Puny smuny. Sorrow smorrow. Anything but. {All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews}

When the biggest irony is that I loved loved loved it.

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.

My two cents

Upon putting this down, I sighed and felt my heart was full. This is what real, raw, honest writing is ... and wow, what that does to a reader. This moved me deeply.

Very few authors can pull off what this book has accomplished: it is funny yet compassionate, sensitive and sweet yet uncloying. When I see an obviously ironic cover, I can't help but duck sometimes - but yes, suspend judgment I did, because I loved Toews's A Complicated Kindness.

And lo and behold, I didn't even roll my eyes even once or inwardly groan or cringe. And that's saying a lot about a book that delves deep into the complicated stuff of sisterhood, depression, pain, suffering, assisted death, and suicide.

Toews is unafraid to articulate all those messy bits and then some. She lays it out bare, never mind being political correct. She takes no heed for taboos.

And the humor! Her humour comes with a really honest emotion that made me unafraid to continue reading. Especially charming about this book are the banter and dialogues which are very realistic and oh-so-relatable. In my mind's eye, I relived some of my own little arguments and conversations with family members. I loved getting immersed and invested -- mentally and emotionally - in Elf and Yoli's lives and the complicated relationship that rules most siblings. I couldn't believe it when the book rolled to its close. I wanted more.

***

This book takes place in Canada, more or less equally between Winnipeg and Toronto. I am familiar with both cities so it was lovely to see mentions of specific places including restaurants and landmarks and get a real sense of the place. Locals of these cities can't help but see these subtle little nods to beloved haunts.

There also little nods to literature and classical music. Throughout, there are mentions of much-loved books. I love classical music so the fact that Elf is a famous and tortured artist appealed to me - it lent a little more humanity and the suffering behind creating beauty.

Verdict

This is a gem of a novel in my eyes. I think anyone who loves and honest book will get sucked int this one. Highly recommended.

P.S. If you pronounce the author's last name as "toes" then you're not the only one! I'd been doing it for ages until I got heard someone say it otherwise (to my dismay and embarrassment). Here's how to pronounce Toews  - properly!

This is a book that qualifies for the Travel the World in Books Challenge. The story is set in Canada and the author is Canadian. Toews is well-known for her novel A Complicated Kindness.

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Room by Emma Donoghue

Tedious, absorbing, unputdownable.

About Room by Emma Donoghue: To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

My two cents

Here's yet another book I held off on reading because of the hype. All I've heard are raves; it's gotten so many awards; it's now a movie. I also held off because based on the synopsis, was I ready?

But I decided. It was time. And now I'm glad I did.

This book is unlike any I have ever read. I disliked it from the beginning - the tedium, the child-like voice, the horrors. I remember wanting to stop but Jack's voice, his love for his mother, and his mother's ferocity were so compelling, I couldn't stop until I found out what happened to them. I wanted to know that they would be ok.

This is extremely tense reading. Horrors are revealed in unlikely ways as Jack narrates his day to day. The days roll on and it seems like nothing changes. Repeated names of Things, like Room, capitalized, as this was the only world that Jack knew. Routines being explained from a 5-year-old viewpoint, with five-year-old language.

I couldn't help getting absorbed in getting to know Jack and his Ma. But descriptions of Old Nick made my skin crawl. The simple horror of the situation with the child's voice really messes with your head -- a psychological journey for a reader.

There is nothing pleasant about reading this book. Nothing. But what kept me going was the hope and the palpable love of mother for child, a love that never allowed hope to die.

Verdict: One of the most difficult books I've ever read. If you don't flinch at difficult subject matter, the first person, five-year-old voice in which this story was told will surely make you weep. Highly recommended.

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

The title says it all.

About A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews: Nomi Nickel lives with her father, Ray, in East Village, a small Mennonite town in Manitoba. She dreams of escaping to the big city, but since her mother and sister left home, it's hard to imagine leaving her father behind. As she begins to piece together the story behind her mother's disappearance, she finds herself on a direct collision course with the town's minister. With fierce originality and brilliance, Miriam Toews takes us straight to the centre of Nomi's world and the complicated kindness at the heart of family life.

My two cents

What a heartbreaker! This is probably one of the saddest, most tragic of books I've read. It's about the Nickels family who live in a very closed touristic Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada. This is told in retrospect by Nomi who was born and raised there. 

Without going too deeply into the storyline, this tackles the challenges of living in and ultimately being (or feeling) stuck in a very small, closed community. It is also about the difficult and often painful decisions that need to be made to be able to break away from such a community. Tackling a hot button topic (religion does it all the time), here it is scrutinized and given life, with the impacts quite profoundly playing themselves out on the Nickels family in general and Nomi in particular. 

The Nickels family is an interesting study with the relationships within their nuclear family sweet, a little oddball, but with the wellbeing of the family always front and centre. The relationships within the community are much more tenuous since the Nickels are related to its leaders. As I pieced together the reasons for the breaking up of the tight-knit Nickels family, so too did I realize that this was not a straightforward story!  

In the beginning, I thought Nomi was pretty clueless and she seemed, well ... pathetic. But in her cluelessness, my heart went out to her. After all, she didn't know any other life than what she was born into. I also realized that Nomi is quite the spunky one; she's a character that grows on you. She's an innocent so it is difficult see how Nomi struggles to comprehend what is happening to her family and to her life.

I found that the storyline can get confusing. But when I digested what I had read, it was a huge "aha" moment for me, and it made things so much more tragic. It is about leaving, it is about staying, and the heartbreak associated with either decision; a predicament that is underscored by Nomi's innocence. Kudos to Toews for injecting some humour and quirkiness into her characters or this may have become quite depressing.

The title aptly captures the complexity of family life bound within a highly conservative religion and community.

Verdict: An inside look into the impacts of a closed community on family and individual life. I would highly recommend this to those who enjoy stories told from the viewpoint of young people, and those who like unexpected twists to their reads. If you have kids, this one will likely make you a highly empathetic reader. Read it.

The Deception of Livvy Higgs by Donna Morrissey

Deception can be more powerful than death. 

The book in one sentence: Wherein we learn of Livvy Higgs' deception, discovering her painfully sordid past.  

Synopsis of The Deception of Livvy Higgs by Donna Morrissey: For two traumatic days, Livvy Higgs is besieged by a series of small heart attacks while the ghost of her younger self leads her back through a past devastated by lies and secrets.

The story opens in Halifax in 2009, travels back to the French Shore of Newfoundland during the mid-thirties and the heyday of the Maritime shipping industry, makes its way to wartorn Halifax during the battle of the Atlantic in World War II, then leaps ahead to the bedside of the elder Livvy.

Caught between a troubled past, and her present and worsening living conditions, Livvy is forced to pick apart the lies and secrets told by her greedy, prideful father, Durwin Higgs, who judges her a failure, and her formidable Grandmother Creed, who has mysteriously aligned herself with Livvy's father, despite their mutual hatred.

Tending to Livvy during her illness is her young next-door neighbour, Gen, a single mother, social-work student, and part-time drug dealer. Overnight, a violent scene embroils the two in each other's lives in a manner that will entwine them forever. In The Deception of Livvy Higgs, the inimitable Morrissey has written a powerful tale, the Stone Angel of the East Coast.

My two cents: I entered the giveaway for this at GoodReads because I felt the need to better acquaint myself with Canadian authors. This is my first time reading Donna Morrissey. She doesn't disappoint with this lovely combination of historical fiction and family saga.

Livvy Higgs is - a harmless, rather forgetful octogenarian - who living alone, seems better with family or in a home. Looking out for her is her neighbour, Gen, a single mother studying to be a social worker.

When Livvy's health takes a turn with for the worse, she hallucinates and revisits her painful past, thus starting a shifting in the book from past and present and back again.

Growing up in a rather lonely childhood, Livvy remembers her martyred mother, her austere father, and a scheming grandmother, and her seeking solace in her neighbour Missus Louis and her family. Most important of all, she distinctly remembers a seeming conspiracy between her father and her Grandmother Creed -- a secret that weighs on Livvy heavily as she sees her mother suffering as a consequence. 

The Higgs family is a shipping family in Newfoundland in the mid-thirties. As Livvy's past unfolds, we become privvy to their lives embroiled in politics and the sordid secrets of the Maritime shipping industry.


This is among the best-told stories I have read in a while, coherent overall yet surprising in how I see the emotional unravelling of Livvy as she learns of the lifelong deception and a betrayal that is difficult to come to terms with. Her "truth" metamorphoses into yet another "truth," highlighting that how we make sense of people at a certain time in our lives ...  can be totally be disproven as we gain a better understanding of ourselves, the circumstances, and of other people's secret selves.

I have no doubt that this story will resonate with many, as well as appeal to Canadian historical fiction fans.

Verdict: A page-turning family saga that reveals the deception that many of us inevitably live with. 

First line: I step carefully onto the iced side steps, knees creaking like an old stair, and fling feed to the grey hubble of pigeons coo-cooing about the doorplace.

Last line:  [..] ah, sweet, sweet grace.

I won this book at GoodReads First Reads. The book will be be hitting bookshelves September 2012

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

About Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.

My two cents

Spoilers, don’t say I didn’t warn you! I was blown away by this book! The third Atwood I’ve read (The Blind Assassin and Handmaid’s Tale), this is by far the best.

Dystopia, according to Atwood, becomes horrifying plausible in this tightly crafted tale of genetic engineering gone awry – overrun by living experiments such as pigoons (pigs bred to manufacture human organs), wolvogs, rakunks, chicken parts grown as chicken parts, and a whole host of horrors.

When man crossed that unspeakable boundary, becoming god and nature, this dystopia is the result. The book opens up the whole discussion of “when is too far, too far?” Is this what awaits us with our tampering of genes, in the name of science, in the name of the greater good?

Snowman, the “last man on earth,” recounts the story of how his genius friend Crake and his Oryx, from their kiddie-porn online obsession, end up breeding a new Homo Sapiens of the green eyes and superior genes. This is a new world where man becomes god to his new creation yet is threatened to extinction.

The horror of the ending, purposefully vague, shows Atwood’s propensity for suspense as well as a healthy respect for her reader’s opinions on this highly debatable, but very real issue of genetic engineering and its potentially catastrophic consequences.

Verdict: A must-read. Now one of my favorites.

1st line: Snowman wakes before dawn.

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The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Back blurb of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin opens with these simple, resonant words: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister’s death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura’s story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel.

Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Brilliantly weaving together such seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.

My take

I started out pretty well, then slowly got more and more disoriented. With more characters introduced, I felt things getting murkier. After recovering several chapters in, and sorting out who was who, backtracking to understand the importance of newspaper stories interspersed … I started picking up pace and started enjoying myself. I was hooked.

Once in that quagmire of several stories happening all at once, I actually resisted leaving. I felt like I was racing to the finish line. Seemingly discrete characters and mini-stories magically melded and converged at the end. I was ecstatic yet reluctant at having finished the last page. It was like I had became privy to a huge secret. Atwood is truly a master at pacing her readers!

This is my first Atwood book and I am blown away by how unpredictably she has treated the oft-times predictable themes of familial love and dynamics. Isn’t the title brilliant? You read so much into the title alone … who is the blind assassin? Who killed whom? Was the character truly blind or merely casting a blind eye?

Spoilers here: On the other hand, I can’t say that this book isn’t without its flaws. For one, I disliked the two main characters. Our protagonist Iris is a boring old lady and somehow I was nagged that I couldn’t plausibly reconcile the risk-taking lover with the old lady she had become. While I enjoyed the character of Laura, she too became quite a tired, predictable character, at least she was consistently inconsistent throughout. Most of the characters were quite flat and stereotyped, particularly Iris’s husband Richard and her sister-in-law Winifred.

Are Atwood’s storytelling devices maybe, maybe overshadowing the story itself? The pulp science-fiction story narrated by Red, the lover, was interesting but did I miss the metaphors? I felt a little lost here. Sometimes the loveliest of tales don’t need any bells and whistles, a good yarn is a good yarn. Reduce the story to its bare bones and somehow the book loses its appeal and sad to say, is actually lackluster.