'All My Puny Sorrows' by Miriam Toews

This was another suggestion from my writing tutor but it is now up there with my favourite books. It's very rare that that happens for me- I read a lot obviously and love many of them, but this one really got to me.

The novel focuses on two sisters- Yolandi, the younger, who is content with living, and Elfrieda, the elder, who desperately wants to die. Yolandi tries to keep her sister alive and the book explores the love, frustration, and fear this task has for her.

Sounds depressing, I hear you ask? It is an absolutely stunning book.

Author, Miriam Toews

Toews manages to capture something astounding here and I was not surprised to find out that, after finishing it and reading around the text, the novel draws heavily from Toews own life. Her father
killed himself and years later, so did her sister. Arguably, these experiences have enabled Toews to depict the labyrinth of emotions that surround death, creating a novel that is tender, truthful, utterly devastating, hilarious and poignant. She writes with desperation and gets across the bizarre puzzle of human experience that goes along with difficult family circumstances and grief- when everything is at the lowest, worst, most mind bogglingly difficult, something often happens which pushes you even further into the pit of despair, and often in this situation, the only thing you are capable of doing is laughing, having been pushed to near hysteria.

 In the novel, Elfrieda (Elf- who wants to die) is bursting with eccentricities, talents, charisma and that magnetic draw that makes those near her revel in her light and exuberant life. She is a talented, world renowned pianist, fiercely intelligent, a voracious reader (who believes she would have been married to Coleridge in a previous life) and an iconoclast. Her sister Yolandi, in contrast, is divorced, has children with two different men, and is an unsuccessful writer. Which character out of the two would you believe has a right to be depressed and want to escape the torments of life? And that is precisely the point. The book addresses that notion many people have that those feelings and wants stem from something rational, something concrete, an event that can be pinned down as a cause.
Something others can make sense of. Both Elf and her father (the chronology of the text moves between the present where the women are in their 40s to memories from their childhood, growing up in a Mennonite community) share similar traits which make them want to commit suicide. They do not fit into the world; the world shuns them, mocks them and what is important to them, and shows no sensitivity towards them. They burst with life and hope and desires to change things, connect with people, to find meaning and purpose and beauty in the mundane and unappreciated- and yet, Toews seems to be saying, such vibrant people cannot survive and thrive in a world such as ours.

How on earth can such a novel be funny? Trust me, it is brilliantly witty. In addition to the deep, existential questions the novel provokes, there is a hilarity to the text which demonstrates the bizarre confusion that is life so perfectly. Yoli frets over a broken shower curtain, the antics of her children, drinks too much on her cousin's porch and sleeps with random men. All the while trying to navigate her divorce. The black humour is biting- she receives a text from her estranged husband reading "I need you", replies with concern and love having been regretting her decision to leave him, only to receive a second text that reads 'Sorry. Pressed send too soon. I need you to sign the divorce papers".

This novel spoke to me in a way a book hasn't in ages and it really made an impression on me. Whether that is because it is truly a literary masterpiece or whether it is the subject matter and its effect on me personally, I'm not entirely sure. But I don't think that matters.

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The text takes its name from a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem about the death of his own sister. 'All My Puny Sorrows' is also littered with references to eminent works of literature throughout. Another tick for me! Below is an extract from that Coleridge poem. 

"I, too, a sister had, an only sister --
She loved me dearly, and I doted on her;
To her I pour'd forth all my puny sorrows;
(As a sick patient in a nurse's arms,)
And of the heart those hidden maladies ­
That e'en from friendship's eye will shrink ashamed.
O! I have waked at midnight, and have wept
Because she was not!"

Dec. 1794

Samuel Taylor Coleridge