I don't get the attention to this book. It is depressing depressing depressing, and there is no relief throughout. Everyone walks about not saying anything to anyone. In one of my "favorite" passages (well, it did make me snort with laugher), the narrator's sister stands up and says nothing to the narrator and the father, then walks to the door, pauses, and says nothing again. It's enough to make me want to scream, simply for some noise in the narrative.
It all seems just a wee bit too precious for me, and reeks of the "can lit" that school kids mock. Do we HAVE to write depressing stories about nothing?
The "inciting incident" is not really described and throughout the book, because no one ever talks and merely sit around looking at nothing or each other or the night or whatever, we spend a great deal of time wondering what the heck is going on and who all these people are.
That said, some of the language is beautiful, but I feel the book is uneven, confusing, and rather dreadful. I had the e-edition, and there were typos throughout as well. ( )

I've kept this book around for over 10 years based mainly on the fact that it won the Giller Prize. That was in 2010 and one of the other contenders for the prize was Annabel by Kathleen Winter. I read Annabel shortly after it was published and I thought it was an amazing book. I certainly can't say I felt that way about this book. Obviously the prize jury saw something in it that I didn't.

Napoleon Haskell is reaching the end of his life, a life which hasn't been easy or rewarding. Like many other young American men in the 1960s he fought in the Vietnam War and like many of those who returned from that war he is haunted by it. He abandoned his wife and two young daughters and wandered from place to place in the US, drinking and smoking too much. One of the few accomplishments in his life was finding Henry, the father of his war buddy, Owen, who was killed in Vietnam. The question of why Owen, a Canadian, enlisted in the US Marines is never really answered and Napoleon seems to not have known he was Canadian because it took him years to find Henry. When he did he took his family to stay with Henry in his "government house" on the edge of a lake created when the St. Lawrence Seaway was built. So, when his daughters, Helen and the unnamed narrator, decide he needs more care it seems logical to move him from Fargo, ND to Henry's place in Ontario. Henry is in a wheelchair and has a part-time nurse who can also keep an eye on Napoleon. At least that was the plan. Then when the narrator's relationship in New York City crashes and she goes to Henry's place too it gives an opportunity for the daughter to learn more about her father. Napoleon tells her stories that somewhat clarify his history including an incident in Vietnam in which US troops killed the people in a small village. Even so, Napoleon's story doesn't clarify what happened to Owen. That's just one of the loose ends in this book which I found frustrating.

I'm sure the author's emphasis on the drowned town where Henry was raised which could sometimes be seen from the surface of the lake has some literary meaning but I'm damned if I know what it is. I also found that I occasionally had to reread sentences in order to understand what the author meant. And sometimes it still wasn't clear to me. Perhaps an English scholar would have a better understanding of this book; I've never claimed to be a scholar. ( )

There was lively discussion at the blog of the late Kevin From Canada when The Sentimentalists was nominated for the 2010 Giller Prize, much of it focussing on the difficulty of Skribsund's poetic prose and her way her layered text often demands re-reading. Undaunted, I bought it when it went on to win the Giller, and then kept hesitating over whether to read it or not.

Well, now I've read it, and I think the difficulty has not been overrated but the novel is worth it.

It's a novel about the after-effects of service in the Vietnam War, narrated by a daughter who struggles to understand her parents and herself. But in the course of caring for her father Napoleon as he slides into dementia, she learns that questing after the unknowable is a lesson in personal growth.

Initially, she believes that truth is never really buried:

...I find it difficult to believe that anything is ever buried in the way that I had once supposed. I believe instead that everything remains. At the very limit: the exact surface of things. So that in the end it is not so much what has been subtracted from a life that really matters, but the distances instead, between the things which remain. (p. 81)

In the aftermath of a soured relationship, the narrator recognises, however, the flaw in her quest to know:

Once my father said, women think that they can make sad things go away by knowing the reason that they happened. This was in dismissal of a question that I asked him once about his experiences in the war. He told me that in my curiosity I was just like my mother, and in the tone that he said it I knew at that moment it was the worst thing of all.

So I never mentioned the war to him again, until those many years later, when he told me himself.

I did believe that, I guess. That I could make sad things go away. Believed that if I knew what had happened to Henry (he had never spoken till that summer of his accident) that I could prevent an accident like that ever happening to myself, or to any of the people that I loved.

Believed, I suppose, that if there was a precise reason that I could get hold of to explain why Henry, and both of my parents ended up so very much alone, that I could prevent, for myself, an equivalent loneliness. (p.83)

This is so true, I think, and yet I have not come across it expressed so clearly before. People search for reasons and answers in the aftermath of all kinds of personal tragedies, in the belief that they will get 'closure'. Often we see them on TV expressing a wish that knowledge of the causes of a tragedy will prevent it from ever happening to someone else, so that the loved one has 'not died in vain'. It's a very human reaction, to try to cushion oneself against grief and pain, and to want to protect others from it too.

The boat featured on the front cover of my edition is an important symbol of love in the novel.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/12/02/the-sentimentalists-by-johanna-skibsrud/ ( )

dreamy, poetic and quite damn good. ( )

I was excited to discover this book. A very tidy dust-jacketed hardcover with winner of the Scotiabank Giller prize printed on it. I had great expectations of it, which it failed to meet.
I liked the premise of the story - a young woman trying to understand her father in the final months of his life. He had been absent for large parts of her and her sister's lives and had battled alcoholism. The outcome is that he is suffering PTSD following his experiences in Vietnam as a marine.
However, the story meanders all over the place too much, to the point of confusion for this reader.
This is an important story and is based on the writer's own experiences, living with her Vietnam war vet father, but somehow it fails to come together. ( )