It’s a testament to the entertaining voice, emotional acuity and quick pacing of All My Puny Sorrows that it doesn’t become evident until about two-thirds of the way through how slight the plot is ... The flashbacks to Yoli and Elf’s childhood in a rural Mennonite community are vivid and energetic. In both the past and present, Toews perfectly captures the casual manner in which close-knit sisters enjoy and irritate each other. The dialogue is realistic and funny, and somehow, almost magically, Toews gets away with having her characters discuss things like books and art and the meaning of life without seeming pretentious or precious; they’re simply smart, decent and confused ... All My Puny Sorrows is unsettling, because how can a novel about suicide not be? But its intelligence, its honesty and, above all, its compassion provide a kind of existential balm.
In the crucible of her genius, tears and laughter are ground into some magical elixir that seems like the essence of life ... There are conversations in this novel so heartbreaking that you will be tempted to recoil, but Toews is working near the emotional territory of Lorrie Moore, where humor is a bulwark against despair ... Toews mines the frustration and absurdity of caring for someone set on self-destruction ... Between those distant poles, Toews hangs a tale about the unspeakable pain and surprising joy of persisting in the world, puny sorrows and all.
...what makes the book so good isn't exactly its story. 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. 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 ... Wit can't wholly conceal the chief flaw of All My Puny Sorrows, which is aimlessness; if you have no real plot, your book should probably either be brief or really, really brilliant. This one is longish and maybe only really brilliant. But who cares? The experience of it is profound, and to leave it is to leave a world real enough that you feel it will continue on without you.
Its compulsive readability is all the more remarkable since the story issues from such a dark place in the author's heart ... Can a work of mourning be a comedy? Uniquely, Toews has created a requiem with an antic disposition ... The story is told in running sprees of dialogue without quotation marks: we experience everything as it is heard in Yoli's mind. Both sisters are lovable, exuberant, quirky, in many respects mirror-opposites. Even in the story's closing stages, comedy and tragedy harp on the same tune.
What holds this novel together, stops it from becoming saturated with sorrow, is a wit so sharp it hurts to laugh at certain scenes. Toews evocatively conjures landscapes, from the small town in which the family live to the 'dark, jagged outcroppings of the great Canadian Shield'. She also takes us on a heart-rending journey through her characters’ emotional landscapes, via the cruel terrain of despair in which Elf becomes stranded, shedding light on the darkest of places.
All My Puny Sorrows is awash in fear and grief and pain, but it is for all that not a bummer of a book. There is hope in it, and a deep sense of home and family, and an encoded determination to live ... All My Puny Sorrows is about many things, including the right to die and the ruinous legacy of suicide. But it is ultimately about learning the very tricky art of survival: how to go on, arm in arm, leaning hard on each other to struggle through.
Ostensibly favoured, Elf possesses a death-wish that persists throughout Miriam Toews’s remarkable novel, which, ironically for a book with self-annihilation as its subject, bursts with ramshackle, precious life ... Full of eccentricities and casual, apposite quoting of literature, its tragicomedy and humaneness recall the best of John Irving ... Toews’s great generosity as a writer is to have opened up her own and shared it with us.
The mixture of grief, numbness, and a sensation of being removed from one's life and observing from above, are starkly captured. Even the hysterical, mirthless laughter when yet more goes wrong is familiar. And Toews captures perfectly the conflicting feelings when a loved one wants to die: sorrow, confusion, guilt, frustration and even anger ... Yet, unbelievably, this book is full of humour ... Toews evokes perfectly the interminable red tape of hospitals, such as the battle to speak to medical or nursing staff, and the sometimes petty rules. There are wonderful observations on every page, sometimes hilarious.
At times Toews' book falls into clichéd territory, with such statements as, 'Because to survive something we first need to know what it is we're surviving.' But at its heart, All My Puny Sorrows is a bittersweet story about those who survive and those who can't fight the current.
Thanks to the prodigious talent of author Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows is an off-kilter, frequently funny and begrudgingly life-affirming romp through, well, death ... Her losses are the reader’s gain: Only an author with an intimate relationship with suicide could have written a novel with such wincingly painful honesty and mordant humor ... Characters, although always entertaining and sharply drawn, occasionally feel more like a collection of outrageous quirks than plausible human beings. Readers who haven’t earned a master’s in Comp-Lit will also spend a lot of time on Wikipedia looking up the mind-boggling number of intellectuals that Toews’ characters casually quote in conversation ... But if the book occasionally feels like an existential debate, it is not without a healthy dollop of self-awareness ... Toews’ great strength lies in her ability to see both sides of this argument and portray them with equal empathy.
...brilliant and desperately sad ... But it's actually a book about what it is to be a sibling, and particularly about what it is to be a sibling to only one other sibling. It is one of the most moving and accurate representations of that complicated situation I have ever read ... Sadness is the book's currency. And not just the sadness embodied in Elfrieda. Yolandi suggests that sadness such as hers lives within us all, a shared consciousness of sorts ... And that is the book's great gift: its reminder that feeling such things is normal. In a world where everyone has that sorrow in them – which is to say, a world like ours – we find permission to embrace that sadness, rather than a rallying cry to escape it ... There is no need to choose relief over violence, or love over pain. In this devastating novel – as in life itself – tenderness and tragedy are, like siblings, forever bound.
Dissolution and encroaching death lurk just beneath—or within—her every smart-ass remark ... As the voice of the novel, Yoli is captivating ... Though Toews depicts both Yoli and Elf as burdened and damaged by past events, and conscious of the chasm left by their absent loved ones, she also gestures at their striving for happiness and whatever pleasures life offers them. Realistic and deeply sad, the ending captures scenes of recovery and endurance with striking fidelity.
Suicide humour is a niche skill: the writer needs bravery and an acquaintance with the act that means the gags aren’t ghoulish, but empathetic. The Canadian novelist Miriam Toews...is an old hand ... One of Toews’ trademarks is the high-speed paragraph, sentences rattling at the speed of thought until it suddenly stops, pulled up by horror ... To describe the tone as black humour wouldn’t quite do it justice. These are the jokes of someone trying to cling on to the mundanity of a sane world while a loved one repeatedly attempts to take her own life ... Toews’ style won’t be for everyone. Those busy, cascading sentences create drama but they can also grate ... To write powerful fiction out of personal events of such magnitude is hard, surely almost unbearably so, but the result is a novel that reaches beyond the limits of itself.
[Toews] is able to take the details of tragedies in her own life, fictionalize them and say something powerful about life, love and art. Her humour and humanity make sensitive issues approachable, taboo topics part of normal conversation ... It appears to offer her rich creative fodder, giving her a closeness to her subject that shows in her writing — it’s engaging and beautiful — and her characters, who are believable and quirky ... A eulogy to her sister, to her father. A writerly kind of eulogy. And she succeeds.
The book asks whether it is reasonable to want to die because one is 'weary of life' and what is our responsibility to those we love, who are consumed by such intense emotional pain ... Toews' writing is remarkable in that she's able to convey that emotion so palpably to her readers ... The narrative is also peppered with exquisitely descriptive passages that completely pull readers into the author's world ... Toews' characters are interesting and complex, each displaying hidden motives and contradictions that make them completely human ... While they might be drawn from the author's life, Toews' ability to convey their thoughts and personalities so vividly is really quite a remarkable accomplishment.
Toews writes from the point of view of Yoli, whose interior monologue reads like a cross between David Foster Wallace and Robin Williams if both were, in fact, a 40-something Mennonite woman with authority issues. She’s a smart aleck with heart, a philosopher with a comic’s timing ... Readers should not expect a novel about the psychological causes of depression or trauma. We learn only a few details about the sisters’ shared history ... All My Puny Sorrows insists upon focusing on the present, on the chaotic here-and-now and what good can be gleaned from any given moment ... Toews has written a moving book about the deep commitment between very different sisters, each troubled in her own way but each imbued with a love and understanding for the other that outsiders cannot fathom.
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 ... 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 ... The novel is as much a work of truth as it is of imagination ... 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.
The irony and wit, which is at times as casually lethal as a Dorothy Parker poem, just makes the novel’s central premise seem even more beyond the human capacity to bear ... This is a novel about bearing the unbearable ... In All My Puny Sorrows, as in her other novels, Toews writes in a cool, deceptively simple voice that moves seamlessly between the memory of past joy and the sometimes surprising banality of present pain. This often edges towards poetry ... If a novel works, it works. But her father killed himself in 1998 and her sister killed herself in 2010, and the novel she has written — so exquisitely that you’ll want to savour every word— reads as it if has been wrenched from her heart.
...tender and bittersweet ... The prose throughout the book is lively and original and moves along at a steady clip. Though there are some underdeveloped aspects (their upbringing in a Mennonite household, Yoli’s experience of motherhood), the novel is a triumph in its depiction of the love the sisters share, as Yoli tries, just as when she was a page turner, to stay a few beats ahead.
A Canadian writer visits her older sister, a concert pianist who's just attempted suicide, in this masterful, original investigation into love, loss and survival ... Toews conveys family cycles of crisis and intermittent calm through recurring events and behaviors ... Crisp chapter endings, like staccato musical notes, anchor the plot’s pacing ... Readers yearn for more time with this complex, radiant woman who fiercely loves her family but cannot love herself ... Toews deepens our understanding of the pain found in Coleridge's poetry, which is the source of the book’s title.
