Download PDF A Complicated Kindness: A Novel, by Miriam Toews

Download PDF A Complicated Kindness: A Novel, by Miriam Toews

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A Complicated Kindness: A Novel, by Miriam Toews

Download PDF A Complicated Kindness: A Novel, by Miriam Toews

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From Publishers Weekly

A 16-year-old rebels against the conventions of her strict Mennonite community and tries to come to terms with the collapse of her family in this insightful, irreverent coming-of-age novel. In bleak rural Manitoba, Nomi longs for her older sister, Tash ("she was so earmarked for damnation it wasn't even funny"), and mother, Trudie, each of whom has recently fled fundamentalist Christianity and their town. Her gentle, uncommunicative father, Ray, isn't much of a sounding board as Nomi plunges into bittersweet memory and grapples with teenage life in a "kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions." Once a "curious, hopeful child" Nomi now relies on biting humor as her life spins out of control—she stops attending school, shaves her head and wanders around in a marijuana-induced haze—while Ray sells off most of their furniture, escapes on all-night drives and increasingly withdraws into himself. Still, she and Ray are linked in a tender, if fragile, partnership as each slips into despair. Though the narration occasionally unravels into distracting stream of consciousness, the unsentimental prose and the poignant character interactions sustain reader interest. Bold, tender and intelligent, this is a clear-eyed exploration of belief and belonging, and the irresistible urge to escape both. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nichol is a Mennonite, which, she wryly observes, "is the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager." Because Mennonites shun modern ways, Nomi's repressively fundamentalist community on the plains of Manitoba is a tourist attraction for Americans searching "for a glimpse backwards in time." Half of Nomi's family, "the better-looking half" as she puts it, is missing. Her older sister has fled the stifling strictures of their hometown, while her mother has also vanished after having been excommunicated by her own brother, the local minister, whom Nomi dubs "The Mouth of Darkness." That leaves the 16-year-old to look after her gentle, bewildered father and to deal with her own loneliness and persistent memories of how her family came undone. For Nomi, coping becomes an exercise in increasingly rebellious, sometimes self-destructive behavior, punctuated by pot-fuelled fantasies of escaping to New York to become a roadie for Lou Reed. Canadian author Toews, who grew up in a similar community, raises a number of fascinating, beautifully dramatized questions about the toll unquestioning faith can take on the human spirit. Her episodic, highly introspective first novel--part of an emerging subgenre of crossover adult books that might have been published as YA--maintains a careful balance between hilarity and heartbreak that most readers will find unforgettable. Michael CartCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product details

Hardcover: 256 pages

Publisher: Counterpoint; New Ed edition (September 15, 2004)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1582433216

ISBN-13: 978-1582433219

Product Dimensions:

5.8 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches

Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

3.7 out of 5 stars

70 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#95,196 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I was unaware of this author until I went on a cruise to the Caribbean in December of 2017. On the ship, I met Elvira, a lovely woman from Canada , who happened to be a Mennonite. We engaged in a discussion on books, and she told me that her daughter was an author. I requested her daughter's name and did a search on Amazon. I was intrigued by a number of her books and ordered them. This was one of them. I was not disappointed.This is a quirky, well-written book. The story centers around Naomi Nickel, a Mennonite teenager living in a somewhat desolate town founded by Mennonites in Manitoba, Canada. Her mother and sister have left the family and she lives with somewhat odd father. Odd is the operative word, since both she and her father seem to be at odds with the insular fundamentalist community in which they live. This is their world as seen through Naomi's eyes. It is also her journey to discovery, a strangely compelling one.I really enjoyed this book and look forward to reading the author's other novels.

I've become a big fan of Ms. Toews. Her stories are sad, compelling, moving, and funny.Built pretty unabashedly on the author's own life, though still fiction, they evocatively depict life in a rural Mennonite community in Canada, from the perspective of, in the case of A Complicated Kindness, a conflicted, troubled adolescent girl raised in a non-conforming family. Her characters are vivid, quirky, and interesting. One of the most intriguing aspects of Toews's writing is how she incorporates dialog. She doesn't use quotation marks. That's not all that unusual - a lot of writers do that. But with her, several exchanges between characters can occur in a single paragraph, and intermix with the protagonist's inner thoughts. That may sound like it should be confusing, but I never, ever got confused. It made perfect sense throughout. It felt to me like I was listening to a story told by a camp fire. It flows wonderfully.The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars is because I don't think it's quite as good as All My Puny Sorrows, so I had to give it less than a perfect score. Call it a four-and-a-half.

This is a well-written book, but it is horribly depressing. There is in theory nothing wrong with a depressing book, but it was so sad I actually resented it. Some of the other reviewers seem to see Nomi Nickel as a "cute" little teen growing up, sort of a MennoniteGidget. In fact she is a severely depressed girl who loses her mother and older sister, and whose father and best friend are kind, but clearly psychotic. In reaction to the ultra-conservatism of her sad town, she goes to the opposite extreme, and drinks, drugs, and has sex too early. The end is very well-written, but we don't know what happens to Nomi. We don't know if she leaves her town,or sits alone and spends her whole life dreaming in her head. One issue the book raises is: Do we see Nomi and her family as psychologically Disturbed, or do we see their behavior as coming from the small community they live in? Interesting, but I am still worried Nomi is alone in her house, still daydreaming.

I read this book first when I was about fifteen. I heard snippets of it on a CBC radio broadcast, and it really got under my skin. The book has shaped a lot of my perspectives and really resounded with me because I empathized with the main character's experiences in growing up in a small town.With that out of the way, the sense of humour, the unique writing style, and the imagery are all really strong here. The author is sympathetic even to antagonistic characters, and it's great. Everyone is held responsible for their actions, too.I do think some readers will dislike the ending, and that prose style does take getting used to as well.All in all, it's a wonderful book by a really good author, and I have to recommend it for all ages--particularly people who think YA is all fluffy romance and post-apocalyptic adventure.

"A Complicated Kindness" is a work of extreme adolescent alienation and unalloyed angst. No mere coming-of-age novel, its subject matter, a young woman's frustrated rage against the suffocating strictures of a small religious sect in an isolated rural Canadian community, is bound to upset its readers. Its author, Miriam Toews, has created a disenchanted, bewildered and embittered protagonist whose rebellion against her tightly-controlled environment rarely produces positive results. In fact, Nomi Nickel receives no solace, spiritual guidance or moral direction from her sequestered Mennonite community. The ironically named East Village is, to Nomi, death-in-life -- everywhere from its major industry, a slaughterhouse for chickens to its otherworldly preoccupation with damnation and the afterlife.Against this repressive milieu, Nomi's mother and sister have fled precipitously, leaving her to fend for herself with her overmatched father. Her oldest sister, Tash, wantonly flouts convention, brazenly embracing a life-sytle that literally predetermines her excommunication from the church and town. More intriguing is the torment her mother, Trudie, experiences. Divided in loyalty between husband, family and faith, Trudie elects an understated subversion of Mennonite tyranny. Her inability to make decisions, her unspoken support of Tash's revolt and her agonizing ultimate decision to flee make her the quiet, invisible embodiment of discontent.In the wake of their departure, Nomi and her befuddled father Ray make do poorly. The disappearance of the home's furniture eerily mirrors the absence of Trudie and Tash. Ray, a devoted sixth-grade teacher, adheres to the structure of Mennonite behaviors, even including wearing a coat and tie to a demolition derby which he attends with Nomi. His heart, torn asunder from conflicted loyalties and the tormented love he has for both his wife and his faith, cannot expand sufficiently to take care of his remaining daughter. Consequently, Nomi's life spirals inexorably out of control. Cigarettes, drugs and rock music cannot staunch her emotional bleeding. Limited by an understandable poor self-image and resisting social pressures for too enormous to battle alone, Nomi flounders. Even halfhearted attempts at sexual expression fail in bittersweet hopelessness.Toews does not turn "A Complicated Kindness" into a sour polemic. Her novel crackles with humor; there simply isn't a page where Nomi's mordant sensibilities don't elicit laughter. Toews' tart observations about East Village compete with Nomi's descriptions of the malignant characters circulating through her life. Her uncle, the major domo of the church, is called The Mouth; his wife, Aunt Gonad. Nomi's friends are a rogue's gallery of teen-aged desperation -- from The Comb, East Village's accommodating pusher; Lydia, her emotionally devastated friend, hospitalized for depression; her feckless boyfriend Travis, whose callow cowardice belies his grandiose dreams.Even though "A Complicated Kindness" is a dazzling success, it does have some inexplicable flaws. Nomi's character wanders from genuine adolescent authenticity to an unbelievable omniscient figure; the character often says things that Nobel laureates would be proud to utter. On numerous occasions, characters become caricatures, sapping the novel's gritty realism for cheap laughs and satirical overkill. Questions posed by the relationship between Ray and Trudie deserve better consideration than the pat answers "A Complicated Kindness" provides. It comes as no shock to the reader that there are several surprise twists at the novel's conclusion.That being said, "A Complicated Kindness" is an extremely important book. Its honesty, insights and sensitivities reveal its author's enormous talents. In Nomi Nickel, Miriam Toews has created an adolescent anti-hero for the late twentieth century, one who could easily hold her own with Holden Caulfield.

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