Winnipeg, where Elf and Nic live

Winnipeg, where Elf and Nic live, is more than a city on the map: it is a place of return, care, and precarious belonging in the Von Riesen family’s story. Called Muddy Waters by the narrator, it is described in deliberately contradictory terms as the coldest city in the world and yet the hottest, farthest from the sun and yet brightest. Its two fierce rivers meet there, a landscape image that gives the city both force and companionship. The novel’s Winnipeg is at once a real setting for family life and a charged idea of how people might endure together.

Setting and identity

The narrator places Winnipeg at the top of an imagined Exotic City Index, where its apparent remoteness becomes part of its appeal. The city’s defining contrasts resist a single, settled impression: coldness does not cancel heat, distance does not cancel brightness, and the meeting of rivers suggests a joining of forces rather than isolation. The description is not a detached civic portrait. It is filtered through the family’s language and attachments, making the city feel intimate even as it is figured as far from the sun.

The name Muddy Waters also gives Winnipeg an expressive, almost private character. It is where the narrator’s sister, Elfrieda Von Riesen, and Nic make a life together, and where the family’s movement repeatedly returns when Elfrieda’s health and care become urgent. The city’s imagery therefore holds two scales at once: the grand, elemental scale of rivers and distance, and the close scale of people visiting, talking, and trying to remain present to one another.

Family movement and return

Yolandi Von Riesen’s connection to Winnipeg follows her departure from East Village. By the time Elfrieda returns from Norway and other places, she has moved away from the family home and has two young children, Will and Nora. She is trying to study, earn money, and manage adulthood; her visits to her parents and sister bring her back into close contact with a family whose circumstances have changed. Winnipeg is not presented as a clean break from the past, but as a setting in which separation and reunion coexist.

During Elfrieda’s period of illness, Yolandi visits with her children. The sisters lie beside one another in bed, smiling, holding each other, while the children crawl over them. This scene makes the city’s domestic space a place of physical closeness rather than merely a location for crisis. Elfrieda’s long, funny letters to Yolandi, written on pink stationery in coloured felt-tip markers, also belong to this period of connection. Their subjects include death, strength, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and the intricacy of despair. After a few months, Elfrieda gradually regains her health, plays piano again, and gives concerts. Winnipeg is thus associated not only with illness, but with a return to activity and the possibility of a shared life.

Work, partnership, and imagined elsewhere

Nic and Elfrieda meet through piano lessons: Nic takes lessons from her, later admitting that he mainly wanted to sit beside her on the small bench while she placed his fingers on the keys. He buys her a new piano bench, but she orders him to remove its soft padding. The detail catches their different temperaments and the exactness of their intimacy. Nic is precise and attached to manuals and measurements; Elfrieda’s requests and musical habits unsettle that preference. He is a medical scientist, and the account of their relationship places his work alongside, but not above, their life together.

Winnipeg is also the place from which the couple imagines departure. Elfrieda and Nic often talk about living in Paris, where he might work at a laboratory and where they could speak French, argue politics, wear scarves throughout the year, and take comfort in old-world beauty. Yet they remain in Winnipeg, which the narrator wryly calls the Paris of the Northwest Passage. The comparison does not erase the difference between an imagined destination and the life actually being lived. Instead, it lets the couple’s cosmopolitan desire coexist with their present home: Winnipeg can be both the city they inhabit and a northern place they redescribe through the beauty they hope to find elsewhere.

Hospital, care, and the city’s daily geography

In the later caregiving crisis, Winnipeg becomes a network of visits and uncertain plans. Nic sees Elfrieda after work, and afterwards he and Yolandi meet for a beer to discuss what to do next. They are trying to assemble a team of caregivers for when Elfrieda leaves the hospital. Their discussions show that the city’s importance is practical as well as symbolic: the family must work out how care might continue beyond the hospital, even while Elfrieda rejects the language of teams, journeys, and health plans.

The city’s streets register Yolandi’s state of mind during this period. After leaving the hospital, she drives her mother’s battered Chevrolet down Pembina Highway, past bleak asphalt and derelict strip malls, feeling that she is speeding toward nothing except what Elfrieda calls the le foutoir of her life. A bedding store interrupts that motion. Yolandi spends ten minutes examining pillows, tests them on a bed, and briefly falls asleep; when she wakes, the salesperson’s smile brings back a childhood peace. The episode does not turn Winnipeg into a cure. It shows instead how an ordinary stop, amid the city’s unlovely commercial landscape, can offer a moment of rest without resolving the troubles that brought Yolandi there.

Reunion and narrative significance

Winnipeg also frames a reunion shaped by fear and affection. After a long airport embrace, Yolandi and her mother visit Nic; it is too late to see Elfrieda at the hospital. The family laughs together as Nic sits on Elfrieda’s piano bench and occasionally plays the keys without tune. The bench, first a small object in the story of how Nic and Elfrieda met, now stands within a family gathering from which Elfrieda is absent. The scene holds warmth and unease together rather than allowing reunion to mean that the crisis has passed.

That night Yolandi dreams that Elfrieda has been discharged but cannot be found, then dreams of grass growing through the stairs in her house. In the dream, doing nothing resolves the anxiety; awake, Yolandi calls the hospital and learns that Elfrieda is still there. Winnipeg’s hospitals and homes remain distinct places, but the uncertainty of discharge makes the distance between them emotionally unstable. Across these episodes, the city becomes the setting where the family tries to make care concrete while confronting how little control care can guarantee. Its rivers, roads, beds, piano bench, and hospital visits give physical form to a story of return: people come back to one another, but not to a simple or settled version of home.