Dueck won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award for her novel, This Hidden Thing, that tells the story of a young Mennonite immigrant woman who "works out" as a domestic servant to earn money for her poor family and whose life is dramatically changed because of it. I was fortunate enough to preview this book and found it captivating. Here's what I wrote about it for the publisher, Canadian Mennonite University Press:
"This sweeping novel covers three generations of Canadian Mennonite history, focused through a young Russian Mennonite immigrant woman whose life is irrevocably changed by her “working out” in Winnipeg to support her family. As an accurate and vivid evocation of time and place, This Hidden Thing not only reflects Mennonite cultural change, but also records cultural change among English immigrants to Canada as their lives intersect with Mennonites. But above all, this is a novel of character.
Dora Dueck’s articulation of the reflexes of personality and the development of consciousness creates a drama of emotional tension and continuous discovery as she tells a compelling woman’s story too often obscured by history. She inhabits her characters in such a way that the reader is drawn into a living, breathing world that lingers even after the covers of the book are closed. This Hidden Thing offers a worthy female, urban counterpart to Rudy Wiebe’s Peace Shall Destroy Many."
David Bergen won two awards for his sixth novel, The Matter with Morris, which was also a finalist for the Giller Prize, one of Canada's top literary honors. I haven't read The Matter with Morris yet, but it explores the life of a man whose son goes to war in Afghanistan. I met Bergen on the Manitoba Author's tour at the Mennonite/s Writing: Manitoba and Beyond Conference at the University of Winnipeg in 2009, and found him to be both personable and funny. He's the unapologetically worldly son of a Mennonite minister, the happily married father of four children, and the winner of multiple awards for his writing. I found his novel, The Case of Lena S, to be both readable and provocative. Bergen is gifted at describing domestic relationships in slightly disturbed families and portraying the complex and unsolvable riddle of ordinary life. His short story collection, Sitting Opposite My Brother, his first published work, is still one of the finest contemporary Mennonite works in this genre.
In his recent essay, "A Complicated Kindness: The Mennonite Contribution to Canadian Literature," German scholar Martin Kuester says, "I believe . . . that new identities—whether resulting from language or narrative traditions—will, perhaps, counteract the disintegration [of commonly held Mennonite values] "that in the past held scattered groups of communities together." Kuester is hopeful that storytelling itself will serve as a force for renewal among Mennonites. "The telling of stories thus becomes a central motif not only in the form of Di Brandt’s “maternal story-telling” but also in Miriam Toews’ “Mennonite existentialism.” We are told the story of a community which is slowly liberating itself from oppressive master narratives but which, in both the literal and metaphorical senses, at all times and everywhere, is threatened by the floods that modern life brings with it."
What do you think? Will the continuing development of Mennonite literature serve as a force for renewal within this small cultural minority, or will it only serve to separate contemporary readers from the tradition by critiquing aspects of the culture that seem outmoded?
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