TO contemporary readers who are unfamiliar or out of touch with the obscurer lamentations of England’s much-bereaved Romantic poets, All My Puny Sorrows seems an oddly-titled novel. The noun “puny,” with its pathetic, puerile ring, is surely incapable of conveying the weight of the “sorrows” with which Miriam Toews’ protagonists are burdened (“wrenching” in Margaret Atwood’s words, reproduced on the book’s rather nondescript cover). And yet the source of the quotation (“all my puny sorrows”) is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mournful poetic reflection on a sibling’s loss.

His plaintive line surfaces first in the novel in a “signature piece” of cryptic graffiti blazoned around their conservative Mennonite town by the narrator Yoli’s anarchic elder sister, Elfrieda. Its subsequent reappearance occurs much later, towards the end of Toews’ absorbing, tragicomic book. On this occasion, the phrase is rediscovered by the increasingly desperate Yoli, following the hospitalisation of her beloved — and, by then, suicidal — Elf: sleepless, and in need of guidance, the narrator chances upon it when browsing through the cut-up whodunits on her mother’s eclectic bookshelf. Coleridge’s “puny” sorrows now induce an epiphany. And, as they do, they draw attention both to the magnitude of the “objective sadness” with which Elf is burdened, and to the necessity — in the circumstances — for her adoring, life-loving sister to find ways to alleviate this suffering. Such measures may require the suppression of Yoli’s own, perhaps comparatively “puny,” emotional needs, and of her qualms regarding assisted suicide’s ethicality.

The literati in Toews’ home country have perhaps already acknowledged her new novel’s prowess; All My Puny Sorrows (2014) was shortlisted last month for the Scotiabank Giller fiction prize, described by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as “the most lucrative” in the nation’s history. It is undoubtedly an extraordinary book, although, for connoisseurs of Toews’ life and oeuvre, it may arguably be deemed not so “novel”. Toews’ earlier works include Swing Low: A Life (2000), in which she retells the story of her father’s manic depression and suicide in his own (imagined) voice; her sister also killed herself just over a decade after this unconventional memoir’s publication, in June 2010.

Yet in her latest, autobiographical, fiction the author succeeds not only in replaying with compassion, dignity, warmth, and incredible, tender humour a series of traumatic (and, at times, unedifying) events, which closely resemble those of her family’s personal history. She also — vitally — recreates the story of a sister’s mindful withdrawal from life and its impacts on her loved ones afresh, through the characters of the incorrigible, un-saveable concert pianist Elf, the haphazard single-mum-cum-writer Yoli, and — last but not least — their wonderfully comic, near indefatigable “short, fat seventy-six-year-old Mennonite prairie woman” of a mother, Lottie.

All My Puny Sorrows begins in the summer of 1979 in the fictional setting of East Village. This small, seemingly sleepy, Manitoban town with its protective “Rocky shield” and benign “blue and yellow fields” aesthetic is nevertheless an unforgiving place, populated by censorious “alpha Mennonite” males, intimidating “posse[s] of elders,” and watchful neighbours. In the novel’s striking second scene these forces combine to threaten to cow Yoli’s misfit father and his feisty-loyal wife into “crucifying” their talented, high-strung, 15-year-old daughter, who would leave “the community” to pursue a music career. Elf’s stupendous (and stupefying) performance of Rachmaninoff (with “fierce perfection”) puts paid to their attempts to contain her unwieldy wildness.

Elf soon escapes — to Norway to study with a man she teasingly dubs “The Wizard of Oslo” — and on to an international career. But, as we discover when the narrative jumps suddenly forward into the present tense, and to Winnipeg, where the 40-something Yoli dully sits beside Elf’s psych ward bed, wondering how her sister really sustained the head wounds that have resulted in so many ungainly stitches, her sister’s exit from East Village and entry into the spotlight have also proved crippling. For, as Elf matter-of-factly puts it, “she’d never adjusted to the light” or “developed a tolerance to the world.” And it is with this clinically-described conundrum that the warm-hearted, world-enduring Yoli, who has left her barely responsible teenage children back in Toronto in order to fly to her sister’s bedside, spends the remainder of the narrative trying to grapple.

Toews’ novel constantly leaps forth and back, between Yoli’s recollections of the attitudes struck since childhood by Elf’s “intoxicating, razor-sharp self,” and her sister’s present invalidity — or self-invalidation. Particularly striking with regard to All My Puny Sorrows’ structure is its inclusion of a series of staggered revelations, which relate to their father’s death. We return several times to an image of a man falling on rails. These come into clearer and clearer focus as the haunted Yoli struggles to reach a decision about how to prevent her sister meeting a similarly violent end.

Yet, despite the agony of its central conflict and themes — Elf’s desire to die, versus Yoli’s need to keep her alive, which is displaced by the imperative to find a means to alleviate Elf’s suffering, finally — Toews succeeds in creating a novel that, though at times profoundly moving, is neither depressing nor “uplifting” in the sentimental, schmaltzy sense. This is due largely to its narrator’s comic-ironic tone and offbeat perspective; to the strength of its women characters, who are headstrong, human and at times wonderfully roguish; and to the powerful sense it offers of a Mennonite family which will link arms and march forth again, though its ranks are woefully depleted, stubbornly refusing to allow its spirit — of love, of loyalty, of calm endurance — to be extinguished.

Above all, the novel succeeds because Toews’ central protagonist, Yoli, has an acute precision of expression, a capacity both to conjure the depths of sorrow, and then not to belittle, but rather to undermine them, as she clutches at life again and again. When she reflects on her family’s history of suicide, following another of Elf’s attempts (this time the anxiety-crippled concert pianist has resorted to drinking neat Javex), Yoli simply observes: “We’ve been here before. Everything is a repeat, another take.” Her double-entendre here is quelling, as is her cold, bitter humour when, exhausted and frustrated, Yoli savagely observes to her bed-bound, soundless sister, “The world has gone a bit dark, eh? … You’d concur?” And yet, towards the end of the narrative, when so much has been taken from her, willfully, and by those she has loved the most, Yoli is still just able to save herself from despair by focusing with tender amusement on the exploits of her elderly, eccentric mother. “Living with my mother is like living with Winnie the Pooh,” she wryly observes. “She has many adventures, getting herself into and out of trouble guilelessly, and all of these adventures are accompanied by a few lines of gentle philosophy. There’s always a little bit more to learn every time you get your head stuck in the honey pot if you’re my mother.”

What distinguishes the painfully real perspectives Toews offers in All My Puny Sorrows, however, is precisely that they are not head-in-the-honey-pot fare, though they may allow the reader momentarily to delight in the consolations of philosophy, and be described as bitter-sweet.

The reviewer has a PhD in contemporary South Asian Literature in English from the University of East London

All My Puny Sorrows

(NOVEL)

By Miriam Toews

Faber & Faber, UK

ISBN 978-0-571-30528-5

322pp.