It’s the fears and hopes and dreams and pain and confusion all stirred up inside us. When she hears bottles being thrown into the back of a garbage truck or wind chimes or even a certain type of bird singing she immediately thinks it’s the piano breaking.Ī child laughed this morning, she says, a little girl here visiting her father, but I didn’t know it was laughter, I thought it was the sound of glass shattering and I clutched my stomach thinking oh no, this is it.” I ask her what kind of piano it is and she tells me that it’s an old upright Heintzman that used to be a player piano but that the player mechanism has been removed and the whole thing has been turned into glass, even the keys. But mostly she’s terrified that it will break inside her. She tells me that it’s squeezed right up against the lower right side of her stomach, that sometimes she can feel the hard edges of it pushing at her skin, that she’s afraid it will push through and she’ll bleed to death.
“Then Elf tells me that she has a glass piano inside her. Click here to buy it for £5.This week’s Wordsmith Wednesday comes from Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows. She also takes us on a heart-rending journey through her characters’ emotional landscapes, via the cruel terrain of despair in which Elf becomes stranded, shedding light on the darkest of places.Īll My Puny Sorrows is published by Faber (£7.99). Toews evocatively conjures landscapes, from the small town in which the family live to the “dark, jagged outcroppings of the great Canadian Shield”. What holds this novel together, stops it from becoming saturated with sorrow, is a wit so sharp it hurts to laugh at certain scenes. All My Puny Sorrows is based on the author’s own experience of her sister’s suicide, in 2010, 12 years after their father killed himself, explaining the novel’s urgency and rawness. It is with a “loving attention to every detail” that their father built their house a quality also governing this novel, written by someone who knows what happens when things fall apart. “We spent the whole time, it seemed, setting everything up and then tearing it down,” says Yoli. In the summer when the family “had a few days to kill” before they could move into their new house, they go camping in the “badlands of South Dakota”. The sisters’ father had built the house himself when he and his wife were “a newly married Mennonite couple”. “Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979,” begins Yoli, the narrator.
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