![]() She begins with the sisters’ childhood, where they are raised in a Mennonite village in Manitoba. Through Yoli, Toews shares her own scalpel-sharp views of the ridiculous. While I think Toews would agree there’s nothing funny about suicide, I think you’ll now understand why I included that quote about nervous laughter. Yoli is torn between preventing her or, eventually, assisting her. ![]() Despite all her success, Elf is grimly determined to commit suicide. Toews’s sixth novel, All My Puny Sorrows is essentially the story of two sisters: the narrator Yoli Von Riesen, who is a relatively successful writer of genre fiction, and her older sister Elfrieda/Elf Von Riesen, who is a very successful concert pianist. ![]() That’s a great novelist for you-they protect you even while they’re messing about in your head. ![]() One of the last lines in All My Puny Sorrows is, “At first we laughed a lot, sort of nervously but eventually we both relaxed and only laughed when things were funny.” I was glad to see that line as I had already begun wondering just how to describe a reader’s reaction to this richly funny tragedy or is it richly tragic comedy? In any event, I suspect Miriam Toews, one of Canada’s best-known novelists, must have been thinking much the same thought on behalf of her readers and so dropped in a hint. ![]()
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