Yolandi is genuinely funny, both existentially funny ('Why are we always told that God will answer our prayers if we believe in Him? Why can't He ever make the first move?') and also just normal funny. Both of those sink into their own narcissism Toews flies away from hers. of Speculation' by Jenny Offill, two other largely plotless novels about struggling women that earned buzz this year. It's this that makes 'All My Puny Sorrows' a far greater and greater-hearted book than, for instance, 'Nobody Is Ever Missing' by Catherine Lacey, or 'Dept.

The sisters' situation is an utter calamity - they love each other ardently, but have such different goals, one of them desperate for Elf to live, the other for her to die - and yet there is room in Yolandi's generous narration for the reality of other people, all the other rooms in the hospital, all the other cities in the world.

It's a voice that acknowledges the immensity of the world, and how consequently one's own problems matter at once so little and so much. It's the voice, which is present right there in the title, with its sense, partly Canadian perhaps, perhaps also partly Mennonite, of self-deferral. That sums up the story of 'All My Puny Sorrows,' but what makes the book so good isn't exactly its story. That contrast may be in place to force us to stipulate the enigma of suicide - it's Elf who has it together, but it's also she who overdoses on pills, drinks bleach, cuts her wrists, and begs Yolandi to take her to Switzerland, where she can kill herself. Elfrieda is a world-renowned pianist meanwhile, Yolandi, the narrator, twice-divorced, with thwarted ambitions as a writer, considers herself a mess. As I fell asleep at last, what occurred to me was that Toews' book was a bittersweet proof of this: that where the usefulness of information ends, the usefulness of the novel begins.įor this book, despite its origins in real life, is fiction. But then sometimes, paradoxically, having so much information can seem to diminish or misdirect our comprehension of a thing like suicide, a thing like grief. We live within reach of so much information these days that I could have gone on searching forever: the Mennonites, barrel racing, Rotterdam, the pathology of multiple suicides within a family. It was later than I had meant to stay up. The purity of the experience of reading the book had dissipated. Finally I shut my computer again, feeling half-guilty.

I experienced the author's grief secondhand, after having read her description of it firsthand. For a half-hour I investigated Toews' family, with all that sense of entitlement to other people's lives that characterizes our age.

All my puny sorrows book review