Fragments and absences: language and loss in Miriam Toews's A complicated kindness.

Abstract

Miriam Toews resists the conventional narrative of the adolescent leaving the small town, proposing instead that the community deserts Nomi Nickel. Nomi, facing maternal absence and the loss of her mother tongue, attempts to use linguistic and material fragments to connect word and world. Suffering from multiple and inexplicable desertions, she rejects the community's intolerance but values its kindness. Her contradictory responses to Plautdietsch, which is both deserting her and being rejected by her, complicate and challenge the concrete words and signs of adolescent protest and rebellion. Binaries separating word and world, kindness and judgement, margin and centre are challenged and collapsed in the course of Nomi's narrative.