How rare is it to come across a novel that elicits a physical reaction from its reader?
All My Puny Sorrows runs the gamut of emotions. Miriam Toews will have you laughing out loud one minute and sobbing on the subway the next. Her novel tells the story of Elf and Yoli, two sisters with an incredible bond despite living very different lives. By all external trappings, Elf is the successful sister. She is a world-renowned virtuoso pianist. She’s wealthy and happily married. Yoli is not any of those things. Instead, she is struggling with how to love someone who no longer wants to live. And so here we find ourselves, in the room with these two inseparable sisters in the aftermath of Elf’s suicide attempt. The way Miriam Toews describes her sadness is haunting: “Then Elf tells me that she has a glass piano inside her. She’s terrified that it will break. She can’t let it break. She tells me that it’s squeezed right up against the lower right side of her stomach, that sometimes she can feel the hard edges of it pushing at her skin.” (I read this novel months ago, and I still think of the glass piano often. It’s so memorable in its specificity! It’s so weird and unique that it could only have come from the mouth of this wonderfully well-rounded, surprising character.) But it’s not all sorrow! It hits all the notes. Shown through some flashbacks to the sisters’ Mennonite upbringing and cutting to their cruel present, the intimacies of their relationship are a saving grace, a sigh of relief. Miriam Toews has an ear for dialogue. Elf and Yoli talk like flesh-and-blood sisters. The details are spot-on. At some point, they speak of their plans to “chop wood, pump water, fish, play the piano, sing together from the soundtracks of
Jesus Christ Superstar and
Les Miserables, re-imagine our pasts, and wait out the end of the world.” There’s a version of this story, painted with less carefully crafted strokes, that comes out cliche. But Miriam Toews is a pro at teasing out the details that make the story full and unexpected.
–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor