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.Īll My Puny Sorrows is published by Faber (£7.99). Toews evocatively conjures landscapes, from the small town in which the family live to the “dark, jagged outcroppings of the great Canadian Shield”. What holds this novel together, stops it from becoming saturated with sorrow, is a wit so sharp it hurts to laugh at certain scenes. All My Puny Sorrows is based on the author’s own experience of her sister’s suicide, in 2010, 12 years after their father killed himself, explaining the novel’s urgency and rawness. It is with a “loving attention to every detail” that their father built their house a quality also governing this novel, written by someone who knows what happens when things fall apart. “We spent the whole time, it seemed, setting everything up and then tearing it down,” says Yoli.
Elfrieda is so thin, her face so pale, that when she. Toews is the author of five previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Both, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. In the summer when the family “had a few days to kill” before they could move into their new house, they go camping in the “badlands of South Dakota”. The following is from Miriam Toews’s novel All My Puny Sorrows. The sisters’ father had built the house himself when he and his wife were “a newly married Mennonite couple”. “Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979,” begins Yoli, the narrator.
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