51 pages • 1-hour read
All My Puny Sorrows
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Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
The day after Yoli tells Elf her plans for Zurich, Lottie informs Yoli that the hospital is giving Elf “a day pass” so that she can “celebrate her birthday” at home (255). Nic will pick her up and Lottie will order her a cake. That morning, Yoli and Nora play tennis together for several hours. While eating ice cream afterward, Nic calls Yoli to inform her that Elf died by suicide. He hasn’t been able to contact Lottie yet. Back at home, Yoli receives several calls from the hospital. Eventually, she talks to the executive director, who expresses her condolences. Yoli gets upset, furious that the hospital discharged Elf at all. Afterward, Yoli calls Will and Barry with the news. Finally, she gets hold of Lottie, who is at home alone waiting for the family to come into town.
Chapter 17 Summary
Yoli and Nora go to Winnipeg. Nic meets them there. At the house, Nic informs them that, after he picked up Elf from the hospital, they went out for lunch. Afterward, she asked Nic to pick up some books at the library for her. Yoli silently muses on how clever Elf was to make this request so that she could be alone. When he returned home, Elf was gone. The police later found Elf’s body on a train track. The doorbell rings and a delivery person drops off the cake they ordered for Elf’s birthday.
After eating the cake, the family says goodbye to Nic. He gives Yoli a story that Elf wrote called Italy in August before she leaves. She reads it once she’s alone at Lottie’s apartment. In the last paragraph, the narrator breaks the fourth wall and repeatedly says goodbye to the reader.
Yoli, Lottie, and Nora climb into Lottie’s bed together. They stay awake talking about Elf and the past. In the morning, Yoli lies in bed thinking about Elf’s story.
Lottie insists to the police on seeing Elf’s body. Yoli goes with her and is shocked by the sewn-up hole in Elf’s face.
Yoli discovers that Elf left her her life insurance and a monthly allowance for the next two years so that she can stay at home and finish her book (267). Yoli decides to use the insurance money to buy herself a house in Toronto. She also realizes that Elf didn’t believe that she’d take her to Zurich and had no plans of visiting Toronto.
Chapter 18 Summary
At her new fixer-upper, Yoli chats with her painter, Nelson, while he works on the house. She starts to doze, slipping in and out of memories of Elf. In four weeks, Lottie will move into the house with Yoli and Nora. Yoli is doing everything she can to prepare the space for her arrival.
In August, Yoli gets bad allergies. Her eye is swollen when she meets up with a friend. Throughout the outing, the friend repeatedly insists that Elf’s death by suicide was a sin. Yoli gets upset, making a scene at the restaurant. Afterward, she gets drunk alone, calls Julie, and leaves a message for her.
Chapter 19 Summary
Lottie moves to Toronto. When she arrives, Yoli remembers the first time she showed Lottie the house. Yoli gave her a tour and then she, Lottie, and Nelson drank beer and toasted. Lottie then recited a Wordsworth poem.
Over the following weeks, the family settles into the new house. Lottie lives on the ground floor, Yoli on the second floor, and Nora in the attic. Meanwhile, Lottie adjusts to life in Toronto. She takes long walks and talks to strangers on the street. She also joins the Mennonite church in Danforth. Yoli often wants to tell Lottie about Switzerland but never gets up the nerve. In the meantime, Yoli thinks about Elf and rereads the letters she sent her over the years. She tries orienting to life with her mother, too. One day, she realizes that Lottie is the real survivor, not her. Not long later, Yoli has a dream about going to Zurich with Elf, which comforts her. On another occasion, she feels so upset that she gets drunk and prank calls the Winnipeg hospital.
As Christmas approaches, Yoli stays in touch with Nic. They talk about Elf, sharing their dreams and memories of her. Shortly before Christmas, Yoli, Lottie, and Nora get a tree. It’s so big that it keeps falling over. Shortly thereafter, Claudio stops by for a visit. After he leaves, the family agrees not to force the Christmas spirit this year.
Chapter 20 Summary
On Christmas Eve, Yoli finds Lottie lying on the couch breathing strangely. She calls the ambulance and they go to the ER. It’s her heart, but the doctors inform her that she’ll be okay. In her hospital room, she tells Yoli that she has something to tell her. She knows that Yoli has been prank calling the hospital and urges her to stop.
Yoli is home alone on Christmas. She calls Julie, who’s alone, too. They get drunk and stay on the phone for hours.
In the months following, Yoli starts writing letters to Elf. She keeps her updated on her life and expresses her regrets about Zurich. She also shares their joint memories.
In a dream, Yoli and Elf fly to Zurich. They have a nice dinner the night before they go to the clinic for Elf’s physician-assisted death. In the morning, they leave early for the clinic.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
The final chapters of Yoli’s narrative lead the novel through its climax, falling action, and resolution. In Chapter 16, the news of Elf’s death by suicide acts as the narrative climax. Throughout the novel, Elf’s mental health has impacted the Von Riesen family’s emotional stability and affected Yoli’s internal world. Toews has sustained the narrative tension by focusing Yoli’s account on the family’s efforts to keep Elf alive. Therefore, when Elf dies, the narrative tension breaks. In the chapters following this pivotal event, Yoli attempts to orient to a world without her sister and to focus on her own survival. The aftermath of Elf’s death therefore initiates the falling action and leads the characters toward healing and renewal.
Toews uses atmospheric detail to capture Yoli and her family’s emotional response to Elf’s death. In Chapter 17, for example, the descriptions of Nic’s house, the books he got from the library for Elf, the birthday cake, and the family’s afternoon together reify their complex internal experiences. On their surface, these images summon a comforting, domestic narrative atmosphere, as they conjure notions of home and family. However, the house, books, and cake have darker connotations in light of Elf’s recent death. “Books are what save us,” Yoli reflects while studying the stack of books Nic was retrieving from the library at the time of Elf’s death; “Books are what don’t save us” (262). This complicates the Importance of Art and Creativity to Survival, as the books did not help Elf to survive. The same notion applies to the cake, which also has dichotomous symbolic resonances. It is not only “a delicate white cake, moist and light at the same time,” but is emblazoned with “a message for Elf written in icing, an emphatic wish for happiness” (263). These images express the complexities and contradictions of the family’s experience after losing Elf. Elf has made the choice to end her own suffering, and the family is therefore glad that she’s no longer in pain. Her new peacefulness parallels the references to light, sweetness, and comfort in this scene. At the same time, the books, cake, and house have ironic undertones because Yoli and her family are grieving Elf’s passing; Elf can no longer read the books or share the cake.
In Chapters 19 and 20, Toews uses Yoli’s new house in Toronto to symbolize her efforts to survive Elf’s death. The house becomes a creative project for Yoli and offers her, Nora, and Lottie a chance to start over after their loss. The descriptions of Yoli’s work on the house capture her desire to make a new life for herself, as well as for her mom. The house is therefore a manifestation of Yoli’s dreams that Elf’s life could have had a different ending and that she could have given her sister the peaceful death she wanted. This is why Yoli repeatedly alludes to her dreams and memories of Elf and incorporates her letters to Elf within the final pages of her narrative. These allusions reinforce Yoli’s complex internal experience, particularly her simultaneous desire to preserve her sister’s memory and to heal from her death. While Yoli hasn’t entirely overcome the pain of losing Elf by the novel’s end, the final imagined scene of her and Elf in Zurich lends resolution to her narrative. Yoli embraces this dream because she is giving both her and Elf the peaceful ending they desire.
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