Matters of life and death

I am not sure I have ever read a book and got to the end and started it again right away and got to the end and started it again a third time, but I did this week. The book was All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews: a magnificent, wise, charming, beautifully made novel that brims with love. It is also the saddest book I have ever read. As I devoured it, I imagined reading it again in 20 years' time, when I hope to be living on Piccadilly among a lot of pink and gold. I imagined reading it 20 years ago, when it would have given me tremendous inspiration as I typed away at the kitchen table, dreaming of romance and what might be.

The book contained what I like most in fiction: human life lived at the deepest level by people of the highest calibre (preferably in big cities). If that is a genre, it is quite a slim one, you will agree.

Of course, the characters in the books you love stay with you forever, keeping you company. I only have to draft and not send an email and Saul Bellow's Herzog's travails are with me; I only have to see a signpost to Earl's Court and I am in the smoky 40-per-cent-proof shadows of Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square. But the feeling I had when I held the book, when I popped it in my bag or put it on my bedside table was not that it would stay with me but that I wanted to stay with it.

All My Puny Sorrows is about matters of life and death. It concerns the efforts of one sister, a writer, to keep her older sister, a concert pianist, from committing suicide. It is based on the real-life experience of the author who has fought this dreadful war herself. It asks how you best love someone who desperately wants to die. It asks what kind of fidelity we owe to the dead we have adored. How does sadness thread itself down the generations? It asks lighter things, too. When teenagers trill their cursory "love yous" as breezily as a "ciao" or a "see ya", what do they think they are doing? When the chips are down, why is it that someone going off to get substandard coffees ("double double double double") from a woeful chain that does not pay its taxes can seem as intrepid and daring as a plot to storm the Bastille?

Although the subject matter of the book appears to be very extreme, keeping people alive, when you think about it, isn't so unusual. It's what mothers do. It's what children try to do for their elderly parents, until they can't any more.

The book also spoke directly to a dilemma of my own. If you are a writer and you've been having quite a time of it, and the likes of lawsuits, blackmail and hitmen crop up in conversation as regularly as the price of eggs, what do you risk by writing about it all? What do you risk by not writing about it? If extraordinarily powerful things occur in your life and you don't cast them as material, what if there is a big hole in your work where all the interesting things should lie, all the deeply felt life? Some things are, of course, sacred but nobody's work should be a pale imitation of what they are living.

. . .

I was about to read the novel for a fourth time (where's the harm?) when instead I made a phone call and sent an email to the publishers, and a few days later the author and I were sitting across from each other at my favourite deluxe Jewish grandma cafe.

It is odd meeting someone for the first time when your fantasy is that there is an almost indecent amount of fellow feeling between you already. How can it go right?

I praised the book greatly to its creator because I love it. It seemed impertinent to ask her any personal things. Why should anyone have to put up with that from a stranger?

It is SO annoying to be asked things like, "Blah blah blah, was the book therapeutic to write?" Questions of that sort insult the art of writing (and possibly the business of living). When people say, "So why did you decide to mix humour and tragedy in such a way?", it shows that they know nothing about how books are made.

When I speak to someone whose work I greatly admire, what I most like to do is communicate the depth of my understanding and that never quite works on the page. But just sitting with the author, listening to her thoughts on writing, on parenting, on pencil cases, on teenage trips round Europe with a boyfriend, on trailblazing mothers, on being a good sister or trying to be, on assisted dying, on grief, everything fiercely intelligent and brimming with heroic softness, as we ate our schnitzels, well, it was a complete inspiration.

[email protected], Twitter: @SusieBoyt

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation