Life is funny because it is so sad, beautiful because it is ephemeral. But in the collective scheme of things, they are nothing. Our individual sorrows, when we are suffering them, are everything. What the screenwriter and director Michael McGowan pulls off here is a miracle of tone – the same tone that Miriam Toews established in her source novel, whose title comes from a Coleridge poem: “I too a Sister had…To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows.” It’s that juxtaposition of puny and sorrow, that heightened awareness of the bitter-sweetness of being human, that slays me. That sounds bleak, but mysteriously, it’s the opposite. ‘Toews takes her place alongside Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and Mordicai Richler as the loveliest quintet of Canadian writing.Mare Winningham in a scene from All My Puny Sorrows. It is, also against all the odds, at times a desperately humorous novel.’ Daily Mail ‘ has produced a masterly book of such precise dignity. ‘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’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. 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. Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. Miram Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows – Sunday Times Top Choice Summer ReadĮlf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters.Įlf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die.
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