ALL MY PUNY SORROWS by Miriam Toews

To say that this novel is sad is a gross over-simplification.  In fact, the last few chapters are downright joyous with quips that made me laugh out loud.  Up to that point, though, the book is a semi-autobiographical novel about family in which the father commits suicide by stepping in front of a train, and his daughter Elf, short for Elfrieda, a brilliant concert pianist, also wants to die.  The other daughter, Yoli, in her forties, narrates, and desperately wants to keep Elf alive, until she finally hatches a plan to get Elf to Switzerland for a legal suicide.  How Yoli manages to remain remotely sane is the question I kept asking, and the fact that she does makes her heroic.  She is the divorced mother of two, living in Toronto, but she spends much of the novel in the psych ward of a hospital in Winnipeg, visiting her sister, near the small Mennonite community in which she grew up.  I kept wondering how or if Elf’s healthcare might have been handled differently in the U.S.—not necessarily better, but possibly differently.  For Elf, it seemed that perhaps music was both her salvation and her albatross, but everyone in the novel sees it as what has kept her going up to this point.  Honestly, I’ve never been really close to someone who ultimately committed suicide, so that I’m speaking from a complete lack of experience.  Near the end, Yoli has an argument with a friend as to whether suicide is an act of courage or of vanity.  I’m certainly not qualified to answer that question, but it’s clear in this case that it is an act of desperation.