A Complicated Kindness

I'm reading the 2004 Canadian Governor General prize winning novel "A Complicated Kindness" by Manitoba author Miriam Toews. One of the quotes of praise on the back of the novel says "A Complicated Kindness possesses one of the strongest fictional voices since Holden Caufield vented his spleen." I read this to Grant, and he said someone said exactly the same thing about one of his friend's novels published to critical acclaim a few years ago. Regardless, the voice of Nomi Nickel, the teenage protagonist growing up in a Mennonite town in Manitoba (a town that is not so fictional, as a friend of ours lives there) is quite amazing. Since I've been "away" I love reading Canadian novels, and, especially, Canadian novels set on the prairies.

Here's a passage from near the opening that I like:

This town is so severe. And silent. It makes me crazy, the silence. I wonder if a person can die from it. There's an invisible force that exerts a steady pressure on our words like a hand to an open, spurting wound. 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. The only thing you hear at night is semis barelling down the highway carting drugged animals off to be attacked with knives.