But don’t go thinking it’s entirely gloomy. All My Puny Sorrows unfolds in the time after Elf’s latest suicide attempt.

Until Elf decides she wants to end her life. But no matter they’ve always had each other. Yoli, on the other hand, is a little more lost in life. Elf is a celebrated pianist, very rich, and very much in love. (Actually, I dare say it’s the best book Miriam Toews has written fight me!) It focuses on two sisters, Elf and Yoli. As Brenda Shaughnessy writes for The New York Time Book Review, “All the narratives in the novel make clear that the only thing that makes any of it bearable is the agency each woman can claim.” –ESīefore Women Talking, there was All My Puny Sorrows. The stories here circle around pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility-but of course it’s not only about those things (it never is). ( Keep reading)Īnother engrossing book of conversations between women, Anna Hogeland’s The Long Answer feels like eavesdropping on phone calls and late-night talks I’ve had with my own friends. In response to the gaslighting of the real-life victims, Toews calls her book “an act of female imagination,” and it is a powerful one-compact, intricate, and unsparing.

Should they do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the only home they know? On their way to a decision, the women argue about the nature of evil, the limits of forgiveness, and the meaning of faith, interspersing their intellectual debate with rage, panic, cruelty, and even laughter. In 2018, Canadian author Miriam Toews, who was raised in a small Mennonite town in Manitoba, published her novel Women Talking, in which eight women from a fictional Mennonite community meet in a hayloft to debate their response to a similar series of crimes. The men, all members of the community, had used livestock anesthetic to immobilize their victims, who ranged in age from 65 to just five years old. Eventually, nine men were convicted of the assault and rape of 151 women and girls. Community leaders dismissed the mysterious attacks for years, insisting that they were the work of the devil or that the women were simply lying or imagining things. In Women Talking, Acts of Imagination Are Acts of Resistanceīefore the movie, before the novel, there was the horrific reality: in the early 2000s, in an isolated Mennonite community in the Bolivian lowlands, women began to awaken naked, disoriented, and in pain, sometimes covered with cuts and bruises. In the meantime, we’re recommending the books and films you and should read and watch next for each Best Picture contender. (Exhibit A: If they gave Oscars to books, our 2022 nominees.) And while there are few adaptations in this year’s lineup, we’ll still be tuning in on Sunday to celebrate storytelling, judge the Academy’s taste, and perhaps witness some live drama. Sure, we’re a website about books, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get in on the Oscars fun, too.

All my puny sorrows book review