All My Puny Sorrows
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Beschreibung des Verlags
Miram Toews's All My Puny Sorrows -Sunday Times Top Choice Summer Read
Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters.
Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die.
Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive.
When Elf's latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go.
Miriam Toews's 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.
'The novel she has written - so exquisitely that you'll want to savour every word - reads as if it has been wrenched from her heart.' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times
'[Miriam Toews] has produced a masterly book of such precise dignity. It is, also against all the odds, at times a desperately humorous novel.' Daily Mail
'Toews takes her place alongside Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and Mordicai Richler as the loveliest quintet of Canadian writing.' Los Angeles Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elfrieda's a concert pianist. When we were kids she would occasionally let me be her page-tuner for the fast pieces that she hadn't memorized." This sentence, in the voice of the younger Yolandi, crystallizes the dynamic of the two sisters in Toews's (Summer of My Amazing Luck) latest novel. While Elfrieda is the genius and the perfectionist, it is the practical, capable Yolandi on whom she depends. Over the course of this tender and bittersweet novel, Elf tours the world while Yoli stays put, has two kids with two different men but stays with neither of the fathers. It is Elf's debilitating depression and suicidal tendencies that keep the two urgently close as Yoli, for decades, does everything she can to help Elf ward off her psychological problems. 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.
