Its subsequent reappearance occurs much later, towards the end of Toews’ absorbing, tragicomic book. 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. And yet the source of the quotation (“all my puny sorrows”) is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mournful poetic reflection on a sibling’s loss. 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). 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.
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