All My Puny Sorrows

By Miriam Toews

From the bestselling author of Women Talking, a "wrenchingly honest, darkly funny novel" (Entertainment Weekly).


Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close-raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her life. After Elf's latest attempt, Yoli must quickly determine how to keep her family from falling apart while facing a profound question: what do you do for a loved one who truly wants to die?

All My Puny Sorrows is a deeply personal story that is as much comedy as it is tragedy, a goodbye grin from the friend who taught you how to live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781635574982

Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, 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 the 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.

Book preview

ONE

Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979. My parents and my older sister and I stood in the middle of the street and watched it disappear, a low-slung bungalow made of wood and brick and plaster slowly making its way down First Street, past the A&W and the Deluxe Bowling Lanes and out onto the number twelve highway, where we eventually lost sight of it. I can still see it, said my sister Elfrieda repeatedly, until finally she couldn’t. I can still see it. I can still see it. I can still… Okay, nope, it’s gone, she said.

My father had built it himself back when he had a new bride, both of them barely twenty years old, and a dream. My mother told Elfrieda and me that she and my father were so young and so exploding with energy that on hot evenings, just as soon as my father had finished teaching school for the day and my mother had finished the baking and everything else, they’d go running through the sprinkler in their new front yard, whooping and leaping, completely oblivious to the stares and consternation of their older neighbors, who thought it unbecoming of a newly married Mennonite couple to be cavorting, half dressed, in full view of the entire town. Years later, Elfrieda would describe the scene as my parents’ La Dolce Vita moment, and the sprinkler as their Trevi Fountain.

Where’s it going? I asked my father. We stood in the center of the road. The house was gone. My father made a visor with his hand to block the sun’s glare. I don’t know, he said. He didn’t want to know. Elfrieda and my mother and I got into our car and waited for my father to join us. He stood looking at emptiness for what seemed like an eternity to me. Elfrieda complained that the backs of her legs were burning up on the hot plastic seat. Finally my mother reached over and honked the horn, only slightly, not enough to startle my father, but to make him turn and look at us.

It was such a hot summer and we had a few days to kill before we could move into our new house, which was similar to our old house but not one that my father had built himself with loving attention to every detail such as a long covered porch to sit in and watch electrical storms while remaining dry, and so my parents decided we should go camping in the Badlands of South Dakota.

We spent the whole time, it seemed, setting everything up and then tearing it all down. My sister, Elfrieda, said it wasn’t really life—it was like being in a mental hospital where everyone walked around with the sole purpose of surviving and conserving energy, it was like being in a refugee camp, it was a halfway house for recovering neurotics, it was this and that, she didn’t like camping—and our mother said well, honey, it’s meant to alter our perception of things. Paris would do that too, said Elf, or LSD, and our mother said c’mon, the point is we’re all together, let’s cook our wieners.

The propane stove had an oil leak and exploded into four-foot flames and charred the picnic table but while that was happening Elfrieda danced around the fire singing Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks, a song about a black sheep saying goodbye to everyone because he’s dying, and our father swore for the first recorded time (What in the Sam Hills!) and stood close to the fire poised to do something but what, what, and our mother stood there shaking, laughing, unable to speak. I yelled at my family to move away from the fire, but nobody moved an inch as if they had been placed in their positions by a movie director and the fire was only fake and the scene would be ruined if they moved. Then I grabbed the half-empty Rainbow ice cream pail that was sitting on the picnic table and ran across the field to a communal tap and filled the pail with water and ran back and threw the water onto the flames, which leapt higher then, mingled with the scents of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, toward the branches of an overhanging poplar tree. A branch sparked into fire but only briefly because by then the skies had darkened and suddenly rain and hail began their own swift assault, and we were finally safe, at least from fire.

That evening after the storm had passed and the faulty propane stove had been tossed into a giant cougar-proof garbage cage, my father and my sister decided to attend a lecture on what was once thought to be the extinct black-footed ferret. It was being held in the amphitheater of the campground, and they said they might stick around for the second lecture as well, which was being given by an expert in astrophysics about the nature of dark matter. What is that? I asked my sister and she said she didn’t know but she thought it constituted a large part of the universe. You can’t see it, she said, but you can feel its effects, or something. Is it evil? I asked her. She laughed, and I remember perfectly or should I say I have a perfect memory of how she looked standing there in her hot pants and striped halter top with the shadowy eroded Badlands behind her, her head back, way back, her long thin neck and its white leather choker with the blue bead in the center, her burst of laughter like a volley of warning shots, a challenge to the world to come and get her if it dared. She and my father walked off toward the amphitheater, my mother calling out to them—make kissing sounds to ward off rattlesnakes!—and while they were gone and learning about invisible forces and extinction, my mother and I stayed beside the tent and played What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf? against the last remaining blotches of the setting sun.

On the way home from the campground we were quiet. We had driven for two and a half days in a strange direction that took us away from East Village until finally my father had said well, fair enough, I suppose we ought to return home now, as though he had been trying to work something out and then had simply given up. We sat in the car looking solemnly through open windows at the dark, jagged outcroppings of the great Canadian Shield. Unforgiving, said my father, almost imperceptibly, and when my mother asked him what he had said he pointed at the rock and she nodded, Ah, but without conviction as though she had hoped he’d meant something else, something they could defy, the two of them. What are you thinking about? I whispered to Elf. The wind whipped our hair into a frenzy, hers black, mine yellow. We were in the backseat stretched out lengthwise, our legs entangled, our backs against the doors. Elf was reading Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino. If you weren’t reading right now what would you be thinking about? I asked again. A revolution, she said. I asked her what she meant and she said I’d see someday, she couldn’t tell me now. A secret revolution? I asked her. Then she said in a loud voice so we could all hear her, let’s not go back. Nobody responded. The wind blew. Nothing changed.

My father wanted to stop to see ancient Aboriginal ocher paintings on the rock escarpments that hugged Lake Superior. They had endured mysteriously against the harsh elements of sun and water and time. My father stopped the car and we walked down a narrow, rocky path toward the lake. There was a sign that said Danger! and in small letters explained that people had been known to be swept off these rocks by giant rogue waves and that we were responsible for our own safety. We passed several of these signs on our way to the water and with each dire warning the already deep furrow in my father’s brow became deeper and deeper until my mother told him Jake, relax, you’ll give yourself a stroke.

When we got to the rocky shore we realized that in order to see the pictographs one had to inch along slippery, wet granite that plunged several meters into the foamy water and then hang on to a thick rope that was secured with spikes driven into the rock and then lean way back over the lake almost to the point of being horizontal with your hair grazing the water. Well, said my father, we’re not about to do that, are we? He read the plaque next to the trail, hoping that its contents would suffice. Ah, he said, the rock researcher who discovered these paintings called them forgotten dreams. My father looked at my mother then. Did you hear that, Lottie? he asked. Forgotten dreams. He took a small notebook from his pocket and wrote down this detail. But Elf was completely enchanted with the idea of suspending her body on a rope over crashing water and before anybody could stop her she was gone. My parents called to her to come back, to be careful, to use some common sense, to behave herself, to get back now, and I stood silent and wide-eyed, watching in horror what I believed would be the watery end of my intrepid sister. She clung to the rope and gazed at the paintings, we couldn’t see them from where we stood, and then she described to us what she was seeing which was mostly images of strange, spiny creatures and other cryptic symbols of a proud, prolific nation.

When we did, finally, all four of us, arrive back alive in our small town that lay just on the far western side of the rocky Shield in the middle of blue and yellow fields, we weren’t relieved. We were in our new house now. My father could sit in his lawn chair in the front yard and see, through the trees across the highway to First Street, the empty spot where our old house had been. He hadn’t wanted his house to be taken away. It wasn’t his idea. But the owner of the car dealership next door wanted the property to expand his parking lot and made all sorts of voluble threats and exerted relentless pressure until finally my father couldn’t take it anymore and he buckled one day and sold it to the car dealer for a song, as my mother put it. It’s just business, Jake, said the car dealer to my father the next Sunday in church. It’s nothing personal. East Village had originated as a godly refuge from the vices of the world but somehow these two, religion and commerce, had become inextricably linked and the wealthier the inhabitants of East Village became the more pious they also became as though religious devotion was believed to be rewarded with the growth of business and the accumulation of money, and the accumulation of money was believed to be blessed by God so that when my father objected to selling his home to the car dealer there was in the air a whiff of accusation, that perhaps by holding out my father wasn’t being a good Christian. This was the implication. And above all, my father wanted to be a good Christian. My mother encouraged him to fight, to tell the car dealer to take a hike, and Elfrieda, being older than me and more aware of what was going on, tried to get a petition going among the villagers to keep businesses from expanding into people’s homes but there was nothing that could be done to assuage my father’s persistent guilt and the feeling that he’d be sinning if he were to fight for what was his in the first place. And besides, my father was thought to be an anomaly in East Village, an oddball, a quiet, depressive, studious guy who went for ten-mile walks in the countryside and believed that reading and writing and reason were the tickets to paradise. My mother would fight for him (although only up to a point because she was, after all, a loyal Mennonite wife and didn’t want to upset the apple cart of domestic hierarchy) but she was a woman anyway, so very easily overlooked.

Now, in our new house, my mother was restless and dreamy, my father slammed things around in the garage, I spent my days building volcanoes in the backyard or roaming the outskirts of our town, stalking the perimeter like a caged chimp, and Elf began work on increasing her visibility. She had been inspired by the ocher paintings on the rock, by their impermeability and their mixed message of hope, reverence, defiance and eternal aloneness. She decided she too would make her mark. She came up with a design that incorporated her initials E.V.R. (Elfrieda Von Riesen) and below those the initials A.M.P. Then, like a coiled snake, the letter S, which covered, underlined, and dissected the other letters. She showed me what it looked like, on a yellow legal notepad. Hmm, I said, I don’t get it. Well, she told me, the initials of my name are obviously the initials of my name and the A.M.P. stands for All My Puny… then the big S stands for Sorrows which encloses all the other letters. She made a fist with her right hand and punched the open palm of her left hand. She had a habit then of punctuating all her stellar ideas with a punch from herself to herself.

Hmm, well that’s… How’d you come up with it? I asked her. She told me that she’d gotten it from a poem by Samuel Coleridge who would definitely have been her boyfriend if she’d been born when she should have been born. Or if he had, I said.

She told me she was going to paint her symbol on various natural landmarks around our town.

What natural landmarks? I asked her.

Like the water tower, she said, and fences.

May I make a suggestion? I asked. She looked at me askance. We both knew there was nothing I could offer her in the way of making one’s mark in the world—that would be like some acolyte of Jesus saying hey, you managed to feed only five thousand people with one fish and two loaves of bread? Well, check this out!—but she was feeling magnanimous just then, the excitement of her achievement, and she nodded enthusiastically.

Don’t use your own initials, I said. Because everyone in town will know whose they are and then the fires of hell will raineth down on us, et cetera.

Our little Mennonite town was against overt symbols of hope and individual signature pieces. Our church pastor once accused Elf of luxuriating in the afflictions of her own wanton emotions to which she responded, bowing low with an extravagant sweep of her arm, mea culpa m’lord. Back then Elf was always starting campaigns. She conducted a door-to-door survey to see how many people in town would be interested in changing the name of it from East Village to Shangri-La and managed to get over a hundred signatures by telling people the name was from the Bible and meant a place of no pride.

Hmm, maybe, she said. I might just write AMPS, with a very large S. It’ll be more mysterious, she said. More je ne sais quoi.

Um… precisely.

But don’t you love it?

I do, I said. And your boyfriend Samuel Coleridge would be happy about it too.

She made a sudden karate-chop slice through the air and then stared into the distance as though she’d just heard the far-off rattle of enemy fire.

Yeah, she said, like objective sadness, which is something else.

Something else than what? I asked her.

Yoli, she said. Than subjective sadness obviously.

Oh, yeah, I said. I mean obviously.

There are still red spray-painted AMPSs in East Village today although they are fading. They are fading faster than the hearty Aboriginal ocher pictographs that inspired them.

Elfrieda has a fresh cut just above her left eyebrow. There are seven stitches holding her forehead together. The stitches are black and stiff and the ends poke out of her head like little antennae. I asked her how she got that cut and she told me that she fell in the washroom. Who knows if that’s true or false. We are women in our forties now. Much has happened and not happened. Elf said that in order for her to open her packages of pills—the ones given to her by the nurses—she would need a pair of scissors. Fat lie. I told her that I knew she wasn’t interested in taking the pills anyway, unless they were of such a volume that their combined effect would make her heart seize, so why would she need a pair of scissors to open the package? Also, she could use her hands to tear it open. But she won’t risk injuring her hands.

Elfrieda’s a concert pianist. When we were kids she would occasionally let me be her page turner for the fast pieces that she hadn’t memorized. Page turning is a particular art. I had to be just ahead of her in the music and move like a snake when I turned the page so there was no crinkling and no sticking and no thwapping. Her words. She made me practice over and over, her ear two inches from the page, listening. Heard it! she’d say. And I’d have to do it again until she was satisfied that I hadn’t made the slightest sound. I liked the idea of being ahead of her in something. I took real pride in creating a seamless passage for her from one page to the next. There’s a perfect moment for turning the page and if I was too early or too late Elfrieda would stop playing and howl. The last measure! she’d say. Only at the last measure! Then her arms and head would crash onto the keys and she’d hold her foot on the sustaining pedal so that her suffering would resonate eerily throughout the house.

Shortly after that camping incident and after Elf had gone around town with her red paint, making her mark, the bishop (the alpha Mennonite) came to our house for what he liked to call a visit. Sometimes he referred to himself as a cowboy and these encounters as mending fences. But in reality it was more of a raid. 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 toward us, one behind the other, like a tired conga line. My mother was in the kitchen washing dishes. She knew they were coming but was intentionally ignoring them, passing off their visit as a minor inconvenience that wouldn’t interfere too much with her day. (It was the same bishop who had reprimanded my mother for wearing a wedding dress that was too full and billowy at the bottom. How am I to interpret this excess? he’d asked her.) My sister was somewhere in the house, probably working on her Black Panther look or re-piercing her ears with a potato and rubbing alcohol or staring down demons.

My father went to the door and ushered the men into our home. They all sat down in the living room and looked at the floor or occasionally at each other. My father stood alone with panicky eyes in the middle of the room, surrounded, like the sole remaining survivor of a strange game of dodgeball. My mother should have come out of the kitchen immediately, all bustle and warmth, and offered the men coffee or tea and some type of elaborate homemade pastry culled from The Mennonite Treasury cookbook, but instead she remained where she was, clanking dishes, whistling with a forced nonchalance, leaving my father to fight alone. They had argued about this before. Jake, she’d said, when they come here tell them it’s not a convenient time. They have no right to march into our home willy-nilly. He said he couldn’t do it, he just couldn’t do it. So my mother had offered to do it and he had begged her not to until she agreed but said she wouldn’t bounce around waiting on them hand and foot while they laid out plans for her family’s crucifixion. This particular visit was about Elf planning to go to university to study music. She was only fifteen but the authorities had heard from a local snitch that Elf had expressed an indiscreet longing to leave the community and they were apoplectically suspicious of higher learning—especially for girls. Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book.

She’ll get ideas, said one of them to my father in our living room, to which he had no response but to nod in agreement and look longingly toward the kitchen where my mother was staked out snapping her dish towel at houseflies and pounding baby veal into schnitzel. I sat silently beside my father on the itchy davenport absorbing their perfume of contempt as my mother described it. I heard my mother call my name. I went into the kitchen and found her sitting on the counter, swinging her legs and chugging apple juice straight from the plastic jug. Where’s Elf? she asked me. I shrugged. How should I know? I hopped up on the counter next to her and she passed me the jug of apple juice. We heard murmuring from the living room, a combination of English and Plautdietsch, the vaguely Dutch-sounding and unwritten medieval language spoken by all the old people in East Village. (I’m called Jacob Von Riesen’s Yolandi in Plautdietsch and when my mother introduces herself in Plautdietsch she says I am of Jacob Von Riesen.) Then after a minute or two had passed we heard the opening chords of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor, Opus 23. Elf was in the spare bedroom next to the front door where the piano was, where her life mostly took place in those days. The men stopped talking. The music got louder. It was Elf’s favorite piece, the soundtrack to her secret revolution perhaps. She’d been working on it for two years nonstop with a teacher from the conservatory in Winnipeg who drove to our house twice a week to give her lessons and my parents and I were familiar with every one of its nuances, its agony, its ecstasy, its total respect for the importance of the chaotic ramblings of an interior monologue. Elf had described it to us. Pianos weren’t even allowed in our town technically, too reminiscent of saloons and speakeasies and unbridled joy, but my parents snuck it into the house anyway because a doctor in the city had suggested that Elf be given a creative outlet for her energies to prevent her from becoming wild and that word had sinister implications. Wild was the worst thing you could become in a community rigged for compliance. After a few years of having a secret piano, hastily covered with sheets and gunnysacks when the elders came to visit, my parents grew to love Elf’s playing and even made occasional requests along the way, like Moon River and When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. Eventually the elders did find out that we were harboring a piano in our house and there was a long discussion about it, of course, and some talk of a three-month or six-month excommunication for my father who offered to take it like a man but when he appeared to go down so willingly they decided to let it go (meting out punishment isn’t fun when the victim asks for it) as long as my parents oversaw that Elf was using the piano only as an instrument for the Lord.

My mother began to hum along, her body began to sway. The men in the living room remained silent, as though they were being reprimanded. Elf played louder, then quieter, then louder again. The birds stopped singing and the flies in the kitchen stopped slamming up against the windows. The air was still. She was at the center of the spinning world. This was the moment Elf took control of her life. It was her debut as an adult woman and, although we didn’t know it at the time, her debut also as a world-class pianist. I like to think that in that moment it became clear to the men in the living room that she wouldn’t be able to stay, not after the expression of so much passion and tumult, and furthermore that to hold her there she would have to be burned at the stake or buried alive. It was the moment Elf left us. And it was the moment my father lost everything all at once: approval from the elders, his authority as head of the household, and his daughter, who was now free and therefore dangerous.

The opus came to an end and we heard the piano top slam shut over the keys and the piano bench scrape the linoleum floor in the spare bedroom. Elf came into the kitchen and I passed her the jug of apple juice and she drank it all, finished it off and chucked the container into the garbage can. She punched a fist into her palm and said finally nailed it. We three stood in the kitchen while the men in suits filed out of our house in the order they had filed in and we heard the front door close softly and the men’s car engines start and the cars pull away from the curb and disappear. We waited for my father to join us in the kitchen but he had gone to his study. I’m still not sure whether or not Elf knew that the men were in the living room or even that the bishop and the elders had paid us a visit at all, or if it was just a coincidence that she chose that exact time to play the Rachmaninoff piece to fierce perfection.

But shortly after the visit from the bishop and his men Elf made a painting and put it in an old frame she’d found in the basement. She hung it in the middle of our living room wall right above the scratchy couch. It was a quote. It read:

I know of a certainty, that a proud, haughty, avaricious, selfish, unchaste, lecherous, wrangling, envious, disobedient, idolatrous, false, lying, unfaithful, thievish, defaming, backbiting, blood-thirsty, unmerciful and revengeful man, whosoever he may be, is no Christian, even if he was baptized one hundred times and attended the Lord’s Supper daily.

—Menno Simons.

Okay, but Elfie? said my mom.

No, said Elfie. It’s staying right there. It’s the words of Menno Simons! Aren’t we supposed to be following them?

Elfie’s new artwork hung in our living room for about a week until my father asked her: Well, kiddo, have you made your point? I’d really love to put mom’s embroidered steamship back in that spot. And by then her righteous indignation had blown over like so many of her wild personal storms.

TWO

Elfrieda doesn’t do interviews. One time she let me interview her for my cheesy class newspaper but that’s it. I was eleven and she was leaving home again, this time for good. She was on her way to Norway for a recital and to study with an old man she referred to as the Wizard of Oslo. She was seventeen. She’d finished high school early, at Christmas. She’d got honors everything and six scholarships to study the piano and a prize from the Governor General of Canada for highest marks which sent the elders into paroxysms of rage and

Reviews for All My Puny Sorrows

[Carrian Troxler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

beautifully written, yet incredibly sad at times. A book that I will not soon forget.

[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)

[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.

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yolandi (Yoli) is a separated forty-something mother of two teenagers who writes rodeo-themed books. Elfrieda (Elf), her sister, is a talented concert pianist with a loving husband and no children. Elf has been in and out of mental facilities due to multiple attempts at suicide. Yoli and Elf are part of a lapsed Mennonite family from rural Canada, now living in Winnipeg and Toronto. Their father died by suicide years ago. Their mother tries to help everyone as best she can. Elf is taken to task by the staff for “not cooperating.” Yoli is repeatedly begging the medical professionals to help her sister.

Yoli is the narrator and we get to know her well. She does not want her sister to die and is torn about enabling her in any way. If Elf is going to kill herself anyway, would it be better to help her die with dignity? She asks herself many questions along these lines.

This sad story is based on the author’s family. It contains subtle humor that helps it not feel overwhelmingly depressing. The author delicately explores suicide, mental health treatment, shame, guilt, and right to die issues. It is a novel about love and pain. It is not for anyone dealing with depression.

[Sonia71 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved it. It builds up as it goes along, and the narrating character, Swiv, makes a special place in your heart. A novel full of tenderness, honesty, and good humor. With the talent I already discovered in "Small Things Like These," Miriam Toews succeeds in conveying her unique vision of life and misfortunes, and makes us fall in love with three brave women, tireless fighters from three different generations. A special mention also goes to Elvira, the grandmother. Miriam Toews already holds a prominent place among my favorite contemporary writers. (Translated from Spanish)

[YolandadelaRosa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Told in a wonderful way, the dialogues are magnificent, a very tough story written with so much sarcasm and irony that it even makes you smile. (Translated from Spanish)

[LHDelgado · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful book, I had never read a book that talked so much about suicide, especially from the family perspective. And the other important topic is the situation in some Mennonite communities (not all, of course). Besides other important themes that, although treated superficially, it’s important to remember that they are there.
From my perspective, the characters are not epic (to put it that way), but the situation, the moment is what makes the difference. (Translated from Spanish)

[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.

[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.

[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

[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?

[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.)”

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[icolford · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Miriam Toews’ extraordinary novel All My Puny Sorrows is an examination of the tragedy inherent in the condition of being human and alive, possibly one of the most brutally honest we’re likely to encounter. This is a novel primarily of two sisters. Yolandi, the narrator, is an author with several moderately successful young-adult novels to her credit and Elfrieda is a concert pianist with a global reputation and a devoted fan base. Yolandi is more or less contented with where she is in life, if she forgets for a moment that she has given birth to two children by two different men, neither of whom is married to her, that she’s broke, and that she’s bored with the YA novel series and carries the manuscript of her unfinished literary novel around with her in a plastic bag. Elfrieda, intensely intellectual, childless and married to doting and long-suffering Nic, has built a riotously successful concert career. She can write her own ticket whenever she wants by going on tour because everywhere she goes her concerts sell out. The difference is that Elfrieda is desperately unhappy and wants to die. Indeed, desperation is at the crux of the novel: the action revolves around Yolandi’s desperate efforts to keep her sister alive and Elfrieda’s equally desperate efforts to slough off a life that has become a torment. Elfrieda’s latest suicide attempt has taken place in the weeks leading up to another concert tour. Yolandi, her mother and Nic struggle to bring Elfrieda through this latest crisis, hopefully in a way that won’t jeopardize the tour. But as the story progresses it becomes clear that the tour will not happen. Central to the novel is a loving, supportive and emotionally intimate relationship between two siblings. At a certain point Yolandi realizes that she will never convince her sister that life is preferable to death, and with this realization finds herself facing a crisis of conscience. The brilliance of Miriam Toews is her ability to take a situation fraught with grief and despair and unbearable sadness and leaven it with humour. This is a family that has suffered a similar loss in the past (the girls’ father killed himself) and as Yolandi struggles to decide on a course of action and we approach what seems an inevitable outcome, Yolandi's behaviour grows erratic and the prose develops a frantic demented momentum that makes it a joy to read. Most of us have been touched in some manner by suicide. It’s impossible to not feel strongly about it. The decision to end a life, even (especially?) your own, should never be easy or simple. All My Puny Sorrows teaches that only by accepting the tragedy of life for what it is will we triumph and move forward.

[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

[jaylia3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I always fall hard for the novels Miriam Toews writes and the characters she creates. A best selling author in Canada, most of her books involve individualistically inclined or exiled Mennonites balancing their traditional upbringing with the modern world in distinctive stories of personal struggle and family connection. The details about Mennonite culture and its fringes give the stories added interest and a strong sense of place, but it’s the characters that really set her novels apart.

In All My Puny Sorrows one sister has it all. Elfrieda Von Riese has always been eccentric, passionate, talented and intense--a dances to her own drummer Mennonite--and now as an adult she’s a wealthy, beloved, beautiful, world acclaimed pianist in a wonderfully loving marriage, but in spite of all that goodness Elf is determined to kill herself, somehow never having developed a tolerance for living in the world. Her sister Yolandi, in contrast, is a twice divorced now single mother, drifting in and out of relationships and perennially broke, who desperately wants to keep Elf alive. “She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.”

It’s not a plotline that would normally attract me, and the story is more character than plot anyway, but Toews gives her characters such captivating, heart-piercing voices that I sank deep and only reluctantly put down this thoughtfully nuanced, non-condescending, family celebrating book. The title comes from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

[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.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It is impossible to read this novel without an awareness of certain events in author Miriam Toews’ life badgering you with every line, with every page you turn. Some years ago Toews’ father committed suicide. Some years after that her sister followed suit. It is a harrowing reality that bombards every moment of this fictional account of the repeated, and eventually successful, suicide attempts of a brilliant pianist and her sister’s efforts to thwart this and/or contemplate the possibility of acceding to her sister’s plea and helping her. Sometimes writers are urged to write about what they know. Sometimes they should think twice.

Of course the writing here is brilliant. It effervesces. Toews’ talent tends toward the rapid fire one liner, which here fires off without pause, plunging breathlessly onward, faster and faster, through one unmitigated disaster to the next, hurtling headlong into…what? Exactly. We begin in the feverish white heat of the emergency ward and for the next 250 pages we remain at that extreme state of anxiety. It begins to feel and read as though the non-suicidal sister is losing her mind. And rightly so. And thus, it is only in the denouement, which lasts a further 60 pages, that All My Puny Sorrows begins to read like a novel.

I’m certain that Toews found great relief in writing this novel (she says as much in interviews about it). As such it serves its purpose as a kind of grief therapy. For the author. But what does the reader gain from this? Not, I think, what Toews has gained, for few if any of us will have suffered the kinds of immediate loss that she has had to face. Instead, we are offered the chance to witness her grief therapy. Sort of. But that isn’t itself therapeutic for us. And it doesn’t make for a satisfying novel either. Might it perhaps, then, at least have some value as a spur to debate over the possible legalization of assisted suicide? I fear that is precisely how the book has been embraced in the literary community, and it is a mistake. Toews’ private grief made public is not a good grounding for a discussion on the rationality of suicide.

For my part, I think Toews is a wonderful writer. She has an immense talent. It is sad that her life is filled with almost Greek-like tragedy. Suitable material for weeping and the gnashing of teeth. Which would be a perfectly reasonable response. However, the principal characters in Greek tragedies don’t overcome their tragedies by creating art. Rather, Sophocles comes along decades later and enlightens and informs us of their tragic plight. Sadly, not recommended.