![]() ![]() A similar affliction resulted in the suicide of Toews’ sister Marj a dozen years later. Dissolution and encroaching death lurk just beneath-or within-her every smart-ass remark.įitful and seething, the novel dwells on what Toews describes- in the memoir Swing Low (2000), an account of her father-as “dragging some of the awful details to the light of day.” Melvin Toews suffered from depression (a “clinical, profoundly inadequate word for deep despair,” his youngest daughter writes) for decades and ended his life after retirement from a robust teaching career in a Canadian prairie town. ![]() ![]() Yoli’s sharp asides are always accompanied by deep unease. While the perfectly-aimed sarcasm of Atwood’s protagonist elicits upbeat and hearty laughter, the cutting observations of Toews’ narrator, Yolandi Von Riesen, register as gallows humor and whistling in a graveyard. My life had a tendency to spread, to get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror….” Despite its raw and painful concerns-suicide, loss, grief-Miriam Toews’ sixth novel, All My Puny Sorrows, brings to mind the irreverent and ebullient opening words of Joan Foster in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle: “I planned my death carefully unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it. ![]()
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