Critical Ananlysis Week One, Blog Two (A Complicated Kindness Miriam Toews) 1/3 of the Novel

“But there is kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don’t know what to say. ” (Toews, A Complicated Kindness 60)

Nomi says this after reflecting on the people in her town. This quote has the title of the novel in it, and is therefore of significant value. Nomi reveals a tender, more appealing side to both the town and her character.

The complicated kindness refers to the sympathy expressed between the people in Nomi’s town, and the kind thoughts that can’t always be articulated because of the strict Mennonite community. The eyes of a person are like the windows to the soul – Nomi is referring to the deeper meaning of the people’s thoughts and the unexecuted actions of kindness they imply.

Nomi’s life and character are also very complex. She knows what she wants but cannot get it. She must rely on both fate and others’ actions to get what she is in desperate need of. Nomi longs for her family to come together and be as one, as they were years ago.

This quote was chosen because it provides the reader with many thoughts about the meaning. It can be interpreted in many ways, and associated with Nomi’s character, the town’s attitude and even the morals of the novel.

The author captures the reader’s attention by using the title within the novel. The reader automatically makes this connection and thinks about the true meaning behind “a complicated kindness”. It is not very often that an author uses the title of the novel within the text, but with this, Toews expects to communicate the message that things are not what they appear to be and maybe there is a deeper reasoning for acts that occur. Maybe Nomi losing her mother’s presence will make her a stronger individual in the long run. Maybe this so called complicated kindness is a metaphor for the difficult things we must go through to achieve happiness or purpose. It could be the unspoken similarities the people of the town share, but since expressing these thoughts is taboo, nobody knows about each other’s challenges. Everyone knows on some level that they are all the same but they cannot reach this complicated connection but do reach one another’s humanitarian kindness.