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From Amazon
Rudy Wiebe's sprawling, ambitious, and powerful The Blue Mountains of China seemed as though it would stand as his definitive fictional chronicle of the Mennonite diaspora. In Sweeter Than All the World, however, he revisits the persecution and dispersal of the Mennonites with even greater ambition, ranging farther in time, space, and faith than he did in The Blue Mountains. Half of Sweeter Than All the World concerns the fictional Adam Wiebe, a Canadian Mennonite who from a very early age is obsessed with the history of his people and his family. Adam travels the world seeking out long-lost uncles and uncovering the murky truths behind his family's past in the Soviet Union. While Adam chases phantom relatives in a solipsistic charge through history, he begins to lose his immediate family. The rest of the novel is a series of first-person testimonies by historical and fictional Wiebes, from the brilliant engineer Wybe Adams van Harlingen (who in the throes of the Reformation fortified Danzig to the point of impenetrability and, in the process, invented the cable car) to martyrs, painters, freethinkers, and the victims of warfare and tyranny. His historian's earnestness betrays the artifice behind Wiebe's novel; the characters all write in slight variations on a common style. Having said that, Sweeter Than All the World is one of Wiebe's most accessible novels, and readers who were put off by the grand style of epics like The Scorched Wood People might be pleasantly surprised by this book, which is broad in scope but effortlessly readable. --Jack Illingworth
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