You won’t forget Elf and Yoli, two smart and loving sisters. Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. Yoli is a beguiling mess, wickedly funny even as she stumbles through life struggling to keep her teenage kids and mother happy, her exes from hating her, her sister from killing herself and her own heart from breaking.
But Elf’s latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Her long-time agent has been calling and neither Yoli nor Elf’s loving husband knows what to tell him. Can she be nursed back to “health” in time? Does it matter? As the situation becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her life.
All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. In her beautifully rendered new novel, Miriam Toews gives us a startling demonstration of how to carry on with hope and love and the business of living even when grief loads the heart.
“She says isn’t it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named—when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of “telling time.” How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.” – Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows
Book Review
I like reading novels that tackles mental illness because it makes me question life and appreciate it in a different way. I’ve read lots of books about this topic and most of them can be found in young adult section. So when I came across All My Puny Sorrows which deals more about this topic in a more mature and adult way it really makes me more interested about it.
The book talks a lot about death from the start until the very last page and it gives too heavy emotions which at the same time the author gives a bit of balance on life as well. I love how the character especially the sisters, Yolandi and Elfireda’s relationship and connection were strongly pointed out in the book. But I think that there’s very limited description for each character for the readers to understand them as an individuals. I only know the main characters from the connection that they have with each other. I enjoy how raw every line was written. The only problem that I have with this book is that the story is slow paced and that it can be boring in some part. Most part of it is a continues series of mundane activities with Elf's suicides interrupting Yoli's tortuous hatred for her own life. I can say that my favorite part is how Yolandi resolve to reclaim her own life and happiness. I think Toews did an amazing job in capturing the helplessness that surrounds depression, not only for those who suffer from it, but for the loved ones who are also impacted by this mental illness. I would highly recommend this book not to people who are dealing with depression but rather to people who have someone in their life suffering from mental illness. It gives me an idea how some people who have most of the good things in life can still suffer with this illness and how people who have a messed up life can still go on and continue living.
I guess it really is about how happiness can be a choice that drives most people to brave through in this roller coaster we called life.
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