The Shunning

By Patrick Friesen

The Shunning 'tears heads off cliches, making us see a whole place freshly. It is a complete world, reeling and tilting but enduring. A fine book, full of bone and muscle. A totality.' Christopher Wiseman, Books in Canada 'The Shumnning shuns easy answers and offers a complex vision of lives in all their contradictions. It's a powerful, humane and moving book.' Douglas Barbour, Toronto Star.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0888010389
• ISBN13: 9780888010384
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Turnstone Pr
• Length: 100 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.3" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Painful, achingly beautiful picture of faith, and its fading

Friesen stuns with potent, disturbing images, and awakens a yearning for the sacred. His book, which is actually one long poem, is a masterpiece. Friesen captures a longing long denied us--a thirst for a faith--and firmly pulls the reader into this story of a Mennonite farmer's destruction. The farmer is excommunicated (shunned) by his church for questioning an aspect of the Christian faith. The story is told through the eyes of the farmer's brother, usually, but occasionally we see through the eyes of the wife, the children, the townspeople, and, perhaps, a distanced, clinical god. Before this work is dismissed as yet another "to hell with Grandpa's religion" book, it is important to note that the book pays no attention to the validity of the farmer's quandry, but instead focuses on the pain, the isolation, and the loss, of a solitary man in his microcosm