All My Puny Sorrows

By Miriam Toews

SHORTLISTED 2014 – Scotiabank Giller Prize

Miriam Toews is beloved for her irresistible voice, for mingling laughter and heartwrenching poignancy like no other writer. In her most passionate novel yet, she brings us the riveting story of two sisters, and a love that illuminates life.
 
You won’t forget Elf and Yoli, two smart and loving sisters. Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. Yoli is a beguiling mess, wickedly funny even as she stumbles through life struggling to keep her teenage kids and mother happy, her exes from hating her, her sister from killing herself and her own heart from breaking.
 
But Elf’s latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Her long-time agent has been calling and neither Yoli nor Elf’s loving husband knows what to tell him. Can she be nursed back to “health” in time? Does it matter? As the situation becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her life.
 
All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. In her beautifully rendered new novel, Miriam Toews gives us a startling demonstration of how to carry on with hope and love and the business of living even when grief loads the heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780345808028

Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

Reviews for All My Puny Sorrows

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

All My Puny Sorrows is kind of like Me Before You, with intractable depression instead of quadriplegia, and a lot more literary references. Brillant, beautiful Elfrieda "Elf" von Riesen has it all; she's a successful concert pianist with a loving husband and devoted family, but she is also afflicted by a persistent desire to die. Her mother, husband, and sister repeatedly save her life and and try to inspire her with the will to live, but their efforts are all for naught. Much philosophizing and many flashbacks to anecdotes from the past ensue. I felt impatient with Elf. She's something of a cipher and the nature of her depression is not well explained, so it is hard for the reader to understand where she's coming from. I had high hopes for this book, but came away somewhat disappointed.

[saresmoore · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I would say that this book undid me, but I think it put me together for the first time. It hit very, very close to home. It made me feel vulnerable, but it didn't make me sad. I think reading this book built something up in me that I didn't know needed to be assembled. I'm absolutely floored by Toews brilliance and incredibly grateful for this beautiful book.

[ldvoorberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very sad but not depressing book about how a sister and her mother live with and through the deaths of family members. An honest look -- without apology, explanation, or excuse -- at suicide. There are so many good truisms in the book, a healthy dose of literary quotations and poetry, and of course the raw dialogue style of Miriam Toews that is unconventional but so logical, nevertheless. Our lives might be normal or screwed up or utterly painful: how do you do it?

[huntersun9 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a beautifully written story of a family desperate to save the life of a suicidal loved one. I usually dislike reading dialogue without quotation marks, but Toews has a unique style that makes things clear. She presents a realistic mix of the sadness, anger and humor that make up grief. I read this on my nook app and will probably buy a hard copy to read again.

[paradiseporch · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Elfrieda (Elf) is a world-renowned pianist, beautiful, wealthy, in a happy marriage – and she wants to die. Her younger sister Yolandi (Yoli) who tells this story is broke, divorced and struggling as a single mother, and she desperately wants to save her sister from committing suicide, while she tries to keep her own life together.This book, shortlisted for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize in 2014, looks at a serious subject in a compassionate & profound way – and along the way provides some humour from Yoli.An outstanding effort. One of those books that sneaks up on you.5 stars

[lamotamant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

At the behest of my well-intentioned mom, the standard issue piano lessons of your average middle-class child crept into once-weekly residency during several years of my childhood. I was a proper failure. I'd take up my seat next to the note-murmuring Mr. Poe and repeatedly pound out "Oom Pa Pa" accompanied by the intermittent SWACK of his favored wooden ruler meeting errant knuckles while my brain was, inconveniently, elsewhere. Often pondering the pros and cons of the stolid Mr. Poe morphing into a raven. I was always more notes-in-the-margins than music notes; my piano lessons (as well as the redundant pleas to switch to guitar lessons because, somehow, THAT would be different and marvelous and oh-so-me) instilling a vast appreciation for those that were musically skilled without, however, bestowing any of that skill upon yours truly.

We all connect differently to the world around us. I could sit down at the nearest piano and chop out a decent "Twinkle Twinkle" but it's the reader in me that is my looking glass into the freedom some feel when keys move beneath flowing fingers. It's the same kind of freedom I feel when something in an author's voice connects with something inside of me and brings it forth, blooming, bursting, breathing.

Toews' All My Puny Sorrows brings forth for me. She richly tells a story of a battle to hold on and to let go. Leavening the sharpness of the reality of loss, depression, mental illness, suicide, grief, and anger with tenderness, respect, empathy, and humor. As we can only do when we've come up against the former and survived it's blows. I think this is why so many have responded to Sorrows; it carries the taste of real experience, real voice. This, being balanced with talent and insightful reference, makes Toews one of my favorite new-to-me authors of this year.

All My Puny Sorrows was a sad, beautiful, encouraging, devastating book to read. It was hard to read and yet even harder to put down. I found so much depth and wisdom in Toews' writing. Wisdom for those who have held on with fierce resolve to life and loved ones; for those who have felt what-if and what-should-I-do tremble on their tongue and echo echo echo in their brains and souls; for those who have experienced both the best and worst of the medical community, the caustic singe of guilt the burnt-out can propagate amidst their patients that are dealing with mental/emotional illness and the lightheaded joy those walking blessings that appear in grey or tan hospital corridors when you least expect them and when you most need them to. Wisdom for those who don't know how to take the next step or write the next word.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A strong novel about a tough subject to write about, the desire to end one’s life. There is a certain heaviness to the book as the narrator grapples with her sister’s depression, and yet, I found it to be more about life and relationships than it was about darkness, so don’t let the subject put you off too much. Toews mixes in the right levels of humor and touching moments, but most of all, she tells the story with honesty and authenticity, and doesn’t resort to melodrama. I loved how her novel was intelligent and yet down to earth. The family has plenty of flaws, made poor decisions, and survived being a part of a conservative Mennonite community, but they are well-read and highly cultured. The book’s title comes from a Coleridge poem, ‘To a Friend’, and there are many other poetic references: Dorothy Parker (“What fresh hell is this?”), Madame de Staël (“beyond all doubt, if you are not as happy as it is possible to be, you are more beloved than anyone who has ever lived”), and Philip Larkin (“What are days for?”), among many others.There are several frank passages on ways of committing suicide, from the drastic (in America, jumping in front of a train), to buying medications normally used to put pets to sleep (in Mexico, Nembutal preceded by an anti-emetic such as Dramamine), to being legally put to sleep (in Switzerland, where euthanasia is legal for non-citizens who’ve simply grown weary of living). And, it’s telling that it’s the sister who is beautiful, talented, smart, and has love around her in life that paradoxically wants to end it, because she’s seen its absurdity and is wrought with inner angst. The women characters in the novel are strong, such as the feisty old mom and aunt, and the bond between the sisters is special and heartwarming. The narrator recalls one time after having her heart broken, her sister sending her a quote from Paul Valery, one word per letter, so that it takes months to decode “Breath, dreams, silence, invisible calm…you will triumph.” One does wonder, are there actually people who do this? … but it’s so incredibly sweet and literary you have to smile. The book really hits its stride in Chapter 5, mixing humor, relationships, and memories in a hospital visit between the two. Also fantastic is Chapter 8, which has some wonderful letters which are intelligent, poignant, and offbeat, essentially microcosms of the book as a whole. I don’t want to spoil anything, but will just say that Toews is skillful in navigating these waters, and I love how she played this one out.Quotes:On beauty:“Her smile is an event.”On depression:“Did Elf have a terminal illness? Was she cursed genetically from day one to want to die? Was every seemingly happy moment from her past, every smile, every song, every heartfelt hug and laugh and exuberant fist-pump and triumph, just a temporary detour from her innate longing for release and oblivion?”On love:“Dan wanted me to stay. I wanted Elf to stay. Everyone in the whole world was fighting with somebody to stay. When Richard Bach wrote ‘If you love someone, set them free’ he can’t have been directing his advice at human beings.”On time and meaninglessness:“I tell her all right, I’ll leave but I’ll be back tomorrow. She says isn’t it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named – when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of ‘telling time.’ How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.”Lastly, these bits of humor:“He had come to Winnipeg to write a libretto. But who hasn’t? It’s a dark and fecund corner of the world, this confluence of muddy waters, one that begs the question of hey, how do we set words to life’s tragic score?”“She started telling stories about me when I was a kid … that I was the toughest girl in town, and that nobody made her laugh harder and that all her piano performances, really, were inspired by my life, by the wild, free, rhythm of my life, combined with its delicacy, its defiance (which I knew was shorthand for being messed up but unable to admit it), or something like that. That she tried to play her piano the way I lived my life: freely, joyfully, honestly (shorthand for: like a cheerful halfwit with no social skills).”“I remember the sex talk she gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. She asked me if I knew what a hard-on was and I said yes and she said great! That was it, the extent of it, my terse navigational guide to the biggest minefield confronting humankind.”“He put his arm around her and said blessings on you, girl, and she told him she was sorry that he had to visit her here. He said no. We don’t apologize for being sick, for being human, for being weary (Uncle Frank has obviously never been a woman.)”

[stephengoldenberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979."

This opening sentence tells you exactly what to expect from the rest of the novel. Eccentric characters and weird off-kilter events fill almost every page. (A man walks past the house naked from the waist down. Their mother goes out to give him some sweat pants. He winds them round his neck like a scarf and walks on. A doctor's waiting room is filled with people who all have patches on their left eye. These are just two examples.)

It's the I story of two sisters, Elf and Yoli, brought up in a Canadian small town Mennonite community by parents who break most of the strict Puritan religious rules. For most of the book, Yoli debates whether she should prevent her suicidal sister from killing herself or take her off to Switzerland and help her to end her life peacefully. Much of it takes place in hospitals as Elf recovers from her latest suicide attempt. Plus she's by no means the only member of their extensive family to have a history of suicide attempts.

Summed up like this, I dare say it doesn't sound very enticing and yet, for a novel full of suicide and death, it is strangely life enhancing, not least because of the humour provided by that constraint stream of eccentricities and some lively, intelligent and funny dialogue. I've never been to Winnepeg or Toronto but Miriam Toews makes both cities sound fascinatingly exotic.

[justacatandabook · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a tough novel to read. Which isn't to say it's bad. It's not. At all. In fact, it's lovely and lyrical and beautiful. It's just tough. It chronicles the tale of two sisters, Yolandia (Yoli) and her older sister, Elfrieda (Elf). Yoli grows up in the shadow of the talented Elf, who is a famous pianist and an amazing free spirit. Yoli adores her from a young age, as Elf is the only one she knows who has the will and strength to fight against their religious Mennonite upbringing.

As adults, it seems like Elf has it all together - a loving partner, a successful career as a famous pianist, while Yoli is struggling - she's divorced (she's working on number two) and working to stay afloat as an author and raise her two kids.

However, underneath, we learn Elf has a great sadness, as the book covers her suicide attempts, including one as she is about to embark on a concert tour. Yoli rushes to her sister's side, but struggles to help her.

Overall, as I stated, the book is lovely, despite its sad subject matter (my heart hurts that apparently much of this is autobiographical for Toews). Having lost a loved one to suicide, reading a lot of this was very hard, indeed. I was very drawn to Yoli - she is a well-written character and you find yourself rooting for her, as she deals with her sister, her mother, and her crazy life. Even fragile Elf is beautiful. The girls' mother is quite a character; I loved her deeply. She was a trip.

I had to power through this one - sometimes all the bad things happening were overwhelming. The strength of character pulled me through it. I found myself a little frustrated at times ("why am I reading this?!"), but it truly is lovely, and if you've dealt with mental illness in any way (either yourself or with someone you love), while it will hurt, it's also a worthwhile read.

[elizajane_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm purposely being vague however, this review may contain what some would consider SPOILERS. There are a lot of reviews of this book so I won't say too much and just narrow in on my main points. I enjoyed the read, Toews is an excellent writer and her characters are always wonderful. I think I'll always enjoy any book she writes. This family, with all its extended aunts and cousins, etc, is so strong when it comes together to be a family to endure the sorrows together and I loved them as an example of family. What the (western) world has so much grown away from and lost. I loved Lottie and Yoli, such women full of fortitude, even though Yoli would have us believe she was full of weakness. Elf, the sister described as not wanting to live, I didn't like. We never got inside her head and I understand the point of that. But we were also not told what her problem was, psychiatrically, what was her diagnosis. She refused meds and I became frustrated with the author for not, at least, giving us the information the family would have. Thus, the reader guesses what is wrong with her and I really did not like her at all when she forces her sister, who is against it, to realistically investigate euthanasia on her behalf. The first death was a beautiful one and showed how a well-lived life can end and how those left behind gather strength from it. In the end, I didn't find the book sad at all. I'm glad the book ended the way it did.

[kimhooperwrites · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really loved this book. The relationship between Elf and Yoli is just so tender and rich and real. Somehow, the author infuses a lightness and humor into such a sad and tragic story. It felt very human and raw. The writing itself is beautiful--very lyrical. I'm going to have to read more by Miriam Toews.

[mjlivi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bloody hell, this is such an achingly sad book. The novel is narrated by Yoli, a writer, whose sister Elf is in hospital following an attempt to kill herself. It's a bleak, funny, moving and heart-wrenching story of love, despair and futility - the whole plot is basically a tug of war between Elf and her family, whose love doesn't seem to be enough to keep her alive. It sounds unremittingly bleak, and it's definitely downbeat, but the voice of Yoli snaps you out of the sadness with wit and sarcasm and you find yourself laughing in the midst of a dreadfully sad story. Toews is a fantastic writer, and this is her most moving book.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sisters have a strange bond. They fight like cats and dogs but they love each other right down to the marrow of their beings. They can frustrate each other, annoy each other, even dislike each other at times, but they are still connected in inexplicable ways. Often they find their roles in the family and they hew to those roles forever after. In Miriam Toews' latest novel, All My Puny Sorrows, there are two sisters caught in their self-defined roles as one of them actively seeks to leave this world and the other struggles to keep her sister in it.Elfrieda (Elf) is a world-renowned concert pianist. She is happily married to a wonderful, thoughtful, and loving man. She's successful beyond all imagining. And yet she is deeply depressed, attempting suicide regularly. Yolandi (Yoli) appears to be the diametric opposite of her older sister. Given half a chance, she consistently bollockses up her life and needs to be bailed out by her sister. Despite her chronic money problems, the difficulties of single parenting, and multiple failed relationships behind her, she is generally pretty happy. Or she would be if her beloved sister wasn't so determined to kill herself. Not only does Elf want to die but she wants Yoli to help her, concocting schemes for them to go overseas together where Elf can get enough of certain drugs to finally succeed in dying. What does Yoli owe Elf though? Does she owe it to her sister to help her or does she owe it to her to try and keep her safe? Yoli wants to be the loyal, unquestioning, and adoring sister she's always been but this leaves her torn about the right thing to do.Elf is not the first in her family to contemplate suicide. In fact, Elf and Yoli's father committed suicide himself. His quiet beliefs in writing and reading put him at constant odds with their Mennonite community, as does his unwavering support for Elf in her forbidden love of piano, poetry, and her unconventional personality. This longstanding history of the two sisters, as well as past persecutions in Russia, weaves in throughout the more present narrative where Elf is in a psychiatric hospital instead of preparing for her upcoming concert tour. The story is entirely from Yoli's first person perspective as the unsuccessful sister and Elf is only envisioned through her eyes. This persepctive makes it that much more shocking for the reader when Elf admits to Yoli that she has spent a lifetime being the responsible one in order to give Yoli the space and freedom to screw-up. And because we see Elf's despair through the lens of Yoli, there seems to be no definable reason for her crippling depression. Yoli doesn't understand quite the ways in which performing both saves and drains Elf, nor the way the pressure to fulfill her familial role overwhelms her. Instead she is left to wonder whether her sister has the right to die if she is seemingly healthy and only suffering mentally. Is this a mental illness deep within her bones that plagues Elf and if so can she be judged sane in her desire to die?The narration feels akin to but not exactly stream of consciousness and is very much one sided. There is little action involved; the story relies almost entirely on character development to keep the reader turning pages. Elf as a character is sneaky and determined, non-compliant with her doctors' orders, only wanting to be loosed from the hospital in order to accomplish her ultimate goal. Yoli's character is conflicted and at least somewhat sympathetic as she weighs her own needs and wants as versus her sister's. The story is roughly based on Toews' own family situation and there is a poignancy about it and a truthfulness to both the grief of living in fear for a depressed loved one and the scary inability to truly save someone who has no interest in being saved. As a novel centered on suicide and the desire to die, there is a lot of bleakness and depression, of course, but there's also humor strewn throughout the story that leavens the certain despair, sadness, and sorrow at moments when it threatens to overwhelm the reader. The writing is serious, intimate, and meticulously chosen; it's very well-written. The story as a whole though is somewhat ponderous and the pacing is slow and deliberate. As a look at the toll depression takes on not only the sufferer but those who love her, this is masterful but as an engaging story, it just doesn't quite reach the same level.

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am ashamed to admit that in the past, I haven't felt that much sympathy for people who attempt suicide. I had always thought that it was a selfish and narcissistic act, causing irreparable pain to everyone around them. But, I don't know anyone who has and suicide hasn't been an event (thankfully) that has impacted my life. Author Miram Toews, on the other hand, is all too familiar with suicide. Her father committed suicide and then 12 years later, her sister also killed herself -- both of them died by throwing themselves in front of a train. All My Puny Sorrows is the semi-autobiographical story of 2 sisters -- Elfrieda, a world class pianist and Yoli, a not very well known children's author. Elfrieda is successful, beautiful, married to a wonderful husband, but she wants to die. Yoli, on the other hand, is struggling on many fronts. She has had 2 failed marriages, ekes out a living writing children's books about girls who compete in horse barrel racing, and continues to fall for the wrong kind of guy. But where her life is really falling apart is that her sister has attempted suicide multiple times.Although the subject of this novel sounds abysmally depressing, Toews throws in humor to this story. And it's not sick, dark humor, but an interesting way of looking at how ridiculous our lives sometimes turn out. I found myself laughing aloud and then crying at other parts. I can't express how much this book touched me. It definitely made me look at my life differently and the lives of people around me. Highly recommended.

[suesbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

excellently written. wonderful depiction of both family love, psychiatric problems, and real despair.

[dreamydress48 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Where does the violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones?" I'm not sure what to write about this book. It's equally ironic, sad and humorous. I listened to the audible version of this book, and could really feel the conversational style of the writing. My only regret is the timing.I knew this was going to be a sad story. I had read this was semi-autobiographical, and touched on themes about Toews's religious upbringing as a Mennonite, as well as the tragic relationships she had with both her father and sister. I planned this read during a time when I was especially upbeat and jovial.Then things changed overnight. I lost one grandmother a month ago, and spent this past week in the hospital waiting for news about my beloved maternal grandmother. I couldn't bring myself to finish the last two hours of the book until today, after my grandmother was sent home under orders from hospice. After her long battle with ALS, something as "puny" as a bedsore will have the last word. It's ironic, just like this book.Although mental illness and its "violence" torture the sufferer, it's effects are always far-reaching. Grief, guilt, sorrow, anxiety, anger and depression are all natural things humans experience when they lose a loved one. What compels a person to take their life? Why are some individuals so stubbornly optimistic despite crappy hands they're dealt in life, while others have the world and are gifted beyond compare, and yet suffer tremendously with each renewed day of life? This is a wonderfully personal novel, and I'm glad Toews deemed us a worthy audience."Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen." - D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

[cygnoir_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A devastating rumination on choosing to live, choosing to die, and who exactly owns these choices. Not an easy read but a necessary one.

[smits_52 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The dialogue in this novel is outstanding.To make suicide at all humorous must be very difficult but Miriam Toews does it. Her characters, Elf and Yoli, sisters, are so well developed and so interesting. I love their crazy mother and Yoli's friend Julie. The only reason I did not give a higher star is I didn't like how it ended. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not at all. I don't get it.

[mdoris_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really liked this book! It was like having a long and wonderful visit with a very good friend and you could both say whatever you wanted! I wanted to read it with a pencil to put a star beside passages that were perfect. Passages that gave so much meaning and were expressed so well, pearls! It is a sad book as it is about grief and acceptance and relationships, and caring. It's about family. It is full of strong vulnerable emotions. There is so much humour and cleverness in the book and the characters jump out fully formed. The undercurrent of the book is the Mennonite community and its pull, with it's long tough history and role expectations. There was such love and warmth in this book.some quotes" They were apoplectically supsicious of higher learning-especially for girls. Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book." p 12" The sons inherit the wealth and pass it on to their sons and to their sons and the daughters get sweet fuck all....But whatever we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes, but at least we have rage and will build empires with that, gentlemen." p. 230"The brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, ......that the pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself. p. 314.Words won't feed the Admiral's cat!" p. 317

[hubblegal-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Touching story of two sisters and their family and the effect of severe depression on each of them. There are some very humorous moments which help lighten the depressing subject matter. I cared about these characters and what would happen to each of them. The book made me appreciate the choices we make each day to embrace life or to reject it. Recommend!

[kcshankd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A hard subject, well told, the tone just struck me as a bit... off.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is brilliant, in my opinion. It has deeply, deeply affected me. Actually, the only people I can think of who wouldn't love this work would be some Mennonites or those who can't cope with reading words such as f*** and c****. Miriam Toews must be a truly remarkable woman to have survived a situation such as the one she describes in this book.

[janismack · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I know this author is well received in Canada and I tried to read this book but I couldn't finish it. It was too scattered and I didn't really care for the characters.

[triscuit_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

At a time when suicide is on our collective minds, this rings so absolutely true. Not everyone has a world-famous sister afflicted with depression but we are all becoming aware of how close it is to each of us. Horrific but so finely told that is a compelling, somehow soothing, read.

[romonko · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book provides an unflinching look at the lives of two sisters who grew up in a small Mennonite town in Manitoba. Elfreida (Elf) is the oldest and the most mercurial. She follows her dream and becomes a world-famous concert pianist who plays concerts around the world. Yolandi (Yoli) is six years younger than her beautiful sister, and her life leads her to more traditional roles. She marries twice and has two children (one from each husband). We meet these two sisters when Yoli is in her mid-forties. She is in the process of getting a second divorce, and she's raising her two children on her own in Toronto. Elf still lives in Winnipeg with her husband, but she has done something that has brought her sister and her mother to her side. Elf suffers from severe depression, and she has just tried to take her own life. The close family and extended family are all brought together to rally by Elf's side. We meet Elf and Yoli's mother Lottie, their favourite aunt Tina and Elf's husband Nic as they all try to understand what has happened to their beautiful Elf. Ms. Toews depicts the incredible heartbreak and sadness that severe depression brings to all members of a family, not to just the one that suffers from the condition. Yet this book is not sad and morbid either because the humour and strength displayed by all of the characters in the book provides a sense of hope and acceptance throughout. Elf and Yoli's mother is wonderfully depicted. She has always disagreed with the Mennonite way of life, and even went on to pursue a career in social work after she had had her family. Her and her husband allowed their lively girls to pursue what they wanted to, even if it took them outside of their small community, and even if it resulted in the public disapproval of the elders in their community. Lottie's pragmatic look at life and her strength and sense of humour reminded me so much of my own late mother-in-law. She too was a tiny, strong woman who met life head on, and who refused to take anything sitting down. There were many times when she gave me the strength to fight another day.

[lit_chick_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"When I listened to her play I felt I should not be there in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterwards stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.” (Ch 4)Elf and Yoli Von Reisen are smart, loving sisters, and polar opposites. Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamourous, wealthy, adored, happily married: she wants only to die. Yoli is a mess, divorced, broke, looking for love in the wrong places – and desperately trying to keep her sister alive. The novel opens in the white-hot pitch of a medical emergency room right after Elf has attempted suicide, not for the first time. Yoli, by turns wickedly funny and heartbreakingly real is, of course, by her sister’s side. If it’s what Elf wants, she’ll do what she can to nurse her back to health in time for her world tour, several weeks out. But Elf’s request will shock her: the assistance she requests of Yoli has nothing to do with her upcoming tour. And so the younger sister is faced with a terrifying decision.Toews is a talented writer, no question. I was taken with both storyline and subject matter immediately, and settled in for what I expected to be a 4.5 or 5* read. But here’s my trouble: the entire novel, but for the final 50 or so pages, is written at such a fevered pitch that it became too much. When at last Elf has succeeded, and Yoli and their mother have settled down to the business of getting on with life, I could breathe again and enjoy – but by then, the story was over. Sadly, this is not one I will recommend, but others have thoroughly enjoyed it.“I tried to apologize, to ease the tension. I didn’t know what to say. I quoted Goethe … “suicide is an event of human nature which, whatever may be said and done with respect to it, demands the sympathy of every man, and in every epoch must be discussed anew” … (Ch 18)_____________Hilarious Quote: (I'm still chuckling about this, even after I’ve closed the novel)The setting of here is the same small Manitoba Mennonite community of which Toews wrote in A Complicated Kindenss. The church elders, attempting to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives, occasionally provide comic relief, as when a troubling rumour gets out that Elf might want to attend university, leading to a “raid” on the family home by the bishop:“He showed up on a Saturday in a convoy with his usual posse of elders, each in his own black, hard-topped car (they never carpool because it's not as effective in creating terror when thirteen or fourteen similarly dressed men tumble out of one car) and my father and I watched from the window as they parked in front of our house and got out of their cars and walked slowly towards us, one behind the other, like a tired conga line.” (Ch 1)

[pgchuis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very beautiful and sad book, but mysteriously also very funny. Toews shows the absurdity of trying to persuade a patient to come to the communal table to eat by otherwise withholding food when all they want to do is die anyway and her portrayal of Elf's mother is affectionate and hilarious. There was something very uplifting about the way the family suffered tragedy after tragedy with dignity and a sort of acceptance and kept on going in love. My favourite scene was where Yolandi says all the things to Elf that she won't let others say: What about me? I'm the screw-up whose life is a disaster - I should be the one despairing and getting comfort from you.

[latorreliliana · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful poignant book about a sister trying to lift her sister out of depression.

[writermala · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This Canadian novel by Miriam Toews is a wonderful, poignant tale with pathos and drama. What distinguishes it from other books of its class is the humor built into it. Toews manages to bring humor in at most unexpected times and it saw me in stitches when I was near tears!Yoli sees that Elf wants to die while she wanted her to live this made them enemies who loved each other. Yoli is in a quandary when her sister Elf with the near perfect life begs her to assist in suicide. The resulting agony keeps the thread of the story moving at a fast pace. I could not put it down once I'd started it.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The bonds of sisterhood and the struggles of depression and suicide are fully explored in this brilliant story. Yolanda and Elfrida are sisters, originally living in a Mennonite community in the east end. Depression runs in their family, something both Elf and her father suffer from. It is a novel about love, loss, and living told with wry and ironic humor. Yolanda is a wonderfully flawed and self-deprecating character, trying to keep her sister alive, while managing or not managing her own life.. She has amazing and amusing insights and opinions on many things. Their mother is another amazing character and it is easy to see where Yolanda got her sense of humor. Elfrida is a concert pianist, but we hear very little directly from her, most of what we know we get from Yolanda or other characters. She has struggled long and hard.So if someone says, "Isn't this book just sad?" I would have to say no, it is so much more. It is funny, celebrates books and poetry, Coleridge's poem is where the title come froms. Celebrates love and how much we will do for love. It is survival, and how we keep on living, finding tiny moments of joy, in which to hold. I never thought I would be reading a book that had me sniffling one second and in the next laughing. A book that holds the joy of living, right next to the face of mental illness.