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    A Complicated Kindness: A Novel
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    A Complicated Kindness: A Novel
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    A Complicated Kindness: A Novel
    Ebook277 pages5 hours

    A Complicated Kindness: A Novel

    By Miriam Toews

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From the award-winning author of Women Talking: “A darkly funny and provocative novel” of family, faith, and adolescent angst (O, The Oprah Magazine).
     
    “Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,” Nomi Nickel explains at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister disappeared, dreaming of escape, and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. This is not the East Village in New York City, where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.
     
    A wry yet bewildered sixteen-year-old, Nomi is trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion. In her droll voice, she tells the story of her eccentric, loving family whose members each find themselves on a collision course with the only community they’ve ever known.
     
    Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and drawing comparison to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, “A Complicated Kindness just may be a future classic in its own right” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 6, 2005
    ISBN9781582438894
    Unavailable
    A Complicated Kindness: A Novel
    Author

    Miriam Toews

    Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

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    Reviews for A Complicated Kindness

    3.5/5

    17 ratings32 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I read this for the Canadian Author Challenge in 2016. It's a grand picture of a young girl's life, in a Mennonite town in Manitoba in the 1970's. Although there are many lifestyle restrictions, and the possibility of excommunication (shunning) always exists, it often feels as though this story could be about any young girl raised in any conventionally religious family--not terribly different from my own American Baptist cousins growing up at about the same time. I knew so many people whose religion dictated their dress, or activities, or food choices that I was always fairly comfortable with my simple Methodist upbringing that seemed to only forbid things that were actually against the law. Nomi Nickel, like any normal teenager, rebels against the rules and authority, yet loves her fractured family and wants to impress her English teacher even while she seems to be neglecting the writing project he has set for her. There is a bit of a mystery and a "shocker" at the end that I didn't see coming and wasn't particularly shocked by. There's an interesting exploration of love and sacrifice here as well.
    • 5/5
      The cracking of my heart seems to be happening all too frequently when I read these days. I would make an effort to avoid the damage (my heart is beginning to look like a crumpled piece of paper left out in the rain) but the unlikeliest books keep scrunching it up in their cardboard fists. A Complicated Kindness did this for me. If you haven't already read it (I think I might be the only one my age who hadn't) it is told through the witty/despairing/smart voice of sixteen year old Nomi Nickels. She lives with her father in the Mennonite community of East Village, Manitoba after Nomi's mom and her sister skipped town. Nomi tries to deal with the loss, as well as her own crumbling religious faith and her emotionally distant and distracted father in the months that follow. I don't know why exactly this book spoke to me- perhaps it was the strong-willed, yet hopelessly lost voice of Nomi. Perhaps it was because she listened to Keith Jarret (the Koln concert of course) on her record player just like I did when I was a teenager and she loved how he made noises when he played, just like I did. Mostly I think I loved Nomi because she is one of the undisputed heirs of Holden Caulfield: just as perceptive and smart with observations about the world that break your heart to make it bigger. And she is just as screwed up by the hyprocrisy of the world she lives in and the loss of everything she holds dear. Just like Mr. Caulfield. Yeah. That was what got me.
    • 4/5
      From the publisher: "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."Toew's is a writer of considerable gifts and her ability to create Nomi’s voice is impressive. She's funny, bitter, terrified (but not about to admit it), proud, sardonic, kind.... in other words, a complete person. It's hard to believe, in fact, she's fictional. The narrative shifts between the present and past, but is never difficult to follow. The lure of the narrative thread is why did her mother and sister leave... and what will happen to Nomi and her father now? The book is often laugh-out-loud funny, even though deadly serious. It takes real talent to be able to do that. The pacing is deceptive, and those looking for a rollicking plot-driven novel will be disappointed, but anyone truly interested in the human condition, the power of religion, as well as the resilience of the human heart will be rewarded not only by the depth of the novel, but by the frequent belly-laughs. A quote form the book: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
    • 3/5
      I never really believed in the main character, so I didn't enjoy this story of family destruction in a small Mennonite town.
    • 5/5
      I absolutely loved this book, though it was not at all what I expected. I'd thought that the book would have more focus on the Mennonite church and its practices, but instead the book was one of the more wonderful character-driven novels I've read. The book fell apart in the final chapter, but I'm willing to forgive the author not knowing how to end because the rest fo the book was such a delight to read. The book captures the experience of faith followed by questioning in a way that was startling and unusual. The setting of the book -- in a rural Mennonite community in Canada -- managed to work brilliantly.
    • 3/5
      Nomi Nickel is a rebellious 16-year-old in a small Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada. Her mother and older sister both are missing (we don’t find out why until the end), and now she lives only with her somewhat disconnected dad Ray. Nomi doesn’t have much to look forward to except a job at a chicken slaughtering farm, and feels trapped as well by the ultraconservative religious strictures of her life. There is supposed to be no makeup, tattooing, sex, dancing, smoking, drugs, or rock-and-roll, although these taboos don’t stop Nomi. She has a boyfriend, Travis, but they don’t connect much except physically. And even that doesn’t seem very rewarding. The story, basically a stream of consciousness, digressive monologue by Nomi, has been compared to Catcher In The Rye, with Nomi as a female Holden Caulfield. To me, Nomi seems also a bit like a non-pregnant Juno, the independent-minded character from the 2008 Oscar-winning screenplay by Diablo Cody.Evaluation: Miriam Toews (pronounced Taves) does a great job of presenting us with the mind of a disaffected teenager, but really, do you want to hang out with one of those for a whole book? And actually I found the book quite depressing (even though some of it was darkly funny), because Nomi seemed to be on the edge of a breakdown, not a bit surprising given the destructive influence of her overly punitive community. And, like any teenager, a lot of her complaints, while well founded, were very repetitive. After a while, I wanted to escape Nomi and her life as much as Nomi did! But don't just listen to me! This book won the 2004 [Canadian] Governor General's Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, Canada’s largest literary prize for fiction.
    • 4/5
      Lovely. Heartbreaking.
    • 4/5
      Like Mrs. Klippenstein's husband, this book is almost perfect. I loved every page.
    • 3/5
      A Complicated Kindness is a coming of age story. The main character Nomi Nickels is a sixteen year old girl growing up in a strict Mennonite community where, like most teenagers, she feels alienated and alone. The book is an interesting window in the life of a girl who is funny and terribly sad. Toews does an excellent job maintaining Nomi's unique voice and perspective throughout the story. Sometimes it did get to be a little too much for me though. At times it was difficult for me to sympathize with Nomi because I felt like the narrative remained angst filled and annoying. I didn't feel like Toews showed much of the beauty that this girl might have inside. I enjoyed the exploration of religious restrictions. I know nothing about Mennonites, so reading a story that takes place in a Mennonite community was fascinating to me. I, of course, will take all of what I read with a grain of salt because I have no idea what the author's biases are toward or against Mennonites. I find it difficult to believe Nomi could get away as long as she did with behaving that way. I just wonder about the authenticity. It doesn't ring true to me, but I don't really know. Nomi lives with her father, Ray. Her mother Trudie and sister Tash have both left the community. Slowly as the book unfolds you find out why. The narrative style seemed too distant at times, but there were some beautifully written passages that kept me reading. I ended up enjoying the book, but I gave it three stars because if I wasn't reading it for a book club I don't think I would've bothered finishing it.
    • 5/5
      This book cheered me up and made me laugh during a time in my life when the last thing I felt like was laughing. In between the funny bits are some deep and insighful observations (sometimes the two go together) about life and religion.Although I felt that the story itself was't as strong as it could have been, I still give this 5 stars because I loved the way Miriam Toews tells a story.This was the first book I read by her and I plan to read more.
    • 2/5
      you know, it's really too bad that rohinton mistry won the governer general's award for a fine balance a few years back because now i expect every gg winner to be that good, which is why i picked up this book. having said this, a complicated kindness is a somewhat enjoyable read about a young woman marooned in mennonite town in manitoba while her family disappears, one by one, from around her. no doubt, this book stands in the canadian tradition of flat external landscapes with which tumultous internal landscapes are contrasted - and in this case the land is wide open while the characters are constrained by their religion, their community and their pasts. also like a lot of canadian fiction is a distance in the writing that makes one feel as though youa re viewing the scene from afar, which is not really the relationship i want with a story. in the end, i'm not so interested in her main character, but much more those who have disappeared, particularly the father who is quirky in a sad and interesting way. i wouldn't buy this book again, but i would take it out of the library.
    • 2/5
      This book was aclaimed in Canada, very favorably reviewed in national papers and was described as "humorous". The book was readable but not very remarkable. It certainly wasn't humorous. Sort of sad, but not humorous.
    • 5/5
      a very critical look at the Mennonite community in Manitoba, the way of life and oppressive fundamentalist upbringing by a former member of the church. Narrated by a 16 year old girl’s voice, which, I don’t have much doubt, belongs to the author herself. Great narration, interlaced with deadpan humour in most unexpected places.
    • 3/5
      This was an unusual book. The writing is very disjointed and jumps around a lot in time, but it fits since it's the scattered narration of a very confused and lost 16 year old. I'm not sure how accurate this portrayal of a Mennonite child is, but Nomi's world is very sad and lonely. I enjoyed the tenderness she shows her father, who is just as sad and lonely as she is. The ending offers a little explanation, but there is still a lot left to the unknown.
    • 2/5
      I'm halfway through this and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. There's not much I'd call a plot, besides Mennonite girl coming of age, but even that's a bit of a stretch. The narrator (Nomi) is mostly recalling things that happened at some vague time in her past; the chronology is difficult (at best) to follow, and the voice (to me) is just blah. I wanted to like this, but I just couldn't.
    • 4/5
      This is a story about bizarre lives. On one hand we have the Mennonite community who live such strange lives that American tourists come to stare at them. Most of that Mennonite community are presented as a distant observer would see them, and hence we tend to see them as just plain crazy religious nuts. On the other hand we see the narrator and her family in more detail and as more complete human beings - and yet they're still weird. Who wouldn't be weird in that situation though? The thing about this book which made it so interesting for me was the father-daughter relationship, and the father himself. Most readers would probably say the father character was a hard-to-believe-wacko. I say "That could be me..I could (do?) behave like that" Ultimately the story is about the potential power of love, in particular the love between the father & the daughter. As a father who has a daughter, I found it a surprisingly powerful statement of hope (and I'm not generally a hopeful person).
    • 4/5
      Nomi Nickel feels trapped in her small, Mennonite Manitoba town. East Village, Manitoba, combines strict religiosity with all of the career opportunities inherent in a chicken-rendering plant, and has brought nothing but strife to Nomi and her family. At the book's start Nomi's mother and sister have already run off, escaping the strictures of East Village. Nomi spends much of her time dreaming about reuniting with her mother and sister, reminiscing about the past, and trying to escape the strictures of East Village. Toewes does a brilliant job of narrating as Nomi, a troubled teenager. Much of Nomi's resistence seems to come from her perverse sense of humor, which sometimes distracts the reader from just how tragic her situation is. Nomi's is a world with few opportunities and no real solutions, and the novel is certainly a cautionary statement on the dangers of ideology without thought.
    • 4/5
      I found this book an interesting read with a unique perspective on a sub culture that doesn't really exist in Australia. Not a fan of religion at the best of times i liked that the character struggled so honestly with the issues she was faced with and the ambivelance she feels.
    • 5/5
      The narrator of this story is 16 year old Naomi 'Nomi" Nickel, a high school senior struggling to grow up, understand life and what it all means in the small, dead-end southern Manitoba Mennonite community of East Village. You see, East Village and its residents live a strained, conflicted life. On one hand, they are proud of their Mennonite ways, to the point of suffocation and contradiction of what is and is not allowed in from the world surrounding them, while on the other hand, maintain a fully operational museum/"theme park" of their Mennonite heritage for the droves of American tourists coming up to witness this 'quaint, simple life", even if it is completely contrived. Lets be honest. How do you promote a clean, pious background when the town's teenage population appears to be running wild, doing drugs, consuming alcohol and just have dreams of being anywhere but here and the adults are struggling with what appears to be their own internal conflicts and demons?The book focuses on Nomi's cynical, sarcastic view of her world, a world her older sister Tash abruptly left one day, three years previously, in a van with her boyfriend. Nomi's mom Trudie made a similar vanishing act months later, leaving 13 year old Nomi and her father Ray to, basically, limp along as best they can. While the members of the community and the school system see signs of a problem, their advice, limited and useless at best, only leads to further displays of outward frustration and rebellion by the troubled teen as she struggles to make sense of what has happened to her family and what the future has in store for her.I did enjoy this story. Yes, there is a lot of anger, frustration, rebellion and abject complacency displayed by the various characters that could turn people off this one. As well there should be. I would find it suffocating to grow up in a community where my only career goal, if I was to remain there after graduation, was to strive for a job at Happy Family Farms, the local abattoir, chopping the head off of chickens for nine hours a day. Forget moving to the city and coming back to visit, because coming back, or maintaining any ties with the community, including your family, isn't exactly an option. Toews, who also comes from a Mennonite family background, gives Nomi a humorous yet heartbreaking voice.Toews is good at presenting damaged souls in her stories. Damaged souls that have the strength to preserver, if precariously, in their search for the light and their way forward through the gloom that surrounds them. This is a story that I do recommend.
    • 3/5
      After loving Swing Low, this book was disappointing. The writing just didn't have the same smoothness, oomph or depth, some sentences didn't seem like complete sentences. It felt like the author was trying to be abstract in lots of ways just left me feeling confused.
    • 4/5
      Excellent writing! Intelligent, not overly narrative, witty dialogue, poignant and quotable -- half the book is truism that can be posted on a wall.
      Worthy of its awards.
    • 5/5
      “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, make-up, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities, or staying up past nine o’clock."According to Nomi Nickel, the sixteen-year-old narrator of A COMPLICATED KINDNESS, this sums up what it is to be a Mennonite. And for someone who grew up on the fringes of Mennonite culture, I can attest that to a teenager, this is EXACTLY right.Miriam Toews, the author of this wholly astonishing work, is also a Mennonite, having grown up in Steinbach, Manitoba, the holy land for the Canadian Mennonite. Appreciating the importance the Mennonite culture places on it’s beliefs and heritage, Toews is also intimately familiar with the adolescent yearning of wanting to break free, to fly away, to be anywhere except here. And the combination of these two factors is nothing less than marvellous.Nomi is not a happy child. Her mother has disappeared, and her sister Natasha has recently followed her mother into unexplained absence. As Nomi searches the community for clues as to their abandonment of her and her father, the novel slowly builds into a culture clash between the world she knows, and the universe she wants.Nomi may very well become one of the great characters in Canadian fiction. An atypically brave teen, Nomi is possessed of both surprising insight and unbridled youthful angst, as well as a brittle yet believable humour. As may be expected, this goes against the norm for the highly religious East Village, the Mennonite community she was born to. As her quiet uprising gains the notice of The Mouth, the local minister who also happens to be her uncle, Nomi finds that the meaning behind her mother and sister’s disappearance is much closer than she thought.Toews, while poking fun at a religious zeal that at times resembles a less violent, softer version of the Taliban (at least to her young mind), never lets her novel become a treatise against religious intolerance. Rather, A COMPLICATED KINDNESS celebrates our past while reminding us that leaving one’s past is not the same as rejecting it. Nomi needs nourishment that her life cannot provide, yet Nomi is wise enough to see the value such an upbringing can provide. It is the struggle to reconcile your beliefs with your sensibilities that makes us all human, and the best of us more so.A COMPLICATED KINDNESS also marks Toews growth as an artist. While her first novels marked her as a warm and funny writer with gallows of humanity, KINDNESS is a dramatic turn of both depth and talent. Her first works were an artist learning to fly; A COMPLICATED KINDNESS is the work of an artist who can not only fly, but who trusts herself to soar high above, in the upper echelon of emotion and risk.
    • 1/5
      Well, I'm not sure what all the hype over this book is about but I have to say I was disappointed. I felt no real connection to Nomi and her disjointed ramblings and and I was left frustrated by the sheer quantity of unanswered questions. What was her dad thinking, leaving this girl after her being abandoned by her mother and sister already?
      Thankfully it was a quick read because I wouldn't have wanted to waste any more time on this one.
    • 5/5
      This was my second reading of this wonderful novel. I paid more attention to the language this time since I already knew the heartbreaking, redemptive outcome. Toews knows of what she writes: the spirit-deadening restrictions imposed by religious leaders, the desire to fit in yet free to explore your own path, the powerful love within a family that in the end can provide grace. The price of breaking away from the herd is expensive and leads to nearly unbearable actions yet eventually each one in the Nickel’s family ventures out on their own. Toews manages to make understandable the inexplicable conformity many are willing to give to satisfy their religious yearnings. It is Toews gift that she also makes understandable the incredible sacrifice made by Ray to provide a way of escape to his beloved daughter, Nomi.
    • 5/5
      I always fall in love with Toews's characters, in this case it's Nomi, a rebellious Mennonite teenager with a dry sense of humor whose family and home furnishings keep disappearing. Nomi lives in the "world's most non-progressive community", East Village, a small deeply religious town in Canada that practices shunning and attracts tourists from around the world who want to witness the simple life first hand, but Nomi's fantasy is to hang out in Greenwich Village with Lou Reed.I read this as slowly as I could--I didn't want it to end.
    • 5/5
      A very intersting read that I couldn't put down. Nomi's voice is complicaed yet clear at the same time. Her feeling of isolation is very reminiscent of Holden Caulfield but her devotion to her father and belief that her family will have a happy ending gives her an anchor. Nomi feels like a real teenager in the fact that she is not hyper-selfaware like teens on TV and movies, but not like many teenagers acts, on intstinct and emotions not really being able to express the why of her actions that adults desire to have explained. For me, I'll carry away from the book is the unconditional love she has for her family, which is touching and sad.
    • 5/5
      Nomi Nickel is a sixteen year rebel recovering from the religious indoctrination of "The Mouth," the preacher in her small Mennonite community. Against the backdrop of a future snapping the heads of chickens at the local slaughterhouse, Nomi explores her family life and future in this fictional memoir.Over the course of the book, you learn why her mother Trudy and sister Tash are missing. If there's a plot, it's the mystery of Nomi's broken family.The best element of this book is Nomi's dark and ironic sense of humour. I found myself giggling more than once while reading. Take this reflection on her Mennonite heritage, for example:"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, jewelry, playing pool, going to cities, or staying up past nine o'clock. That was Menno all over. Thanks a lot, Menno."Don't read this book for a plot—it drifts back and forth in history as Nomi reflects on the events that formed her character. In the end, the book's resolution came as a surprise—I had to reread the page to make sure I followed what was happening.A Complicated Kindness is a dark and funny reflection on small town religiosity and its consequences.
    • 5/5
      Nomi Nickel's soliloquy about her life in a Mennonite community shows a combination of innocence and gullibility along with wisdom and awareness that makes her believable. Toews speaks with a personal knowledge of life in a Mennonite community and Nomi is the perfect person to tell the story. She rebels against the absurdities uttered by church elders and her school principal yet the tourists who come to stare at the quaint village are no more reasonable. With limited exposure to outside influences, these people form the extent of Nomi's worldly knowledge. No wonder she is confused and cynical. Toews' characters are all well-drawn but Nomi is a masterpiece of humour and heartache. She will remain in my thoughts for a long time.
    • 2/5
      Naomi is a self-centred 15 year old growing up in a small Mennonite community in Manitoba. Her older sister was shunned by the community, and her Mother left after her elder daughter, leaving Naomi with her Dad. Dad’s a nice guy, but not much of a parent. Naomi is into all kinds of trouble.This story might have been interesting if it was written by the Dad. But the way Naomi tells it, is just boring.Thanks Monica for lending me this book!
    • 4/5
      A beautifully-written, hilarious book about loss -- loss of family, community, faith, and your sense of stability in the world.