Ink

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"We have extensive accounts, typed out neatly: 'They took me into a dark room and started hitting me on the head and stomach and legs. I stayed in this room for 5 days, naked, with no clothes.'" Angela Woodward's novel Ink tells the story of two women who spend their days doing that neat typing. Sylvia and Marina, both single moms, work in a suburban office building, transcribing tape recordings of witness statements about detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. Their ordinary preoccupations--problems with the soap in the restroom, the motives of Marina's new love Mr. Right, and Sylvia's worries about paying for her son Jordan's show choir costume--provide a lulling backdrop to the violence represented in the transcripts. Woodward layers essayistic explorations of the history of ink and writing materials into the women's tale, along with the story of the disastrous masterpiece of a French poet, and a writer's notations about her daily commute and the lake behind her house. Then a new crime is revealed. Ink is an illuminating meditation on what it means to bear witness.