We all connect differently to the world around us. I was always more notes-in-the-margins than music notes my piano lessons (as well as the redundant pleas to switch to guitar lessons because, somehow, THAT would be different and marvelous and oh-so-me) instilling a vast appreciation for those that were musically skilled without, however, bestowing any of that skill upon yours truly.

Often pondering the pros and cons of the stolid Mr. Poe and repeatedly pound out 'Oom Pa Pa' accompanied by the intermittent SWACK of his favored wooden ruler meeting errant knuckles while my brain was, inconveniently, elsewhere. I'd take up my seat next to the note-murmuring Mr. Read moreĪt the behest of my well-intentioned mom, the standard issue piano lessons of your average middle-class child crept into once-weekly residency during several years of my childhood. I've never been to Winnepeg or Toronto but Miriam Toews makes both cities sound fascinatingly exotic. Summed up like this, I dare say it doesn't sound very enticing and yet, for a novel full of suicide and death, it is strangely life enhancing, not least because of the humour provided by that constraint stream of eccentricities and some lively, intelligent and funny dialogue. Plus she's by no means the only member of their extensive family to have a history of suicide attempts. Much of it takes place in hospitals as Elf recovers from her latest suicide attempt. For most of the book, Yoli debates whether she should prevent her suicidal sister from killing herself or take her off to Switzerland and help her to end her life peacefully. It's the I story of two sisters, Elf and Yoli, brought up in a Canadian small town Mennonite community by parents who break most of the strict Puritan religious rules. A doctor's waiting room is filled with people who all have patches on their left eye. He winds them round his neck like a scarf and walks on. Their mother goes out to give him some sweat pants. (A man walks past the house naked from the waist down. Eccentric characters and weird off-kilter events fill almost every page. This opening sentence tells you exactly what to expect from the rest of the novel. 'Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979.'

All my puny sorrows by miriam toews