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Read A Complicated Kindness (2005)

A Complicated Kindness (2005)

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Rating
3.62 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
1582433224 (ISBN13: 9781582433226)
Language
English
Publisher
counterpoint

A Complicated Kindness (2005) - Plot & Excerpts

it was hard to let this book end. as the remaining pages dwindled and dwindled, i found more and more things to do instead of reading. maybe i should brush my teeth. maybe i should check my email. maybe i should sleep even though i have ONE PAGE TO GO.part of it is that miriam toews is a genius at creating truly compelling characters. nomi is a gas. nomi is the kid you always wanted to be -- funny, smart, sassy, resourceful, a world-champion bullshit detector, unbelievably creative, sweet, loving, rebellious but without angst, uncontrollable but without malice, vulnerable and tough and vulnerable again. she's your ideal sister, your best friend, your most treasured child. nomi is perfection.another part of it is that miriam toews writes like god. she does. she puts thoughts in nomi's mind (nomi is the first person narrator) that make your jaw drop and your heart beat fastfastfast, they are so beautiful and original and crazy. every line is poetry. everything that goes through nomi's mind is poetry. at first, this book was hard to make out. you see, toews drops us right in the middle of nomi's most hellish years in her über-hellish mennonite town, a canadian wasteland of a place designed to strip its denizens of all joy and pleasure so that they'll better appreciate the rewards of eternal life. which doesn't make a lick of sense because if eternal life is truly what it's cut out to be we won't need any help at all to find it absolutely fabulous. plus, quite frankly, this life manages to be rough enough without any encouragement whatsoever. but the leader of the local mennonite community doesn't see it this way, and this throws the whole town in a heightened state of schizophrenic* behavior. while going to church and acting according to menno's principles, they find ways to curb the bleakness by getting drunk, getting stoned, and fucking each other crazy. especially the kids. when they get caught (or when their insubordination becomes too egregious to ignore) they get excommunicated, which means that the entire community, including their families, must act as if they no longer exist. this absurd and cruel fact proves essential to the way the novel develops, and gives the characters occasion to show each other the complicated but by no means negligible kindness that gives the novel its title. as you can imagine, there's not a little heartbreak in all this disappearing. nomi and her dad, who are the two family members left at the moment the novel begins, wade through the sadness, the hopelessness, and the desolation with a reciprocal tenderness that is all the more touching for being muted, unspoken, and very reserved. neither quite understands the other, and they both live extremely independent lives (ray is not quite a parent in the way we understand parenting), but they love each other and support each other and ultimately quite literally live for each other. since all of this -- bleakness and despair and love -- reaches us through nomi's words, there are many moments of maximum, laugh-out-loud hilarity. this hilarity, and the complicated kindness i described, make this novel absolutely delightful and original and a masterpiece of the human mind. *i'm using "schizophrenic" the way it's commonly used, with full awareness that people diagnosed with schizophrenia don't perceive things this way at all.

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews is the story of a girl's journey through Mennonite culture, and her struggle to break free. Nomi is a teenage girl living with her extremely religious father in a town known for simplicity and restriction from the outside world. After her mother and sister escape from their Mennonite community to pursue a more carefree and less religious lifestyle, Nomi is left questioning the real meaning of life. Nomi constantly tries to find release from her overbearing life by rebelling against the strict rules of the Mennonite town with her boyfriend and drugs. As the real reasons for her mother and sister's disappearance unravels, Nomi's life comes crashing down in front of her eyes and she enters a dark world; her only way to save herself is by escaping the only town she ever knew. Miriam Toews's writing style is the strong point of this book. I have to admit, it took me a while to adjust to it, however, I did enjoy it by the end of the novel. Her run on sentences and lack of quotation marks makes you really feel like you are jumping right into Nomi's head and thinking with her. By the end of the novel, you feel what Nomi feels, you think how Nomi thinks, you hurt like Nomi hurts. You stop questioning why she makes such radical choices, and instead you start despising the world she lives in, like she does. Had it not been for the writing style, I don't think I would have made it through the book.In terms of plot, this book completely lacked one. It jumped around so much that I was left constantly confused and wondered if I had missed something. I've now read this book twice, hoping to fill in the blanks, and I'm still as lost as I was the first time. Different people and names are thrown at you so often that I had a hard time remembering anything significant about any of them! Another thing that bothered me is that so many questions are left unanswered that you are left more frustrated than satisfied. Overall, this book is worth a read for the writing style and to try something new, however, I don't recommend reading before bed as it will put you to sleep before you even get through a very short [6-10 page] chapter.

What do You think about A Complicated Kindness (2005)?

Let's first just get out of the way how geeked out I was to see a reference to Reach for the Top, having myself been geeky enough in high school to have been at the provincial finals one year. I really, really liked this book. It seemed to have the perfect balance between things I could relate to and things that the author was teaching me about a group of people that I have never known much about (in particular, I thought the Mennonites were much more like the Amish and I assumed that at the very least there'd be no TV.) The narrator's voice felt authentic, as did the situation of her friend Lids, who saddened me a great deal."That I belong within the frightful fresco of this man’s dream unnerves me.""The mark of the beast? Streets paved in gold? Seven white horses? What? Fuck off. I dream of escaping into the real world.""I wanted to experience goodness and humanity outside of any religious framework."Okay, so it was a bit odd to find a lot of my very atheist teenage thoughts mirrored here in the voice of a teenage Mennonite, who spent a lot of the book worried her sister was going to go to hell. Granted, I related a lot to Nomi and the restlessness that comes from growing up in a small town, feeling cut off from the big city. "It was the same feeling you get when you’ve spent a lot of time with a friend or relatives or someone and you’re kind of sick of them and want to be alone again but then the time comes for them to leave and suddenly more than anything you don’t want them to go and you act really nice again and run around doing things for them but you know that time is running out and then when they’re gone you’re kind of relieved but also sad that you hadn’t been a better friend and you tell yourself next time for sure I’ll be a better friend. And you kind of want to call them up and apologize for being a jerk but at the same time you don’t want to start something stupid and you hope the feeling will just go away and that nobody hates you."So perfectly what it is like to be at home visiting the family for more then ten days at a time."I also liked it because every time I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really."One of my best friends always tells me that you don't need to worry until you're bleeding from the eyes. And I have also always found that cheering and hopeful.
—Chinook

As I read Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness, I couldn't stop thinking about Richard Dawkins' assertion that religion is child abuse.Looking around at our neighbours and friends, ourselves and our parents, it is easy to laugh off this idea. We may see our churches doing good works in the community; they may be providing relief for Haiti or some other disaster struck land; they may be providing shelter for the homeless or the physically abused; their beliefs and morality may be providing guidance to people around us; so yes, there are a number of good things that churches can do, which makes it easy to scoff at the idea that religion is inherently abusive. Perhaps it is too easy to scoff, though.A Complicated Kindness is all about how a church and its beliefs abuse a congregation -- but specifically how the ideas of Menno Simons and his modern Mennonite followers destroy the Nickel family.Nomi, her sister Tash, her mother Trudie, and her father Ray lose everything because of their religion. They lose each other, they lose themselves, they lose their sanity, and they are forced to make their way in the world -- or not -- despite the irreparable damage done to them by the belief system they were born into. None of them chose to be Mennonites. They were born Mennonite, raised Mennonite, and destroyed Mennonite. Their religion was abusive in the worst possible ways, and as I loved Nomi more and more, as I came closer to her pain through her fragmented stream-of-consciousness, as my anger rose, I started to accept Dawkins' point in a way I'd never allowed myself before.But Dawkins is not the only one calling religion abusive; he is not alone in his opposition. Nicholas Humphrey, author of The Mind Made Flesh, "argues that, in the same way as Amnesty [International:] works tirelessly to free political prisoners the world over, we should work to free the children of the world from the religions which, with parental approval, damage minds too young to understand what is happening to them."Miriam Toews' beautifully sad story brought me one step closer to agreeing with the assertions of these men; I only wish I had enjoyed the story more than I did. Although I am sure I wasn't supposed to leave it with a smile, I would like to have left it with something other than a deep depression.
—Brad

I appreciated this book much more on re-read (it's hard to pick a fave of hers - but at least I now have all three that I've read so far clearly in my mind). I am still slightly more impressed with the two that followed, The Flying Troutmans and Irma Voth, but it's only because ... because ... why? It's now the merest gradation of five star-dom that separate them.There is no doubt that Nomi's 'voice' is a spectacular accomplishment. Distill it, and each drop is pure essence du Toews. I think that what I struggle with here is the lack of story. The ennui (which is the point, of course) is wearing. I love teen angst and pain as much as anyone, and told this well, this wrenchingly, it's hard to critique. So even typing that, that the lack of story is what differentiates this one from the others, is, I feel, not true.But it was almost too much, y'know? Paragraph after paragraph of the most stunning, sardonic, almost zeugmatic insights out of this gr 12 Mennonite girl, struggling with a fundamentalist faith that has been imposed on her and an abandonment of monumental proportions. Collapsing under the burden of responsibility and grief, acting out, no relief in sight. Gahhhh. This writing hurts, physically - it is so beautiful, so painful, so funny. It hits you like a wall, with the most mundane and profound thoughts given equal treatment. This is the brilliance of the writing: that it so perfectly mirrors Nomi's psychological state. Everything is equally important, so nothing is. Complete overload of random, irrelevant and vital detail - so nothing makes sense, nothing has meaning. Standing in the midst of the largest questions about family bonds, love, faith - and all while 'coming of age' to boot. But here's what I will say about Toews' characters (god, I hope they are not too too autobiographical, but I fear they are): there is a life force in them. A will toward not just survival, but a cathartic, definitive, life-affirming strength that forshadows the emergence from pain as a better, whole and happy person. Yes. This is what I believe. For each and every one of them.Just brilliant.
—Jennifer (aka EM)

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