Now, in their middle years, Elf is a rich and celebrated concert pianist who like their father is resolutely suicidal, while Yoli is a broke writer of “rodeo romances” who is failing at both love and life and yet forges enthusiastically ahead. The story, to extent to which there is one, is about the relationship between sisters Yolandi and Elfreida Von Riesen, the children of free-thinking Mennonites who chafe against and ultimately escape their constricting religious community just before their father, a “quiet depressive,” kills himself by jumping in front of a train. Instead, thanks to the prodigious talent of author Miriam Toews, “All My Puny Sorrows” is an off-kilter, frequently funny and begrudgingly life-affirming romp through, well, death. Sounds tedious, yes? But somehow it’s not. The book contains little plot, an abundance of obscure poetry and the untimely death of three protagonists. “All My Puny Sorrows” is a novel about suicide, a 320-page contemplation of the point of human existence that asks why we bother slogging through our inevitable suffering when we have the choice to end it all.
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