A Complicated Kindness - Softcover

Toews, Miriam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0676976131 ISBN 13: 9780676976137

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 2005

Synopsis

Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City’s East Village. Instead she’s trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small town whose population is Mennonite: “the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.” East Village is a town with no train and no bar whose job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir or churning butter for tourists at the pioneer village. Ministered with an iron fist by Nomi’s uncle Hans, a.k.a. The Mouth of Darkness, East Village is a town that’s tall on rules and short on fun: no dancing, drinking, rock ’n’ roll, recreational sex, swimming, make-up, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities or staying up past nine o’clock.

As the novel begins, Nomi struggles to cope with the back-to-back departures three years earlier of Tash, her beautiful and mouthy sister, and Trudie, her warm and spirited mother. She lives with her father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless schoolteacher whose love is unconditional but whose parenting skills amount to benign neglect. Father and daughter deal with their losses in very different ways. Ray, a committed elder of the church, seeks to create an artificial sense of order by reorganizing the city dump late at night. Nomi, on the other hand, favours chaos as she tries to blunt her pain through “drugs and imagination.” Together they live in a limbo of unanswered questions.

Nomi’s first person narrative shifts effortlessly between the present and the past. Within the present, Nomi goes through the motions of finishing high school while flagrantly rebelling against Mennonite tradition. She hangs out on Suicide Hill, hooks up with a boy named Travis, goes on the Pill, wanders around town, skips class and cranks Led Zeppelin. But the past is never far from her mind as she remembers happy times with her mother and sister — as well as the painful events that led them to flee town. Throughout, in a voice both defiant and vulnerable, she offers hilarious and heartbreaking reflections on life, death, family, faith and love.

Eventually Nomi’s grief — and a growing sense of hypocrisy — cause her to spiral ever downward to a climax that seems at once startling and inevitable. But even when one more loss is heaped on her piles of losses, Nomi maintains hope and finds the imagination and willingness to envision what lies beyond.

Few novels in recent years have generated as much excitement as A Complicated Kindness. Winner of the Governor General’s Award and a Giller Prize Finalist, Miriam Toews’s third novel has earned both critical acclaim and a long and steady position on our national bestseller lists. In the Globe and Mail, author Bill Richardson writes the following: “There is so much that’s accomplished and fine. The momentum of the narrative, the quality of the storytelling, the startling images, the brilliant rendering of a time and place, the observant, cataloguing eye of the writer, her great grace. But if I had to name Miriam Toews’s crowning achievement, it would be the creation of Nomi Nickel, who deserves to take her place beside Daisy Goodwill Flett, Pi Patel and Hagar Shipley as a brilliantly realized character for whom the reader comes to care, okay, comes to love.”
This town is so severe. And silent. It makes me crazy, the silence. I wonder if a person can die from it. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness. Silentium. People here just can’t wait to die, it seems. It’s the main event. The only reason we’re not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime. My guidance counsellor has suggested to me that I change my attitude about this place and learn to love it. But I do, I told her. Oh, that’s rich, she said. That’s rich. . .

We’re Mennonites. After Dukhobors who show up naked in court we are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager. Five hundred years ago in Europe a man named Menno Simons set off to do his own peculiar religious thing and he and his followers were beaten up and killed or forced to conform all over Holland, Poland, and Russia until they, at least some of them, finally landed right here where I sit. Imagine the least well-adjusted kid in your school starting a breakaway clique of people whose manifesto includes a ban on the media, dancing, smoking , temperate climates, movies, drinking, rock’n’roll, having sex for fun, swimming, makeup, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities, or staying up past nine o’clock. That was Menno all over. Thanks a lot, Menno.
—from A Complicated Kindness
From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

The highly anticipated third novel from one of Canada?s most daring and original writers, A Complicated Kindness is a portrayal of a stifling Mennonite town -- a novel that is at once brilliant, hilarious, and revelatory.

?Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,? Nomi tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her father, Nomi spends her time piecing together the reasons her sister Natasha and mother Trudie have gone missing and trying to figure out what she can do to avoid a career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken abattoir on the outskirts of East Village -- not the neighbourhood in Manhattan where Nomi most wants to live but a small Mennonite town in southern Manitoba. East Village is ministered by Nomi?s Uncle Hans, or as Nomi calls him, The Mouth. A fiercely pious and religious man, The Mouth has found both Trudie and Natasha wanting and has orchestrated their shunning by the community.

At its heart, A Complicated Kindness is the world according to a devastatingly funny and heartbreakingly bewildered young woman trapped in a small town that seeks to set her on the path to righteousness and smother her at the same time.


This town is so severe. And silent. It makes me crazy, the silence. I wonder if a person can die from it. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness. Silentium. People here just can?t wait to die, it seems. It?s the main event. The only reason we?re not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime. My guidance counsellor has suggested to me that I change my attitude about this place and learn to love it. But I do, I told her. Oh, that?s rich, she said. That?s rich. . .

We?re Mennonites. After Dukhobors who show up naked in court we are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you?re a teenager. Five hundred years ago in Europe a man named Menno Simons set off to do his own peculiar religious thing and he and his followers were beaten up and killed or forced to conform all over Holland, Poland, and Russia until they, at least some of them, finally landed right here where I sit. Imagine the least well-adjusted kid in your school starting a breakaway clique of people whose manifesto includes a ban on the media, dancing, smoking , temperate climates, movies, drinking, rock?n?roll, having sex for fun, swimming, makeup, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities, or staying up past nine o?clock. That was Menno all over. Thanks a lot, Menno. -- from A Complicated Kindness

From the Back Cover

What Nomi Nickel needs most is a bus ticket out of town. For now, however, the rebellious 16-year-old is stuck living with her hapless father, Ray, in a bungalow in East Village — not the hip one in New York City but a smug Mennonite community ruled by her pious uncle, “The Mouth.” Nomi’s sister, Tash, left town a few years ago in her boyfriend’s truck. Soon afterwards, their mother, Trudie, disappeared. Now there’s nothing left but to piece together these mysterious defections and rage against the fundamentalist bullies. Wise, edgy, and wickedly funny, Nomi has wooed thousands of readers with her bittersweet tale of teenaged angst in Mennonite country. Cara Pifko’s narration strikes just the right note of childish bravado and wistful sarcasm.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Canada
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0676976131
• ISBN 13: 9780676976137
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256