Miram Toews's All My Puny Sorrows - Sunday Times Top Choice Summer Read
Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters.
Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die.
Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive.
When Elf's latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go.
Miriam Toews's 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.
'The novel she has written - so exquisitely that you'll want to savour every word - reads as if it has been wrenched from her heart.' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times
'[Miriam Toews] has produced a masterly book of such precise dignity. It is, also against all the odds, at times a desperately humorous novel.' Daily Mail
'Toews takes her place alongside Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and Mordicai Richler as the loveliest quintet of Canadian writing.' Los Angeles Times
This is the most convincing, compassionate exploration of suicide I have ever found. Elf is never presented as selfish for her many suicide attempts; instead, this novel asks us to confront whether it is cruel to force somebody to live, especially in a psychiatric facility in which their autonomy is completely undermined. Is life worth it when it can only be sustained under duress, locked up and denied simple pleasures like homemade food? Can every case of suicidal ideation be cured, or are there some untreatable cases? Is suicidal depression not a chronic, agonizing condition that can, sometimes, only be alleviated by death? Can assisted suicide in instances of severe psychic pain be the truly correct and compassionate option? These are difficult, scary questions, and Toews does not shy away from them. She constructs a set of beautiful, strong characters, an imperfect but ultimately fiercely loving family who must come together under impossible circumstances. I really don't know how she has managed to make a book so sad and so funny and so real. A must-read.
