Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979.
- p. 3
For Friday 56:
The words "nothing bad has happened yet," a lyric from a Loudon Wainwright song, knocked around in my head while I cruised past the house on Warsaw Avenue.
- p. 56
About All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews: 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.
This is another book that would qualify for the Travel the World in Books Readathon (or challenge since there's only a day left)! The story is set in Canada and the author is Canadian. Toews is well-known for her novel A Complicated Kindness.
No comments
Post a Comment