Novelist examines early Mennonite experience
WINNIPEG, MB�"“There are certainly enough books in the world. Part of the writer's craft is finding reasons to write!"
So says Dora Dueck, and she has plenty of experience finding reasons�"she's spent most of her life writing, in one form or another, and her passion for her craft is impossible to ignore. “Writing is a calling, and novels can teach us how to love."
Dueck's newest novel, This Hidden Thing (CMU Press, 2010), features the life of Maria Klassen, a Russian Mennonite immigrant to 1920s Winnipeg, who finds herself working as a domestic in a wealthy home. The book deals with various themes: Mennonite adaptation to Canadian culture, wealth and poverty during the Depression, and social and spiritual identity. But most of all it is the story of a secret�"a secret so powerful that Maria carries it the rest of her life.
This Hidden Thing has an unusual structure. The book is laid out in two major sections, the first dealing with Maria's five years working for the Lowry family, and the second offering a decade-by-decade summary of Maria's later years. But the book is driven by characters, not by plot�"Dueck's talent shows in skilful, descriptive passages which reveal much about her characters.
Much of Dueck's accomplishment in This Hidden Thing is the character of Maria. Proud, silent, she is sometimes unlikeable but often admirable. Not that she was an easy character “to find," as Dueck puts it, smiling. “She's such a reticent person. It was hard to find a way to tell her story." Dueck began the novel in the 1990s and worked on it slowly, gradually “coming to terms" with her character�"and honing the book's representation of Mennonite history.
This Hidden Thing is soaked in history: Winnipeg readers will find themselves face-to-face with an early, but still recognizable, incarnation of a city which was built on the backs of immigrants like Maria. Dueck, who worked for many years as a freelance writer and editor at the MB Herald, recently completed a Masters in history. Her research focused mainly on the first Mennonite Brethren periodical and its impact on Mennonite immigrants in Canada.
On the surface, the book might seem to be a Mennonite tale�"a faith-based story. But while This Hidden Thing situates itself within the Mennonite tradition, its tone is one of spiritual questioning, and Dueck avoids offering any hard-and-fast answers to Maria's questions about sin, forgiveness and personal significance.
“I have an abhorrence of pieties," says Dueck. “I write within the community, which is not to say that I don't ever feel critical of the community. But I wanted anybody to be able to pick the book up and enjoy it."
This Hidden Thing is the latest in a line of Dueck's published fiction, and her second novel. It offers an intriguing working-out of Dueck's personal philosophy on grace and forgiveness. “The writer needs to approach everything he or she does with compassion, because then it will be 'singing up the earth,' as an Australian indigenous saying goes."
“Books can take us into experiences we don't know and open us up to love."
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