a complicated kindness
That’s the title of the book I’m reading
– a complicated kindness.
(No caps in the title = just so you know it’s not a mistake.)
The author, Miriam Toews, is my new she-ro: every single book she’s written to date has won and/or has been nominated for an award.
And she’s Canadian — w00t!
Born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba.
Obviously inspired by her own life experience, Toews tells the story of Nomi Nickel, a 16-year-old trapped in a small Mennonite town (hello?) who lives with her father Ray and spends her days trying to piece together the reasons why her mother, Trudie, and her sister, Natasha, have gone missing.
I’m about one-third into the book, and Toews’ style and wry humour remind me of J.D. Salinger’s; so I’m laughing a lot and can’t get myself to stop reading.
Here’s an excerpt:
We’re Mennonites. As far as I know, 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. Ironically, they named this place East Village, which, I have learned, is the name of the area in New York City that I would most love to inhabit. Others ran away to a giant dust bowl called the Chaco, in Paraguay, the hottest place in the world. My friend Lydia moved here from Paraguay and has told me stories about heat-induced madness. She had an uncle who regularly sat on an overturned feed bucket in the village square and screamed for his brain to be returned to him. At night it was easier to have a conversation with him. We are supposed to be cheerfully yearning for death and in the meantime, until that blessed day, our lives are meant to be facsimiles of death or at least the dying process.
Once I’m done with a complicated kindness, I’ll be reading Swing Low: A Life (Miriam’s memoir of her father’s troubled life), and then summer of my amazing luck (“Delightfully humorous, subversive, and naughtily clever,” says the Prairie Fire) — all of which I’ve borrowed from my local library.
Her other two books were taken, so I reserved them: a boy of good breeding, and her latest novel, the flying troutmans.
After reading through Toews’ entire works, I’ll either be hungry for more or totally nauseated. But one thing’s for sure, it’ll be the end of reading other people’s stuff for a while: I’ll have memoirs of my own to write.
Which brings me to an update concerning my big paper purge: the way things are going — and they’re going honky dory, thank you — my prediction is that by the end of June, I’ll be done with the whole mess. That’s when the real fun will begin.
I’m happy and excited… yet calm and serene.
All good!
