Book review: All My Puny Sorrows

YOLI is dying to keep her sister Elf alive. It is a full-time job for this author going through a second divorce, a middle-aged mother of teenagers seeking to finally write a novel for grown-ups after a series of Young Adult “rodeo romances”.

Miriam Toews

Faber, €10.99; ebook, €9.09

By contrast, Elfrieda seems to have it all. She is a beautiful, internationally known concert pianist, but despite this she is driven by a deep melancholy to kill herself. “She wanted to die and I wanted her to live,” Yoli says. “We were enemies who loved each other”.

It may seem like a heavyweight read — and, to be fair, it often is — yet Toews leavens the persistent gloom which is characteristic of lesser literary writing with a vein of dark comedy.

Indeed, she frequently attacks the genre of misery fiction as a whole with, for instance, Yoli and Elf’s mother declaring at one point: “We get it. We know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!”

Luckily getting on with it is exactly what Toews does. While never making light of the seriousness of Elf’s situation, she nonetheless delivers a story which is laugh-out-loud hilarious.

It is an unexpected tone for a novel not just about depression and the moral quagmire of assisted dying, but for one based on the author’s own experience of her sister’s suicide in 2010.

Always a highly autobiographical writer, Toews has often spoken about the categorisation of fiction and non-fiction, distinctions she sees as mostly irrelevant. Such thinking is much in evidence in All My Puny Sorrows.

The novel is as much a work of truth as it is of imagination. Much like Swing Low: A Life (2000), the memoir Toews wrote about her father, who also killed himself in 1998, All My Puny Sorrows exudes a rawness which quickly earns the reader’s trust.

It is an approach which demands that one empathise equally with Yoli’s exasperation and with Elf’s desire to “slowly evaporate into space”. The author further draws on her Mennonite background and the restrictions of religious fundamentalism, something which has informed much of her previous work.

The sisters here have been shaped by their upbringing in a small town which styles itself as a “refuge from the vices of the world” but which, in actuality, is little more than a “squad of perpetual disapprovers”.

All My Puny Sorrows is thus a tonal masterclass of a novel, a sad, sad book which is compulsive reading because of how it acknowledges humour as a pivot-point in the seesaw of dignity. It is vulnerable to accusations of plotlessness, yes, but to criticise Toews for that is to miss the point entirely. Because this is not a story built around twists and turns. It is instead an engrossing and hugely satisfying dramatisation of an unimaginable request.