It’s a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem that lends this extraordinarily vivid novel about two sisters, Elf and Yoli, its title. Elf believes that Coleridge would “definitely have been her boyfriend if she’d been born when she should have been born”.
The sense of being born at the wrong time haunts Elf, a wealthy, renowned pianist who has made repeated attempts to end her life. Weeks before her world tour, she ends up hospitalised after a suicide attempt. Yoli yearns to keep her sister alive while knowing she wants to die, in a novel that tackles our conflicting desires for life and death.
“Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979,” begins Yoli, the narrator. The sisters’ father had built the house himself when he and his wife were “a newly married Mennonite couple”. 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”. “We spent the whole time, it seemed, setting everything up and then tearing it down,” says Yoli.
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. 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.
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 published by Faber (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £5.99
