All My Puny Sorrows

The plot of All My Puny Sorrows sounds unrelentingly depressing. Elfrieda, a beautiful, highly-talented pianist has attempted suicide, and not for the first time. Her sister Yoli sits at her bedside, trying to cajole her back to health. She is joined by Elfrieda’s loving husband and the two of them dodge calls from the pianist’s agent.

Elfrieda — known affectionately as Elf — recovers and goes home and her International tour seems back on track. But when Elf makes a request of the sister who loves her so dearly, Yoli realises nothing is as simple as it seems. Can she do as her sister asks?

The theme might be gloomy the novel is anything but. And that’s because Canadian writer Miriam Toews writes with such humour. That her sixth novel is an uplifting, and sometimes hilarious story of family love, owes little to this plot and everything to the characterisation.

Brought up in a Mennonite community in rural Canada, Elf and Yoli never quite fit in. The elders of the church expect women to take a back seat in life. The girl’s mother is chastised for having too flouncy a wedding dress and Elf’s desire for higher learning is viewed as suspicious.

Elf showed such all consuming talent at the piano, that the elders who came to object to her playing caved in and her escape to Europe was seen as inevitable.

She played with passion, pouring her emotions into the music, so affecting all who heard her. No wonder she ended up with a brilliant career.

In contrast Yoli is a mess. A struggling writer, there is no happy marriage for her.

She has two children from two fathers, and is sleeping with two men, one of whom has admitted a deep infatuation for Elf, whom he once heard play.

Yoli is a quite wonderful narrator. Self-deprecating and funny, she is an acute observer of life.

On a plane journey with her mother, going to her aunt’s funeral, she watches the confusion when an escaped toddler take a bite out of a passenger’s arse.

At the funeral, when one of Yoli’s cousins is extolling the deceased’s virtues, her toddler son, unbeknownst to her, starts playing with the urn; getting the lid off, and throwing the ashes around before, finally, shoving some into his mouth.

‘And I learned another thing,’ comments Yoli. ‘Which is just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn’t mean you stop telling the story.’

I’d not read the talented Toews before, and can’t wait to make my way though her backlist.