These are the jokes of someone trying to cling on to the mundanity of a sane world while a loved one repeatedly attempts to take her own life. To describe the tone as black humour wouldn’t quite do it justice. I remember humming that refrain over and over, singing myself to sleep with those lyrics in the days before my father kneeled in the path of a fast-moving train.” I love that she tells me this again and again but I wonder sometimes if she thinks I’m an idiot . . . Bob Marley says it too but he says every little thing gonna be all right and that strikes me as an appropriate qualifier even if all he was doing was getting enough syllables to match the music. “She hugs me in the hallway and tells me everything will be all right. One of Toews’ trademarks is the high-speed paragraph, sentences rattling at the speed of thought until it suddenly stops, pulled up by horror. Yoli’s voice is by turns dry, manic, heightened to the point of hysteria, furious and profoundly sad. Yolandi (Yoli) is our first-person guide, daughter to a father who has already committed suicide, and sister to the depressed concert pianist Elfrieda (Elf). All My Puny Sorrows (a fragment of a Coleridge poem) is full of moments like this: laughter at the edge of the void.
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