In rereading the assembled information below I am aware that it is essentially a compilation of ‘background information’ on the novel. I have purposely left out my analysis and interpretation, for the most part, because my sense of what the duties of the backgrounder entail is to provide information that can then be interpreted by the literature circle as a whole. I don’t want to start doing the thinking and connecting for my group members. I want to search out background information that I think will generate discussion, period. I am aware that this reads like a bad lonely planet entry and I’m not thrilled with that. I do think that this information will be of value in thinking critically about the novel and that is my only criteria.
Miriam Toews was born in Steinbach Manitoba and spent her youth there. Her novel A Complicated Kindness is set in a fictional town called East Village. This Russian Mennonite town is generally thought to be a fictionalized version of Steinbach. This begs the question, what is Steinbach Manitoba like? We need this information before we can do any kind of meaningful comparison.
Steinbach, Manitoba.
Steinbach is a small city that has a current population of approximately 13,000. If we assume the novel is set in the late 70’s to early eighties (based on the Lou Reed references), then the population of Steinbach at that time would have been much smaller; figures for 1981 list the population at 6,676.
The town traces its origin to the settlement of Mennonite settlers in 1874. These Mennonites were of two types, Kleine Germeinde, and Bergthal. The main difference between the two groups seems to be the reformist and more pious and discipline oriented nature of the Kleine Germeinde who were reacting to some general backsliding among the Mennonites in general. In this way Miriam Toews story in A complicated kindness seems to be one that has been going on for a very long time, and similar experiences were likely had by youth in previous generations in Manitoba, and even before in Russia.
Steinbach does not seem to have been as Strictly 100% Mennonite as it appears in the novel. Census figures seem to indicate in the 70’s there would have been about 80% of the population that were German speaking. As of 2001 the rate of religious participation among the cities residents stood at over 90%.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Toews and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinbach,_Manitoba)
For a more definitive answer to the question of how much of Steinbach is in the novel it is always prudent to use the author’s own words (from the Faber reader’s guide to the novel:
In writing A Complicated Kindness Miriam Toews has said that she wanted to ‘show how the fundamentalist interpretation of religion or Christianity was destructive in the Nickel family.’ Given her own back- ground of growing up in the small conservative Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba it was inevitable that she would be asked to what degree her confused yet sharply intelligent narrator’s experience reflected her own. Replying that although the events in East Village were entirely fictitious she has explained ‘I was very conscious of making sure that my character’s relationships with the community were authentic. Mine were something else entirely. Obviously. But the emphasis in the town on punishment and shame, and joylessness, that degree of severity and intolerance – all those aspects I certainly experienced.’
The daughter of a liberal family, Toews still describes herself as a Mennonite (although she also declares herself an agnostic) and has retained a great affection for the positive aspects of the Mennonite way of life, such as the idea of the extended family, an affection echoed in Nomi’s feelings for East Village. She remembers ‘a very nur- turing, safe environment, everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it’s a beautiful thing, and it is, but there’s so much going on besides.’ Toews left Steinbach the day after her graduation and says that she could not go back to live there explaining that people who leave ‘have very complicated relationships with the places we grew up. We want to love them, and we do love them, but there’s so much of it that’s so harsh, so unforgiving.’
Source: http://www.faber.co.uk/site-media/reading-guides/complicated-kindness_reading-guide.pdf
Miriam Toews novels often contain absent mothers. This is the case in both Summer of my Amazing Luck and A Complicated Kindness. It raises questions for readers of here work about the nature of her relationship with her own mother; Toews addresses these issues in an interview she gave to Herizons magazine:
“The relationship I have with my mother is so strong and loving and fun, that maybe I had to, in order to have a character who was working through something difficult, have her gone – dead, or missing, or whatever, just absent – in order to create that conflict for my character. And, to get all psychoanalytical about it, I’ve been trying to understand my father for a long time now, and I think that in my own life, growing up, etcetera, my mother was sort of this buffer between him and me, in that she kind of protected me from his sadness and tried to make life fun and upbeat all the time. So maybe, in order for my character to understand her father better, and assuming that my characters are in some ways me, that particular buffer has to be removed.” (Source: http://www.randomhouse.ca/author/results.pperl?authorid=55356&view=full_sptlght )
From Lori:
“The Father/Daughter Relationship in A Complicated Kindness”
As Fred discusses in his posting, Toews chooses to make the mother an absent figure in this novel. As Tash, Nomi’s sister, also decides to flee East Village, Ray and Nomi are the only family members left in the house. When looking at this particular father/daughter relationship, it is often difficult to determine who is taking care of whom. While Trudi, the mother, is described as someone who could do activities like “deep-sea diving or leading groups of tourists around places in Europe” (7), Ray “never really succumbed to that type of extreme” (29). He is content to let his wife be in the spot-light. When Trudi is finally excommunicated from the Mennonite community for stoning her brother’s house, Ray realizes that he has only his younger daughter to help him get through his lonely life.
As I was the “Passage Master” in our literature circle, I was immediately drawn to a section of the novel where Nomi comments on her interpretation of the relationship with her dad. Even before Trudi leaves her husband and daughter, Nomi perceives that Ray is not the typical authoritarian father figure.
From a metaphorical sense, I see Trudi as the anchor that keeps Ray afloat in his identification of a dutiful husband and father. Even though Ray and Nomi are sad when Tash leaves, perhaps deep down they always knew that she could not fit into such a conformist society such as East Village. However, when Trudi, who possesses many of the same personality traits of her older daughter, also chooses to leave the family, Ray regresses into almost a catatonic state: “. . .he didn’t move all day. And he didn’t speak and he didn’t eat. He just stood there in his dark suit with his necktie all done up and everything and his hands in his pockets, moving his change around. That was the only sound all day. . .” (190).
What I appreciate the most about the relationships described in A Complicated Kindness is that Toews never tells the reader exactly what happens to Tash, Trudi, Ray and Nomi at the end of the novel. It is not often that an author leaves the reader with so many unanswered questions. When I think about the title of the novel, it seems that Tash, Trudi and Ray believe it is “kinder” to leave Nomi than to have her live with them in shame. Last, I believe Toews shows her readers that all families have complex relationships whether we can observe these complexities from our everyday interactions with them or not.
The sense of place that is exemplified in the novel is carefully articulated in a way that supports the overall sense of the complexity of life within East Village. Although it is described as a safe and nurturing environment from the standpoint of generational history and knowledge, it is still a place that constitutes complexities beyond simplistic resolutions. In other words, place becomes more than just a landscape. Place is the interaction of the characters within a controversial space. For this reason, the spaces within the novel are an essential component to feeling a sense of disjunction between a sense of comfort and an undeniable lack of cohesion. This is represented by the way in which the characters are living within a particular construct that demands a certain level of religious cooperation/obedience but the characters are stepping outside of the expectations. In essence, they figuratively and symbolically step outside through the movement from place to place. They step outside and go against the expectations through places and the use of different spaces. For example, vehicles are a place to get within a space inside the larger structural thematic space of East Village. Again, we see this when the kids go to the pit and the description of main street as “bookended by two fields of dirt that never grow a crop. They lie in perpetual fallow, my dad told me. Those words haunt me still” (47 Toews). It is described as a road that leads to eternal damnation but should be connected to something earthly like a road. In this way, the main street becomes an active influence on the landscape. It starts to symbolize the life of the characters within the structures and landscape. Similarly, the idea of the real town and the museum village shows this juxtaposition between what is “working authenticity” that has to meet a certain criterion and the unauthenticated expression of the characters trying to come to terms with themselves and their environment and place (Katie). The increase in participation in places that are not the church or home shows the way in which the characters are trying to express themselves beyond the fundamentalist religious constraints they are trying to move around within the general scope of place. For this reason, the way in which the novel traverses from place to place and jumps back and forth contributes to the overall sense of incompatibility between self and place, self and others, self and expectations, and self against self.