Miriam Tow's 'All My Puny Sorrows'

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Miriam Toews book “All My Puny Sorrows” is rich in music. Musical allusions and music play an important role in shaping the characters and also elaborating on how it affects their lives. Throughout “All My Puny Sorrows”, music is used among other things as a form of rebellion for Elf. Conversely, music also helps explain the fragile thoughts and anxiety that Elf feels later in her life as she contends with suicidal thoughts. The underlying subject of music permeates the story and helps us better understand the characters. Music can be understood by everyone and can be used to express emotions that words often cannot. Rebellion is often sought through music, and the characters in “All My Puny Sorrows” reflects this. The Mennonite community …show more content…

Elf is very musical and plays the piano, later becoming a very successful concert pianist. She is rebellious to the judgment and constrictive nature of her religion and is always looking for ways to break free of it. The elders in the community disapprove of her musical ambitions make this clear by visiting her father to dissuade the notion of Elf going to university to study music. Yolandi describes Elf's response to this by driving the men out of the house, playing Rachmaninoff's Opus in G Minor on the piano upstairs. Yolandi says, “The men in the room remained silent, as though they were being reprimanded. Elf played louder, then quieter, then louder again. The birds stopped singing and the flies in the kitchen stopped slamming up against the windows. The air was still. She was at the centre of the spinning world. This was the moment Elf took control of her life”(14). Elf's fiery defiance to outmoded traditions and a male-centrist society that says women

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