Toews conveys family cycles of crisis and intermittent calm through recurring events and behaviors: Elf and her father both suffer from depression Yoli and her mother face tragedy with wry humor and absurdist behavior and two sisters experience parallel losses. Yoli’s men are transient, leaving her with two children.
Elf’s husband appreciates her singular sensitivity as a performer, but this capacity for vulnerability dangerously underpins her many breakdowns and longstanding depression. Elf travels around Europe, emptying herself into Rachmaninoff performances Yoli writes books about a rodeo heroine, feeling aimless and failed. His suicide and absence from their adulthood make him even more important to his daughters as their paths diverge. The girls' father baffles neighbors by supporting Elf's creative passions and campaigning to run a library. Toews ( Irma Voth, 2011, etc.) moves between Winnipeg, Toronto, and a small town founded by Mennonite immigrants who survived Bolshevik massacres, where the intellectual, free-spirited Von Riesen family doesn’t share the elders' disapproval of “overt symbols of hope and individual signature pieces.” Yoli looks back over time, realizing that the sisters' bond is strengthened by their painful memories. “She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other,” Yolandi Von Riesen says of her sister, Elfrieda. A Canadian writer visits her older sister, a concert pianist who's just attempted suicide, in this masterful, original investigation into love, loss and survival.
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