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Narrated by Miriam Toews
Miriam ToewsUnabridged — 6 hours, 44 minutes
Narrated by Miriam Toews
Miriam ToewsUnabridged — 6 hours, 44 minutes
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Nomi's hunger for life prevents the novel from being as bleak as her situation might suggest; her account of her trials is veined with a dark humor that glints with the glee of payback. She also has an artful way of weaving her anecdotes together.
— The New York Times
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. Agent, Knopf Canada. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Adult/High School-Growing up in an isolated Canadian Mennonite community in the 1980s, Nomi knows that there is a world beyond the single Main Street of her town. A senior in high school, she is drifting downward in a haze of drugs, thoughts of sex, and lethargy, knowing she needs to escape this repressive, fundamentalist community but unable or unwilling to take the first step. Her gentle, somewhat befuddled father tries to support and understand her, but he is dealing with a wife who left to prevent his having to "shun" her and an elder daughter who left with her boyfriend-and her mother's blessing. He slowly sells off their possessions and ultimately drifts away himself as a (still gentle) prod to Nomi to leave. The girl's seemingly random thoughts, often charmingly humorous, lead her gradually to see the hopelessness of living in a place the tourists come to visit "for a glimpse backwards in time," and the possibilities of building a life "away." Although Nomi's story is depressing, her wry observations reflect normal adolescent angst leavened with a distinctly parochial irreverence. Teens with real issues as well as those who would benefit by realizing that they don't have it so bad will find sadness and hope in Nomi's thoughtful musings and root for her survival. The story is a metaphor for those torn between a present lack of fulfillment and the fear of moving toward the unfamiliar-in other words, growing up.-Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
An amusing if somewhat rambling account by Canadian author Toews (Swing Low: A Life, 2001) of a teenaged girl growing up in the middle of nowhere. All adolescents think they live in the dorkiest place in the world, but 16-year-old Nomi Nickle maybe really does. Her hometown of East Village, Manitoba, you see, is populated almost entirely by Mennonites, an austere Christian sect. East Village has a movie theater but no bars, discos, pool halls, McDonald's, or Starbucks-and even the theater specializes in films about Menno Simons (who founded the religion and named it after himself). So it's not really an MTV kind of place. But that doesn't keep Nomi or her sister Tash from throwing themselves into the usual adolescent cauldron of hormones, scorn, and rebellion. Tash eventually runs away from home with her boyfriend Ian, and Nomi dreams of moving to the real East Village (in New York) and hanging out with Lou Reed. Even Nomi's mother, Trudie, whose brother Hans ("the mouth") is the town's equivalent of the Pope, gets fed up with life among the elect and runs off to parts unknown, leaving Nomi alone with her sweet-hearted but ineffectual and very depressed father, Ray. Nomi copes by ignoring her studies, partying with the other slackers, and hanging out with her boyfriend Travis (who plays guitar and likes to run naked through wheat fields). It's all on the gloomy side, but, if Nomi is to be believed, that's what Mennonite life is all about ("A Mennonite telephone survey might consist of questions like, would you prefer to live or die a cruel death, and if you answer 'live' the Menno doing the survey hangs up on you"). Still, like any normal teenager, Nomi can't imagine anything right abouther family. Perhaps she's the one who has the changing to do. Toews captures the spurts and lurches of adolescent growth in a tale as crude and fresh as its subject matter. Agent: Carolyn Swayze/Carolyn Swayze Literary Agency
"Brilliant . . . there is beauty and compassion in [Toews'] portrayal of Nomi's struggle."
—New York Times Book Review
"Brilliant."
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"There is a Plautdietsch term, schputting, for irreverence directed at serious or sacred things. In conversation, as in art, Toews is a schputter; she likes to puncture anything that has a whiff of pretension or self–importance about it . . . [A Complicated Kindness] is a master class in schputting."
—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
"Offering incisive reflections on life, death and Lou Reed, the black–sheep Nomi is clearly wise beyond her years, and her voice is unique. The road to anywhere else may be rough for her, but her angst–ridden journey is unforgettable."
—People Magazine
"A darkly funny and provocative novel."
—O, the Oprah Magazine
"A scathing, bittersweet and twistedly funny novel."
—Seattle Times
"[A Complicated Kindness] offers a primer on Mennonite ways through her enormously appealing 16–year–old protagonist, Nomi . . . As a stand–in for the author, Nomi has an acidic wit and a keen eye for calling out hypocrisy . . . If Nomi portrays the rest of her family with more compassion than an angry teenager might, then A Complicated Kindness is a prototypical Miriam Toews novel. So much of Toews’ work features her actual family in various forms: We meet versions of her mother, father, and older sister over and over again in her novels, and she’s forgiving and admiring of all three even as they suffer under the weight of their religion."
—Maris Kreizman, BuzzFeed
"Why the compulsion to laugh so often and so heartily when reading A Complicated Kindness? That's the book's mystery and its miracle. Has any of our novelists ever married, so brilliantly, the funny—and I mean posture–damaging, shoulder–heaving, threaten–the–grip–of–gravity–on–recently–ingested–food brand of funny—and the desperately sad —that would be the three–ply–tissue, insufficient–to–the–day, who–knew–I–had–this–much–snot–in–me brand of sad? I don't think so."
—The Globe and Mail
"There have been a lot of Holden Caulfield knockoffs since 1951, but few authors have been as successful as J.D. Salinger in channeling adolescent angst in a way that's as charming as it is profound. Miriam Toews hits that elusive mark with her new novel. In fact, A Complicated Kindness just may be a future classic in its own right."
—Philadelphia Inquirer
"Miriam Toews, the award winning Canadian author, embodies Nomi's voice with such an authentic and manic charm that it's hard not to fall in love with her . . . A Complicated Kindness captures the struggles of a family and its individuals in a fresh, wondrous style. Despite this complexity of family tensions, much of A Complicated Kindness is pleasantly plotless. The looseness of Nomi's worldview, the sometimes blurry nonfocus of it, the unexpected sideways humor, make this book the beautiful and bitter little masterpiece it is."
—The Believer
"Who says novels aren't political? A Complicated Kindness by Canadian Miriam Toews, is the story of a wise, funny, unhappy teenager whose family is destroyed by fundamentalist Christianity."
—New York Post
"Truly wonderful . . . A Complicated Kindness is . . . one of the year's exuberant reads. Toews recreates the stultifying world of an exasperated Mennonite teenager in a small town where nothing happens with mesmerizing authenticity . . . Toews seduces the reader with her tenderness, astute observation and piquant humour. But then she turns the laughs she's engendered in the reader like a knife."
—Toronto Star
"Bold, tender and intelligent, this is a clear–eyed exploration of belief and belonging, and the irresistible urge to escape both."
—Publishers Weekly
"Although Nomi's story is depressing, her wry observations reflect normal adolescent angst leavened with a distinctly parochial irreverence. Teens with real issues as well as those who would benefit by realizing that they don't have it so bad will find sadness and hope in Nomi's thoughtful musings and root for her survival. The story is a metaphor for those torn between a present lack of fulfillment and the fear of moving toward the unfamiliar–in other words, growing up."
—School Library Journal
"Toews captures the spurts and lurches of adolescent growth in a tale as crude and fresh as its subject matter."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A Complicated Kindness is just that: funny and strange, spellbinding and heartbreaking, this novel is a complicated kindness from a terrifically talented writer."
—Gail Anderson–Dargatz, author of The Spawning Grounds
"It is a complicated kindness indeed that gives us this book. Miriam Toews has written a novel shot through with aching sadness, the spectre of loss, and unexpected humor. You want to reach inside and save 16–year–old Nomi Nickel, send her the money for a plane ticket to New York, get her a cab to CBGB's on the Bowery and somehow introduce her to Lou Reed. It might seem an odd metaphor to use about someone who has authored such a vivid, anguished indictment of religious fundamentalism, but Miriam Toews writes like an angel."
—David Rakoff, author of Fraud
"The narrator of this novel, Nomi Nickel, is wonderful. She scrapes away the appearances in her small town and offers what she finds in a voice that is wry, vulnerable, sacrilegious and, best of all, devastatingly funny. This is Miriam Toews at her best."
—David Bergen, author of The Case of Lena S.
From the moment Nomi Nickels begins her story, listeners know something's wrong in her life. Cara Pifko's narration in young Nomi's voice makes that clear from the start, taking on shades of anger, petulance, and rebellion as listeners ponder the reasons behind the departures of her sister, Tash, and her mother, not to mention the strange actions of Nomi herself and her father. At first, her rant seems like typical teen angst, but soon it reveals the hurtfulness of the Mennonite practice of shunning those who go against their dictates. Pifko makes listeners care as Toews slowly unveils Nomi's story. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940177269870 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2017 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
One
I live with my father, Ray Nickel, in that low brick bungalow out on highway number twelve. Blue shutters, brown door, one shattered window. Nothing great. The furniture keeps disappearing, though. That keeps things interesting.
Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing. Ray and I get up in the morning and move through our various activities until it’s time to go to bed. Every single night around ten o’clock Ray tells me that he’s hitting the hay. Along the way to his bedroom he’ll stop in the front hallway and place notes on top of his shoes to remind him of the things he has to do the next day. We enjoy staring at the Northern Lights together. I told him, verbatim, what Mr. Quiring told us in class. About how those lights work. He thought Mr. Quiring had some interesting points. He’s always been mildly interested in Mr. Quiring’s opinions, probably because he’s also a teacher.
I have assignments to complete. That’s the word, complete. I’ve got a problem with endings. Mr. Quiring has told me that essays and stories generally come, organically, to a preordained ending that is quite out of the writer’s control. He says we will know it when it happens, the ending. I don’t know about that. I feel that there are so many to choose from. I’m already anticipating failure. That much I’ve learned to do. But then what the hell will it matter to me while I’m snapping tiny necks and chucking feathery corpses onto a conveyor belt in a dimly lit cinder-block slaughterhouse on the edge of a town not of this world. Most of the kids from around here will end up working at Happy Family Farms, where local chickens go to meet their maker. I’m sixteen now, young to be on the verge of graduating from high school, and only months away from taking my place on the assembly line of death.
One of my recurring memories of my mother, Trudie Nickel, has to do with the killing of fowl. She and I were standing in this farmyard watching Carson and his dad chop heads off chickens. You’d know Carson if you saw him. Carson Enns. Arm-farter in the back row. President of the Pervert Club. Says he’s got a kid in Pansy, a small town south of here. Troubled boy, but that’s no wonder considering he used to be The Snowmobile Suit Killer. I was eight and Trudie was about thirty-five. She was wearing a red wool coat and moon boots. The ends of her hair were frozen because she hadn’t been able to find the blow-dryer that morning. Look, she’d said. She grabbed a strand of hair and bent it like a straw. She’d given me her paisley scarf to tie around my ears. I don’t know exactly what we were doing at Carson’s place in the midst of all that carnage, it hadn’t started out that way I’m pretty sure, but I guess carnage has a way of creeping up on you. Carson was my age and every time he swung the axe he’d yell things at the chicken. He wanted it to escape. Run, you stupid chicken! Carson, his dad would say. Just his name and a slight anal shake of the head. He was doing his best to nurture the killer in his son. It was around 4:30 in the afternoon on a winter day and the light was fading into blue and it was snowing horizontally and we were all standing under a huge yellow yard light. Well, some of us were dying. And Carson was doing this awful botch job on a chicken, hacking away at its neck, not doing it right at all, whispering instructions on how to escape. Fly away, idiot. Don’t make me do this. Poor kid. By this time he’d unzipped the top half of his snowmobile suit so it kind of flapped around his waist like a skirt, slowing him down, and his dad saw him and came over and grabbed the semi-mutilated chicken out of Carson’s little mittened hand and slapped it onto this wooden altar thing he used to do the killing and brought his axe down with incredible speed and accuracy and in less than a second had created a splattery painting in the snow and I was blown away by how the blood could land so fast and without a single sound and my mom gasped and said look, Nomi, it’s a Jackson Pollock. Oh, it’s beautiful. Oh, she said, cloths of heaven. That was something she said a lot. And Carson and I stood there staring at the blood on the snow and my mom said: Just like that. Who knew it could be so easy.
I don’t know if she meant it’s so easy to make art or it’s so easy to kill a chicken or it’s so easy to die. Every single one of those things strikes me as being difficult to do. I imagine that if she were here right now and I was asking her what she meant, she’d say what are you talking about and I’d say nothing and that would be the end of it.
It’s only because she’s gone that all those trivial little things from the past echo on and on and on. At dinner that night, after the slaughter at Carson’s place, she asked us how we would feel if for some reason we were all in comas and had slept right through the summer months and had woken up around the middle of November, would we be angry that we had missed the warmth and beauty of the summer or happy that we had survived. Ray, who hates choosing, had asked her if we couldn’t be both and she’d said no, she didn’t think so.
Trudie doesn’t live here any more. She left shortly after Tash, my older sister, left. Ray and I don’t know where either one of them is. We do know that Tash left with Ian, who is Mr. Quiring’s nephew. He’s double-jointed and has a red Ford Econoline van. Trudie seems to have left alone.
Now my dad, you know what he says in the middle of those long evenings sitting in our house on the highway? He says: Say, Nomi, how about spinning a platter. Yeah, he uses those exact butt-clenching words. Which means he wants to listen to Anne Murray singing “Snowbird,” again. Or my old Terry Jacks forty-five of “Seasons in the Sun.” I used to play that song over and over in the dark when I was nine, the year I really became aware of my existence. What a riot. We have a ball. Recently, Ray’s been using the word stomach as a verb a lot. And also the word rally. We rally and we stomach. Ray denied it when I pointed it out to him. He says we’re having a good time and getting by. Why shouldn’t he amend? He tells me that life is filled with promise but I think he means the promise of an ending because so far I haven’t been able to put my finger on any other. If we could get out of this town things might be better but we can’t because we’re waiting for Trudie and Tash to come back. It’s been three years so far. My period started the day after Trudie left which means I’ve bled thirty-six times since they’ve been gone.
