conveys the riches of a hardscrabble inheritance; a love of words, reading and music, a sustaining yet unsentimental faith, and a bond with the natural world, all of which have provided a compass for his writing life."

One of the Taylor-Prize jurors reflected, "Rudy's book haunts you; it stays with you."

... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Masterful
From the first page, I could see why "Of This Earth" won the Charles Taylor Prize. I had read two of Rudy Wiebe's other books, "Stolen Life" and "Peace Shall Destroy Many", and thought them well written, but the writing in this book is amazing! It's original and intricate and yet it never distracts or confuses, painting the scenes of a life so clearly that the reader is standing right beside young Rudy as he runs under the belly of a draft horse or sits at the kindergarten table in a one-room school house. I know I'll read this book over and over just to enjoy the way he uses words. It's a masterpiece! ... Read more

Product Description
Rudy Wiebe’s latest novel is at once an enthralling saga of the Mennonite people and one man’s emotional voyage into his heritage and his own self-discovery. Ambitious in its historical sweep, tender and humane, Sweeter Than All the World takes us on an extraordinary odyssey never before fully related in a contemporary novel.

The novel tells the story of the Mennonite people from the early days of persecution in sixteenth-century Netherlands, and follows their emigration to Danzig, London, Russia, and the Americas, through the horrors of World War II, to settlement in Paraguay and Canada. It is told episodically in a double-stranded narrative. The first strand consists of different voices of historical figures. The other narrative voice is that of Adam Wiebe, born in Saskatchewan in 1935, whom we encounter at telling stages of his life: as a small boy playing in the bush, as a student hunting caribou a week before his wedding, and as a middle-aged man carefully negotiating a temporary separation from his wife. As Adam faces the collapse of his marriage and the disappearance of his daughter, he becomes obsessed with understanding his ancestral past. Wiebe meshes the history of a people with the story of a modern family, laying bare the complexities of desire and family love, religious faith and human frailty.

The past comes brilliantly alive, beginning with the horrors of the Reformation, when Weynken Claes Wybe is burned at the stake for heretical views on Communion. We are caught up in the great events of each century, as we follow in the footsteps of Adam’s forebears: the genius engineer who invented the cable-car system; the artist Enoch Seeman, who found acclamation at the royal court in London after having been forbidden to paint by the Elders; Anna, who endures the great wagon trek across the Volga in 1860, leaving behind her hopes of marriage so that her brothers will escape conscription in the Prussian army; and Elizabeth Katerina, caught in the Red Army’s advance into Germany when rape and pillage are the rewards given to soldiers. The title of the novel, taken from a hymn, reflects the beauty and sorrow of these stories of courage. In a startling act of invention, Sweeter Than All the World sets one man’s quest for family and love against centuries of turmoil.

Rudy Wiebe first wrote of Mennonite resettlement in his 1970 epic novel The Blue Mountains of China. Since then, much of his work has focused on re-imagining the history of the Canadian Northwest. In Sweeter Than All the World, as in many of his most acclaimed novels, Wiebe has sought out real historical characters to tell an extraordinary story. William Keith, a University of Toronto professor and author of a book about Wiebe, writes: “Wiebe has a knack for divining wells of human feeling in historical sources.” Here, all the main characters share his name, and the history is one to which he belongs. Moreover, alongside those flashbacks into history is revealed an utterly compelling contemporary story of a man whose background is not totally unlike the author’s own. Wiebe sets his narrative against his two favourite backdrops: the northern Alberta landscape, and the shared memories of the Mennonite people. Sweeter Than All the World is a compassionate, erudite and stimulating work of fiction that shares the deep-rooted concerns of all of Wiebe’s work: how to make history live in our imagination, and how we can best live our lives. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Hmm
A multi-century history of Mennonites, specifically Wiebes.What is the theme?What is sweeter than all the world?Familial love?He's not an easy man to read, but I enjoyed this one because of the history.Have to get hardcovers for my children before they're hard to find.

Not Quite What I was Expecting
I read this book because it was recommended on Amazon's page for _The Russländer_ by Sandra Birdsell.I really enjoyed that book, so I thought that I would give "Sweeter Than All the World" a try.

And, as the title of my review says, "Sweeter" wasn't exactly what I was expecting.One thing I enjoy in any novel, especially a "historical" one (in addition to a good story) is getting a good feel of what it was like to live at that particular time and place."Sweeter Than All the World" has that it parts, but it really contains two threads.One thread contains various interesting stories about Mennonites throughout history, while the other thread is Adam trying to make sense of himself, and his history, present, and future.

Personally, I found the "20th Century Adam" chapters to be tedious, but I don't want to be too discouraging if this sort of thing is your cup of tea.

However, be aware that this definitely isn't a historical novel along the lines of Michener's "Poland" or "Alaska".

Rudy's Good Book
If you like good writing, especially when it's grounded in real history, then you'll like Rudy Wiebe's Sweeter Than All the World..He takes on the story of a Mennonite family over time, a nearly epic family chronicle covering more than five hundred years,and succeeds astonishingly well.The chapters alternate between the historical/fictional stories and the contemporary story of Adam Wiebe and his family The three epigraphs give the reader a good entry into the novel, especially one from the poet Joseph Brodsky: "You're coming home again.What does that mean?"Answering that question is not so simple for Adam Wiebe, the main character.We watch as he loses his childhood home, then finds a home with his wife and family, only to lose it again, partly through his own actions but also because, like the rest of us, he has cast himself adrift in an over-hyped, noisy and fragmented contemporary society. You don't have to be Mennonite to recognize the emptiness of Adam's a long period of self-imposed wandering and exile.He searches to find not just himself but also to recover what he has at the opening of the novel - a sense of being at home.When her parents separate, his daughter too becomes a global wanderer, trying to lose what she feels is the heavy burden of her family past.When she disappears, Adam's wandering takes on a double purpose as he tries to find both his daughter and a place for himself within a recovered family past.
Home, for Rudy Wiebe, is not simply cast as a physical or geographical place and he makes no bones about the essentially spiritual nature of Adam's quest.In contrast to the wanderings of the earlier Mennonite families, forced by persecution and war, Adam's jaunts from lover to lover and airport to airport would seem almost trivial if they were not so painful for him and so familiar to us. As he did in The Blue Mountains of China, Wiebe's careful use of historical sources is convincingly interwoven with the voices of his semi/fictional characters.I enjoyed checking up on some of the historical references he cites at the novel's end and discovered just how historically accurate much of his "fictional" material really is. What finally knits the generations together here is storytelling.Their faith and beliefs, their lives, their accomplishments and their suffering are passed along in the family stories, a forcefor ill to the young Adam, but ultimately a powerful force good.Wiebe clearly believes that we need to strike a balance between forgetting the past and obsessing over it, and he comes down on the side of memory.His fictional Wiebe family finally shares the stories, not as a way of burdening the younger generation, but of a way of providing them with the roots they need to grow. ... Read more

Product Description
These studies of Canadian authors fulfill a real need in the study of Canadian literature. Each monograph is a separately bound study of about 55 pages. Each contains a biography of the author, a description of the tradition and milieu that influenced the author, a survey of the criticism on the author, a comprehensive essay on all the author's key works, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works. ... Read more

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This authoritative edition contains all fifty of Canadian literary icon Rudy Wiebe's short stories. For over fifty years, Canadian literary legend Rudy Wiebe has been defining and refining prairie literature through his oeuvre of world renowned novels, histories, essays, and short stories. He has introduced generations of readers far and wide to western Canadian Mennonite, aboriginal, and settler culture. Some say he wrote the book on historical prairie fiction. In fact, he's written quite a few. The book included all fifty short stories that Wiebe completed between 1955 and 2010, including one previously unpublished story. This is a must-have book for aficionados of great world literature, fans of prairie fiction, and Wiebe's faithful readers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Compelling and candid account of Mennonite wanderings
The Blue Mountains of China is an historical novel that tells the story of a set of Mennonite immigrations from the Ukraine SSR to Siberia, Canada, Paraguay, and briefly, China. The novel begins with a series of loosely connected chapters which move forward in time, and focus on individual and interior responses to the privations endured by Mennonites, who either are being forced from their land or are seeking that next elusive place on earth where Mennonites can be Mennonites. It is ultimately a convergent novel, with characters separately developed in early chapters being linked together as a saga of several families interrelated by beliefs, culture, and circumstance. I chose to read it because my paternal line comes from the same Mennonite background, and in fact, emigrated to the US from the same Mennonite colony, Molotschna, in the Ukraine SSR from whence this story originates. I found this novel to be quite moving, and wonderful in depicting the lives and thoughts and beliefs of my ancestors. The writer is respectful of the Mennonite community and of the devotion to God that many in that community try to include in their daily lives. At the same time, the characters are very human and flawed, and the writer is candid in his depiction of some of the real problems and issues that the Mennonites struggled with, including the often exaggerated insularity, and the piety that could be overstressed to the point of missing Christ's message regarding treatment of our fellow men, among others. He doesn't miss the complexity of martyrdom or deep sacrifice that several of his characters show, bringing out the quiet personal courage of someone acting on their convictions while also showing the apparent futility of some of these actions.

The novel begins with the kulakization and collectivization of the late 1920's and early 1930's in the USSR, where Mennonite and peasant agricultural villages of the Ukraine and other areas were deliberately dismantled by the state using the most cruel, brutal and murderous methods (see Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine for a general history of this time), including mass starvation. The author uses local and individual stories to show the effects of this policy on the Mennonites without specifically describing the larger history. Through his patient development of characters he fleshes out the effects of Mennonite beliefs and culture in response to these terrible events in history, following people who were arrested and removed from their families or killed by the secret police, people who returned to once vibrant and well off villages only to find them being dismantled board by board or destroyed, people who left their villages, one step ahead of the authorities, to try to leave the country, some who are exiled against their will to Siberia, some who escape from Siberia to the Blue Mountains of China, and so on. Most of those who manage to survive end up in other parts of the world where the land is so poor that it is given away to newly arrived immigrants, like parts of western Canada, the semi-desert of Paraguay, and Siberia, and struggle to establish themselves in yet another place. The novel celebrates the endurance of these Mennonites, and their faith that sustains them in these often hard times. The author finishes the story with two beautiful chapters that help bring out the uniqueness of Mennonite ideals, and the radical Christian ideals that fueled the birth of the Mennonite movement, and that still lives in some of its practitioners, almost despite the rigidities of their micro-denominations and closed societies that exist side by side and in constrast to those ideals.

This novel is very thoughtful and highly recommended to someone who seeks a human face to the Mennonite immigration sagas.It requires some patience to acclimate to the author's literary techniques, which are more inward-directed than straightforward linear plot; as well the author provides the reader with little context for the Mennonite historical situation, beliefs and culture which the reader needs to fully appreciate the story, so a little extra reading would help to fill in these gaps: Kroeker's Introduction To The Russian Mennonites isbrief account (111 pages) that provides a good part of that context.On a final note, the Russian Mennonites spoke Mennonite Low German, or Plautdietsch.The author employs an unusual technique that brings alive the native rhythm of Mennonite speech and thought; his novel is written in English, with a few Low German words sprinkled in, but many of the interior monologues are grammatically constructed as if in Low German, giving the sensation of listening to the character's thoughts in the rhythm of their native language.

The title..
.. seems to have nothing to do with the text. But the author is Rudy Wiebe, not Eva Marie Kröller!!!

You have to know Mennonite history to understand the book at all, especially since RW seems to have been bound and determined to become the James Joyce of Mennonite authors. Most of the book is written as introspection, so I can't help you with the meanings of the many sentence fragments, but I can at least do what RW should have done, namely, provide a little dictionary' of a few Mennonite (Plat-) dialect terms. Here are some naive guesses:

groutestov/Grossestua-living room
sommastov-summer (or back-) room
Chortitza (where they had originally settled in the Ukraine)
actstov-(from Mecklenberger-Vorp0momern Platt) a back room that can only be entered through another room, akt meaning "aft".

The 'Russian' Mennonites originated in Switzerland in Reformation times, as did all Mennonites of that age, then and picked up their language (Platdeutsch) in north Germany. From Prussia they were invited to 'Russia' by Katerina der Grosse. They're pacifist, refuse any but their own (German Bible-) schools, and prefer no citizenship. Ca. 1875 Canada looked more friendly so there was a mass migration but 'Russia' was not emptied of Mennonites (the book begins with the time after the communist revolution in the Ukraine). After WWI their German schools were outlawed in Canada (they go 6 yrs. to learn Hochdeutsch in order to read Luther's Bible) so they migrated to the State of Chihuahua in N. Mexico (and farther into Central and South America) where, in 1991, they still formed a colony some 50000 strong N, of Cuahtemoc (they make Mexico's cheese, e.g.). At that time they had no citizenship, by choice, and did not have to serve in the Mexican army. In Cuahtemoc and in their "Dorfs" north of Cuahtemoc we heard the language spoken (my German wife barely understood parts of the prettily sung old Plat dialect) and were able to speak with them using Hochdeutsch. The language of the Amish and Mennonites who settled Pennsylvania after 1693 ("Pennsylvania Dutch" is an "English" mispronunciation of 'Pennsylvania Deitsch') is a southwest German dialect, related Schwäbisch-Badenrisch, Swiss German and Alsatian. That was an entirely different Mennonite migration. Mennonites and Amish in Pa., Ohio, Ky. and Tenn. would not be able to converse (except via Hochdeutsch) with those in the Dakotas, Canada, and Mexico.

A great Canadian novel
A very moving and powerful novel that tells the story of the Mennonites who fled the Soviet Union to escape religious persecution.Although not as highly acclaimed as some of his other works, The Blue Mountains of China is perhaps one of the great Canadian novels. ... Read more

Product Description
Rudy Wiebe's novels about the experience of people on the prairies, especially of such minority and/or politically disadvantaged groups as natives, Metis, and Mennonites, have brought the geography, climate, history, and society of this region to the attention and appreciation of readers throughout the world. And scholars from throughout the world (and particularly from Europe), as well as from across Canada, have already travelled to Calgary to work on the extensive holdings of his manuscripts, correspondence, and other personal and professional papers. This book describes these holdings in valuable detail indispensable to the growing body of scholars, readers, writers, and others fascinated with the work of one of Canada's most important authors. This description is prefaced with a useful biocritical essay by Jon Kertzer, surveying Wiebe's life and work and offering an original and cogent commentary on both. ... Read more

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“What can that mean, I and my family will have a ‘reserve of one square mile’?”

So asks Big Bear of Governor Morris, come to impose a square treaty on the round, buffalo-covered world of the Plains Cree.As the buffalo vanish and the tension builds to the second Riel Rebellion, Big Bear alone of the prairie chiefs keeps up pressure for a better treaty by refusing to choose a reserve.He argues, “If any man has the right to put a rope around another man’s neck, some day someone will get choked.”

It is Big Bear’s story – and the story of Wandering Spirit, of Kitty McLean and John McDougall–that is told in this novel with rare and penetrating power.Permeated with a sense of place and time, this eagerly awaited work by Rudy Wiebe reflects the author’s sensitivity to the Canadian prairies, their history, the minds and hearts of their diverse people.

Exploring Big Bear’s isolated struggle, Wiebe has encompassed in one creative sweep not only his hero’s struggle for integrity, but the whole range and richness of the Plains culture.Here is the giant circle of the prairie horizon, and the joy, the sorrow, the pain and the triumph and the violence of unconquerable human beings faced with destruction. ... Read more

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A Discovery of Strangers tells of the meeting of two civilizations – the first encounter of the nomadic Dene people with Europeans – in an imaginative reconstruction of John Franklin’s first map-making expedition in 1819—21 in what is now the Northwest Territories. At the heart of the novel is a love story between twenty-two-year-old midshipman Robert Hood, the Franklin expedition’s artist, and a fifteen-year-old Yellowknife girl known to the British as Greenstockings. A national bestseller, published also in Germany and China, Wiebe’s first novel in eleven years and his twelfth work of fiction won him his second Governor General’s Award for Fiction at the age of sixty, over strong competition from Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.

It is a story of love, murder, greed and passion in an unforgiving Arctic landscape. French-Canadian voyageurs paddle the small British expedition into the land of the Yellowknives to search for the fabled Northwest Passage. While this trip would not prove as disastrous as Franklin’s third expedition, nevertheless more than half his men did not survive the harsh conditions. The long winter stopover allows for interchange between the cultures. When the son of a Lancashire clergyman and the daughter of a native elder fall in love, they devise a language of their own to cross their wordless divide. Hood will not survive to see the birth of his daughter, perishing in 1821 in an attempt to reach Greenstockings’s band 450 kilometres south. Nor will the Yellowknives survive much longer: within twenty years, they will be all but wiped out by a smallpox epidemic brought by the white men.

The novel is the work of a poetic mind, written in several voices: of the British explorers, of the Tetsot’ine people – named Yellowknife by the strangers – and, most unexpected of all, of the animals that live on the Barrenlands. Wiebe climbs inside the characters, bringing them and the North to life. “Most Canadians have never seen that landscape. Yet I see it as being at the centre of our national psyche. That’s the roots of our world, right there.” He began work on the novel in earnest following a canoe trip between the Coppermine River and the site of Fort Enterprize in 1988, when he was first enraptured by the landscape. The novel contains vivid images, such as stunning descriptions of caribou bursting through snow. In calling the Arctic ‘A Land Beyond Words,’ Wiebe admits how difficult it was to do it justice. “I think there’s always a total contradiction in even trying to do such a novel,” he said in an interview, “and yet it’s the very contradiction out of which any kind of artistic struggle must come. It’s not even worth trying if it doesn’t seem impossible.”

In researching historical sources, Wiebe found letters, earlier accounts of the region such as those of Samuel Hearne, as well as oral stories and mythology told by the Dene elders. “I take the facts, as many of the facts as history gives me, and I use them to tell the story that I believe these facts tell us beyond themselves . . . .How did it happen, why did it happen, what was going on inside people’s heads while it was happening, why did they do what they did?” Franklin’s book on the first expedition contained a small paragraph mentioning Greenstockings as the most beautiful girl of the Dene, and a sketch of her and her father Keskarrah drawn by Robert Hood. Wiebe also discovered a claim made years later by one of the members of the team that Greenstockings had had a child by Hood (these facts are related in his book Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic). From these details, he created a powerful story of their union. “It’s imagination all right, but it has to be an informed imagination.”

The Kingston Whig-Standard claimed the book “is to the North what Big Bear was to the West – an imaginative, and possibly definitive, evocation of a crucial time, place and situation.” It is part of a body of significant historical fiction by Wiebe, including The Scorched-Wood People, which tells the story of Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont and the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. The third Franklin expedition has been the subject of works by Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, as well as accounts such as Frozen in Time by John Geiger and forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie. A Discovery of Strangers explores the expedition Wiebe found more fascinating: that of first contact between the Europeans and the Natives, which was so damaging to the Native people in the end, and so essential to the survival of the Europeans. In his acceptance speech for the Governor General’s Award, Wiebe said: “We know too little about our selves. In this enormous, beautiful land we inhabit, we seem to have no eyes to see, no ears to hear, the stories that are everywhere about us and clamouring to be told . . . . Only the stories we tell each other can create us as a true Canadian people.” ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

First-rate historical fiction
This is an excellent fictional account of Franklin's *overland* expedition to the Arctic Ocean.Through the device of multiple narration, it presents us with both the Aboriginal and European perspective on the events.Wiebe did his homework: the novel is solidly based on the first-hand accounts of Franklin, Back, Hearne, and others. The influence of Faulkner is evident in narrative style, prose style and theme.Faulkner's great story The Bear was clearly an influence ... Read more

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Carmen and Griffin, young and white, are head-over-heels in love.When Carmen turns into a black woman, Griffin thrills at a love turned exotic.But Carmen's transformation means trouble for Griffin's racist mother, already struggling with a new lover and a husband nicknamed God.The question is, can love be relied upon to save the day?This is a funny, sexy tale of love affairs and magical transformations. ... Read more

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A rare and marvellous collection by a master teller of tales, together in one volume for the first time.River of Stone brings to readers an appealing selection of Rudy Wiebe's best and most loved writing — and draws us into a world that he has made distinctively his own. In this haunting collection, his stories and memoirs play off each other to reveal the geographical and emotional range of the country. Here we have timeless meditations on country, particularly the West and the North; memories of a Mennonite childhood, and the pain of being cast out by the community; of writing and history; of pioneer days lived with love and struggle; and unexpected, entertaining stories that are by turn loving, macabre, ironic, sad and joyful, and very funny. ... Read more

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"Sixteen years later Louis Riel would be
dressing himself again ... to be hanged by
his neck until he is at last, perfectly,
dead. 0 my God have mercy."

So begins Rudy Wiebe's powerful portrayal of Louis Riel, the mystic revolutionary of the Northwest, and Gabriel Dumont - "the savage" as he calls himself - the great buffalo hunter who becomes Riel's commander-in-chief.

With the same epic scope and inspired vision that he brought to The Temptations of Big Bear (winner of the Governor Generals Award for Fiction), Wiebe recreates an agonizing chapter in Canadian history which can never be forgotten - the explosive world of the North West Rebellions and the characters of the two men who led them.

Written with powerful clarity and compassion, The Scorched-Wood People is an immense achievement, a brilliant exploration of the faces of prophetic vision, the morality of politics and the nature of faith.

Product Description
This new edition, by two-time Governor General's Award-winner Rudy Wiebe, is the first book in NeWest's 'Landmark Editions' Series. First released in 1989, this collection won the Alberta Culture Non-Fiction Award. These essays take a critical look at history, mystery and spirituality of a region that Wiebe would have us see as a vital aspect of Canadianism. ... Read more