The Sentimentalists

by Johanna Skibsrud

Winner of 2010 Giller Prize

Johanna Skibsrud's debut novel connects the flooding of an Ontario town, the Vietnam War, a trailer in North Dakota and an unfinished boat in Maine. Parsing family history, worn childhood memories, and the palimpsest of old misunderstandings, Skibsrud's narrator maps her father's past.

Napoleon Haskell lives with Henry in the town of Casablanca, Ontario, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath which lie the remains of the former town. Henry is the father of Napoleon's friend Owen, who died fighting in Vietnam. When her life comes apart, Napoleon's daughter retreats to Casablanca and is soon immersed in the complicated family stories that lurk below the surface of everyday life. With its quiet mullings and lines from Bogart, The Sentimentalists captures a daughter's wrestling with a heady family mythology.

"The real beginning of this story," says Skibsrud, "was a summer that I spent working on Flagstaff lake, a lake that covers four now submerged townships in northern Maine, and served as the inspiration for the lake and the buried town in my book. That fall, with the beginnings of a story in my head, my father began to speak for the first time about his experiences in the Vietnam War. I am still not sure exactly why he told me his story when he did, but I think it had to do—it was 2003 then—with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had been for some time stirring in him a deep anger toward a government willing to repeat the mistakes of the past at the expense of innocent people; soldiers as well as civilians.

My mother thinks that my father told me his stories because he knew that I would do something with them—what I did write, though, was not my father's story, but my own. And it is not a true story. At its root, though, there are two true things. One is my father's testimony following Operation Liberty II in 1967, in which he spoke out against the murder of a civilian woman by the Captain of his squad. The other is the feeling I got floating over the buried towns of Flagstaff a feeling of the way that everything exists in layers, that nothing disappears; it just gets hidden sometimes."

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Book Club, War, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Contemporary

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2009

About the author

Johanna Skibsrud is a Canadian writer whose debut novel The Sentimentalists, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She is also the author of This Will Be Difficult to Explain, as well as two poetry collections. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Reviews

[Moira Fogarty · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found the writing in this novel utterly exasperating. The sentences are convoluted, coiled together with endless commas and parentheses and semi-colons; fractured thoughts hammered roughly back together with an excess of punctuation.

Never have I read such a short book so slowly. Moving through this text was like pushing through molasses, the structure and arrangement of words sucked at my eyeballs like quicksand.

Many people seem to embrace the convoluted, disjointed language in this book because it was "written by a poet". I have read many novels written by Canadian poets. Margaret Atwood is a poet. Michael Ondaatje is a poet. Anne Michaels is a poet. Their books demonstrate the positive influence a rich appreciation for language can bring to prose.

This book gave me none of that. No glittering diction, no seductive cadence, no driving rhythm. Instead it was fractured, distracted, digressive. Steeped in an incurable awkwardness, where everything remains oblique, every statement amended with a string of qualifications and apologetic explanations.

John Barber of the Globe and Mail stated that 'The Sentimentalists' was "Undoubtedly the most obscure book ever to win a major literary award in Canada." Indeed.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall for the final debate between the prize panelists - Michael Enright, Claire Messud and Ali Smith - when they were discussing the merits of this novel. Why choose this over Douglas Coupland or Jane Urquhart? How to equate this on a par with the writing of previous Giller winners like Mordecai Richler and Alice Munro?

Both the Globe and Mail and the National Post wrote articles shortly after 'The Sentimentalists' won, highlighting a shortage of available copies of the book. The selection of a book published by such a small press may have had a political motivation, to show support for a struggling industry that has been hit hard by economic strain and funding cuts.

Mark Medley in the Post writes: "...Giller Prize juror Claire Messud said that when she first received a copy of The Sentimentalists what struck her wasn’t Skibsrud’s writing but the book itself: 'Physically, it’s a beautiful book.'"

The original print run of 2,500 hand-pressed copies may have been works of art, but as I am writing this, just two years later, those artifacts are long out of print. The physical copy I read, borrowed from my local library, was a standard trade paperback, produced by Douglas & McIntyre, and due to chronic print run shortages caused by the publisher's stubborn refusal to call in help from other presses, most of the post-award sales were in e-book format anyhow. Oh, the sadness.

Here's a video interview with Johanna Skribsrud that shows clips of one of the jurors, Ali Smith, speaking about the character in this book being "history" and "at the same time, the character in this book is a relationship, and it's a relationship between a father and a daughter", and "at the same time it's a relationship between the individual and a time" and "it's a relationship which resonates over time".

Seriously? So, we should just disregard the actual characters, then? Well, good. I didn't like them anyway.

Aside from my lack of connection to the narrator and the rest of her dysfunctional family, many plot elements seemed randomly thrust in the text and left to fester. The constant insertion of scraps of dialogue from the movie Casablanca. The pointless anecdote about the sister finding a benign lump on her left ovary that goes nowhere. The boat.

Worst of all, we're never given a satisfactory explanation of the question asked on page 103, "Why did Owen go to the war when he didn't have to?" This plagued me: Canada's involvement in the Vietnam War was "non-belligerent". A few thousand of us went as peacekeepers, and about 110 Canadians died there. But why would a nice Ontario boy be in a combat unit? Did he cross the border to enlist as an American?

Skibsrud's own father was born in America, which explains why she tells the story from the perspective of an American soldier. Ostensibly, the book is set in Ontario because Napoleon's war buddy Owen had family there, but we are never told of the extraordinary circumstances that would have lead to a Canadian being on the front lines. We're never given insight into the friendship between Owen and Napoleon during the Vietnam flashback section, nor do we learn why or how Napoleon and Owen's father Henry became friends, just that it happened and now everyone is in Ontario.

After slogging through the first three sections of the book - Fargo, Casablanca and Casablanca 1959 - I was ready to throw in the towel.

In the final section called 'Vietnam 1967', the father's storytelling takes over, and it's like the book wakes up from its coma. Shaking off the lethargy of the fugue state it has been wallowing in for 100 pages, it remembers things like action, pacing, and movement. The forward momentum falters at points, but readers briefly break free from the jail cell of introspective reminiscence where we have been kept prisoner for so long.

However, since 'The Sentimentalists' won the $50,000 Giller Prize in 2010, I've created a little 4-step tutorial for aspiring authors who seek to replicate Skibsrud's magic formula.

Award-winning sentence construction 101
with Johanna Skribsrud

Step One: First, create agonizingly, disruptive caesural breaks with an overabundance of commas, then - break things up further still with interjections - surrounded by, em-dashes.

"When, a little later, Helen discovered the extent of his credit-card debt and insisted that my father give up trading altogether, he - with not too much of a fuss - after that, did." p. 42

Step Two: And don't be afraid to start with a conjunction. Or hell, start with TWO conjunctions. Open with a vague proposition. Wander miles away from it. Finish with obscurity. State nothing conclusive.

"But because they hardly spoke of it, they did not interrupt our dreaming, and perhaps were even instrumental in leading me, at that age, to the false presumption that a thing could, quite simply, be forgot." p. 37

(Remember: Use, oodles, of, commas. Toss them in, anywhere.)

Step Three: Describe a commonplace event - like traffic moving - with a tossed salad of improbable syntax and obscure medical terminology. As always, start with a subordinating conjunction. Bonus points if you can brutalize the whole sentence into a string of broken parenthetical phrases.

"So that, even when I could hear again the cars lurch from their standing positions forward, even when I could feel again the thrombotic pressure of their blinking lights, now stalled, now pulsing with longing, to turn left, to turn right, I myself stood still, caught at that particular intersection from which I could go no further." p.47

(Maybe the car's turn signals were suffering from hypercoagulability of its endothelial cells?)

Step Four: Crown your achievements with an awkwardly ambiguous modifier. This is the perfect time to let go of that growing obsession with commas, to avoid accidental clarification.

"Perhaps all of this will seem slightly less surprising if I divulge at this point that the event I have just described occurred exactly ten days after stumbling upon the man who for six years I had been intending to marry as he made love to another woman." p.48

(Not exactly a conventional wedding ceremony, but certainly one to remember, eh? "Do you take this bride?" "I do… *grunting* I DO… *wet slapping sounds* I DOoohhh…! *'O'-face*")

To be fair, there are a few moments of genuine beauty here; it's not 100% maudlin navel-gazing. On page 50, there's a nice description of an old poetic trope - how love is like a little bird. Skibsrud takes this worn comparison and makes it her own. Near the end of the book, on page 159, she constructs a lovely image of the narrator's inner turmoil:

"Instead, I felt only very strange and small. Like I was sitting inside myself in little pieces. As though I could, if I wished, take myself apart like a Russian doll and find myself in layers there, each one smaller, and more hollowed than the last."

Yes, there's some genuine beauty. But $50,000 worth? I don't think so.

[Jonathan Schildbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing in this book is absolutely beautiful, frequently poetic in describing the mundane. The story plays with time and place as the narrator attempts to piece together enough information to make it possible for her to understand her father. A number of devices run through the story, most notably a town that's underwater due to a river being dammed up, and a wooden boat that was decades in the making, as well as a strange and cobbled-together house that was the narrator's childhood home. Skibsrud's writing about her father's Vietnam experience is also rather effective--essentially impressions based on what her father told her, fixed on particular items or occurrences such as boots taken from a dead enemy, or the items her father found in the duffle bags of dead American soldiers as part of his job there. Skibsrud does not try to construct a complete, point by point explanation of everything, but presents her father much the way anybody experiences anybody else--through available contact points and those images and events that stick in one's memory.

* An addendum: After writing my own review, and having noticed before I wrote it a fairly low overall rating for the book, I began reading through the reviews of others. I was rather puzzled by the puzzlement of so many readers at the structure, language, and meaning of the book. Perhaps it is because I read fairly slowly, taking in the rythm of the written word almost no matter what I'm reading; or possibly because I'm a fan of all that high-fallutin, post-World War I literature, but I never tripped over the oft-noted commas and dashes that seemed to cause so many readers so many problems. I fell into the language and it felt comfortable to me.

I understand the difficulty of some in terms of "hype" versus achievement, but I wasn't reading this book with the same weighty expectations of those who apparently started off wanting to deem the novel unworthy--or those who thought it would transform their lives. Many seemed to deliberately misunderstand things that were apparent to me. For instance, despite the complicated structure of the book, Skibsrud never made it difficult to place the characters in a particular location or time. And how did anyone read this book without understanding the gender of the main character--even if said character was never assigned a name? How could someone so misinterpret the work as to think the violence of the Vietnam War was the crux of the book?

I admit I approached the book with my own reservations. For instance, I was wary of how the author might bring the Vietnam War to life (which only occurs in fairly brief episodes), but Skibsrud handles it largely as a person hearing things second-hand and in impressions--yet still makes it vivid. And the testimony near the end of the book is not meant to shock the reader, or make the reader wonder at the dread of war, or provide the final answer to all that has come before. It instead furthers the mystery of the narrator's father and only hints at what he has buried emotionally inside of him: an entire human life stricken from the official record.

Is the material on the Vietnam War strikingly new and different? Perhaps not. But at its heart, the book is not about the Vietnam War--but rather the personal impact of the Vietnam War on multiple generations through the character of Napoleon and his lost friend. And in that sense, Skibsrud brings something unique to the table. The story is not about war, but about emotional distance brought on by trauma, betrayal, and the confusion that both begets and grows out of betrayal. The characters are not betraying one another in the sense of sticking it to each other for personal gain, but rather fail one another because they don't know how else to act. And those are the betrayals that most of us live with.

Napoleon tries to make sense of what has happened and what he has done (or to drive it all from his memory); and those around him try to make sense of Napoleon and all the ripples he creates--most fairly small and ordinary, but much more like the impacts that the families of veterans really feel than the more explosive impacts that are common to Hollywood movies--or else simply abandon any effort to understand Napoleon, either letting him be as he is, or seeing him in terms of the inconvenience he has been to them.

The narrator takes on the effort to understand Napoleon in order to distance herself from her own problems, to block them out, only to run into the reality that she is adopting Napoleon's strategies for self-preservation, which are only likely to perpetuate the emotional distance and detachment that informs her world.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the book that recently won Canada's highest-profile literary award, The Giller Prize. A furore followed the announcement that ‘The Sentimentalists’ had won surrounding the inability of the book’s small independent publisher, Gaspereau Press, to produce books fast enough to satisfy the demand. At the time the publisher, Andrew Steeves, said something to the effect that he doubted the wisdom of having just four people (the Giller judges) dictate what the majority should and would read. A good point. However, that’s the effect of high-profile literary prizes — for better or worse. Having now read the book I can’t help but wonder if Steeves was also calling into question the worthiness of this book to win the Giller.
The book is beautifully written — lyrical, yet clear and unpretentious. Scenes and locations are finely drawn. A community submerged by the formation of a reservoir is an effective and haunting metaphor for the repressed emotions of the main characters: father and two daughters. But I found the plethora of understatement in the book made for a lack of empathy — the style so distant, so cool, that the characters, although reasonably credible, seemed to me to be dull and uninteresting. I wondered if the author had done this purposefully as a contrast to the last section, which is a transcript of the father’s testimony at an inquiry into a war crime he witnessed when serving as a soldier in Vietnam. If so, the contrast isn’t powerful enough for me. The information provided by the testimony isn’t shocking or monstrous enough to explain or make sense of, or imbue power to, the stifled emotions and unarticulated wounds that are merely hinted at throughout — especially compared to descriptions of other atrocities we’ve all read or heard. The potency of the testimonial revelations isn’t strong enough to explain the general, rather tedious, dysfunction of this family of father and two daughters. Subtlety is one thing in a novel, impenetrability another.

[Thebookthief · Rating 3 out of 5]

Am I glad I read this book? Yes. Do I think there were moments of beautiful and poetic phrasing, as well as thoughtful introspection? Yes. Do I think the writing and story as a whole are worthy of the Giller? Not really. I think Skibsrud is going to be a very good writer. I think that her second and third efforts, if they make it to publication, will be books to read and savour.

And I think that this, her first novel, would have benefitted a great deal from a stronger editing hand.

It's easy to see what Skibsrud is attempting to achieve with this story about submerged truths and how much we miss when all we see is what is revealed above the water level, all swirled together in the miasma of the history of the Vietnam war, and yet the novel never quite attains the heights toward which it is reaching. Tim O'Brien covers similar territory in most of his works, and his writing is far and away above that in this book. Skibsrud's youth and the fact of this being her first novel - and the buzz surrounding the publisher's printing capabilities - contributed more to her winning the Giller than the quality of the book itself, in my opinion. Yet there is no denying her talent and the potential within her writing. Give her a few more years, a few more novels, and Skibsrud will, indeed, be a Canadian novelist worthy of great note.

[D.A. Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

The talk of the publishing world. The darling about town from the little press that could. Such is the weight that Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel has been saddled with since its unexpected Giller win back in November 2010. Against what some guessed were sure bets—Light Lifting and Annabel immediately spring to mind—this hand-crafted, small print run title surprised everybody, taking home the largest prize in the Canadian publishing industry.

I managed to snag a copy of this, conveniently and to my surprise given its limited availability, almost immediately after the Giller win, but, like Franzen’s Freedom, I just wasn’t able to sink into it right away. The hype—the countless stories and baseless debates about whether or not her publisher, Gaspereau Press, could handle the suddenly atmospheric demand of the title—was practically deafening, and in the face of that much noise, I kept my distance. If this book was everything the Giller claimed it to be, I wanted to go into it with a clear head.

So.

It’s always best to lead off on a high note, and I can’t think of any better place to begin than the book’s amazing look and feel. This was my first Gaspereau book—after seeing the rather unfortunate D&M redesign, I was thankful for my luck—and their reputations as aesthetes is immediately apparent. From the thick, textured cover stock adorned with a lovely graphite etching, to the little stylistic flourishes speckled throughout the interior, there is no doubt to the publisher’s commitment to producing a book that is meant to be bought, valued, and passed on to another, rather than being unceremoniously discarded or treated with ambivalence. Gaspereau’s eye for aesthetic detail is seldom seen in an industry that is all too often required to strike a very fine balance between form, functionality and cost.

You’ll notice I’ve refrained from talking about the text itself. There’s a reason for that.

Hype. It’s unavoidable.

I felt like I had given myself more than enough time to let the shadow of the Giller victory wash away from the book’s surface, hopefully allowing me to enjoy as I would any other title—with little to no preconceptions. As I read, I found this to be almost impossible.

The story, told from the perspective of a nameless narrator, tells the tale of a husband, father, and war veteran, Napoleon Haskell, as he moves from Fargo, North Dakota, to a fictional Ontario town, eclectically named Casablanca. There, we’re treated to a third-person account of Haskell’s life—his failings as a husband and father to two girls, the long friendship he has cultivated with the father of a comrade in arms lost in the Vietnam War, and yes, his time in the war itself. The strength of this story rests on the shoulders of the narrator’s relationship to not only her father, but also to the father of the young man lost to mysterious circumstances while in Vietnam. As her life is met with rather sudden and unpredictable change, she seeks to learn more about why her father is the man that she has come to know. The story itself is not the problem—it’s how it has been served.

Skibsrud is a poet first, and that is more than obvious in the deliberate layering of the text into almost labyrinthine series of ever more delicate (and arrhythmic) curlycues. She employs an almost obsessive compulsive amount of commas and dashes—so much so that sentences and entire paragraphs wind themselves into circuitous thoughts that are seldom resolved. The result of this, unfortunately, is a book that struggles to say so very little by saying more than it ever should—and somehow, in the process, says almost nothing at all.

Reading The Sentimentalists, I was repeatedly jostled out of the experience by such a seemingly deliberate lack of rhythm. Each time that happened—and sadly, it was more than a few times—I found myself inadvertently thinking back to the one thing I was trying to forget: This book, this gorgeous little identity-crisis of loving, minimalist design and confounding, over-complicated sentence structure, took home the most prestigious prize in Canadian publishing.

Did I hate the book? No, not at all. There were several places where the little sparks in the relationship between Haskell and his unnamed narrator daughter were genuinely moving, and I quite enjoyed the sudden starkness and break from form that the interrogation provided. However, the simplicity of the back-and-forth interrogation was such a departure from what had come before that it only seemed to heighten the frustration I felt towards the rest of the book.

The Sentimentalists is a lovingly produced book, and very unique, but I couldn’t help but feel, as I was reading, how desperately in need of a strong editorial hand it was. While some may cry out that I’m calling for the book to be lobotomized in favour of pandering to the easy-reading public, I would counter by saying that I found the poetic, lyrical trappings of the narrative as nothing more that a method for masking the writer’s insecurities. It was as if she was fearful of presenting a concrete thought or idea, one way or another. The result of that is a book that has left a slightly sour taste in my mouth, as if I’ve been shown a portrait of a once-young man through the divided white space of a crossword puzzle.

[A.J.]

A horse, long of face, its hooves clattering on the cobbles that overlie the bones of settlers long dead, of child victims of diptheria and German measles, its long face hanging from the arch of its long neck, walks into a bar.

And the bartender says, why so ineffably sad?

This is a joke, as told by a poet-novelist. And The Sentimentalists is a novel, as told by a poet-novelist: over-written, over long even at a mere 216 pages, and, thanks to the Giller Prize, over-praised.

It starts well. Skibsrud has an ear and an attention for the rhythm of a sentence, and the first 20 pages or so are rich and evocative. It seems well done. But with those 20 pages done, with the scene set and the actors introduced, one expects the novel to go somewhere, to do something. It does not. Instead, it drifts about, rather aimlessly, talking about itself. And the middle sags.

Those sentences soon seem too rich in commas, too wordy, too long; Skibsrud is using entirely too many words to say very little:

On those occasions, what I had feared most was only that the space I had felt in me so palpably then might remain all my life in the unbearably empty state in which it had arrived. So to find that, on the contrary, it could disappear completely — and without a trace — without ever having been filled; that it could be compressed so soundly within a body that inside would remain only the mechanical procedures of the lungs and the heart, was a great surprise.

Uh, what occasions were those?

At night, I lay up in Owen’s old bedroom where I had slept so many nights as a child and felt nothing at all, except for the static hum of electricity from the floors below. A sad and irreversible change had occurred, it seemed, and the great and open space which I had always felt within me, that I had thought, in fact, had been me, had disappeared, so finally that I could not hope, I thought, to resurrect it, or feel again that lightness at the exact centre of my heart as I had on so many occasions before. When, in that very room, I had harboured in me an expectation of a world so vast, and of such incomparable beauty, that I could feel it loosening the muscles of my throat; a disturbance of which I could hardly endure.

Ah, yes. Those occasions. I know them well.

This ceases to be a question of style, and becomes a matter of substance, or more properly, of its lack. Reading these sentences, their vague language, their aversion to the concrete and particular, is rather like attempting to read braille through oven mitts: you’re certain something’s there, but you’re damned if you can figure out what. And if the chief joy of this book is to be found in its language, you wonder why you need 200 pages of it; it is like listening to a symphony that consists solely of a pianist repeatedly hitting the same note.

It is not only in its lack of movement that the novel sags. It is also packed with redundancies. Things disappear both completely and without a trace. The narrator harbours in her expectations, as if there is some other place one might harbour them. The garden shed, perhaps? Where is the poet’s attention to language, the economy and force of the poetic line? Adrift in the stagnant middle of this narrative, senses muffled, it begins to seem that one is reading page after page of filler. The novel takes a full 100 pages to get up and get moving.

Even 60 pages in, we know nothing of the characters. And this seems to be Skibsrud’s point, that we cannot see inside of other people. But neither do we have any concrete sense of their outer lives. Nobody does anything; nobody says anything — dialogue, through the first half of the novel, is often reported indirectly. The narrator may tell us that her father laughs, but we never understand why. We never hear the joke.

Indeed, we never hear any jokes; one thing the reader will not find herein is a laugh, or even a smile. The horse walks into the bar and we all are ineffably sad, though we know not why, and we hope, or think, that the emptiness at the very centre of our hearts will one day soon be filled with the expectations that we keep hanging beside the hedge trimmer out in the garden shed. But it will not be so, for life is ineffably sad.

And here is the crux of it: novels of this ilk flout the narrative building code by ignoring such load-bearing beams as character and plot. They dramatize nothing; indeed, they place themselves above such concerns. They labour to convince us that they are more literary than literature itself. But The Sentimentalists, in its continual tone of sadness, falls prey to melodrama’s cousin, sentimentality. We do not live our lives in a fog of sadness. To pretend that we can, to repeatedly strike this same note for 200 pages, is emotional masturbation. Having thrown away the tools by which emotional effects are earned — the stuff of drama — the novel strikes desperately at that same sad note. And all that sadness, like the joke about the horse, is without force. The Sentimentalists grasps to make us sad because it fails to understand the truth: without joy, there can be no heartbreak.

[Robert Docking · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with a number of other readers who have commented on their problems with Ms Skibsrud's style. At one point early on, I noted to myself that I'd never seen so many bleeding commas. I'm glad I persisted, however, because i found there was real power in the main narrative that focuses on the tragic circumstances of the father's experience in Vietnam. In those pages, much of the writing is more direct, and the gain in emotional power is significant. The knotty prose in other parts of the novel, while reflecting the fractured, contingent and conflicted consciousness of the narrator, leaves this reader at something of a loss -- the father and his story are more engaging and the simpler prose gives more room for the reader to feel and imagine the emotional and spiritual consequences for the father and his family. I believe a less constricted telling would serve her and her characters better. But Ms Skibsrud is a real writer and I expect future novels will give greater expression to her talent.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh. There are so many things wrong with this, but fortunately it was short.

Goodness knows I like complex and interesting prose. At first, I thought "she's read too much Henry James." But had it been more like Henry James I might not have had such an objection. He puts clauses in the middle of sentences and sets them off with commas - proper punctuation, if you will. But this? There were sentences with several clauses set off by commas, which sometimes then had a semi-colon so that she could continue her thought. There were even a couple of sentences with the commas, a semi-colon and a colon. And, frankly, to no point.

The really sad part of this is that she had a very good story. Why that's sad is because the construction was all backwards. There is something dysfunctional about one of the characters but we don't know why. And then another character says the war is over. What war? The time period isn't clear. For many many pages I thought WWII. Then about 2/3 of the way I realized it was Vietnam. (I think that's in the GR description, but by the time I started reading I had forgotten that.)

At the end, I realized this book is about loss. By the time I got to the end, though, I was too frustrated with the failure of the author's handling and writing to fully appreciate the loss. And that is as much of the tragedy of this book as the tragedies the characters experienced. It could have been so much more. Still, I'll let it rise above my "I hated it" rating and give it 2 stars.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I, too, having had, in times past, the joy of putting pen to paper, love, although perhaps not as much as Skibsrub, but more than I found most editor's do, the kind of convoluted sentences that require a comma (or semicolon) every five, or so, words. If, at each literary stop, a new line were started (press ENTER here) it might be more readable--or more poemish. But no less story-like.

[Megan Baxter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like I owe a pre-emptive apology to my book club. This was the book I picked for the next round of reads, as it was coming up on my list, and it was CanLit, and I figured, why not? I felt like Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which I got out of the library at the same time, might be too much to ask. It's not coming around as a read until July, I think, and so, far in advance, I'd like to say "I'm so sorry." And also that we can change it if people want.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good grief! People like to bash this book in their reviews.

My experience was quite different, and I was quickly taken in by the story's pace, symbolism, imagery and subject matter. Reading The Sentimentalists, conjured similar emotions to those that I have felt while reading works by Cormac McCarthy. I hesitate to say that because I do not want to give the impression that Johanna writes with a similar style; she doesn't, but I experienced similar emotions - emotions of introspection, brooding, melancholy, and a quiet sense of peace and satisfaction.

While others found her usage of punctuation cumbersome, I found it to be thoughtful and integral to the tone of the story.

Well done, Skibsrud!

[Shane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the recent story about how this book took off, thanks to the "Giller Effect," a more interesting one than the novel itself.

The storyline is disjointed with frequent shifts in time and place and tells mostly of a daughter’s (I don’t think I got her name) final visit with her alcoholic Vietnam veteran father, Napoleon, who is determined to kill himself by drinking. Napoleon has been at it for many years, drifting through multiple locations after deserting his young family, until he is hauled by his two daughters to the lakeside home of a fallen comrade’s father, located on the shore of a lake below which lies an old town; the lake serves as a metaphor for Napoleon’s submerged and deteriorating memories of a war in which “might was right,” dope was nirvana, and orders were meant to be obeyed—however unjust.

The daughter’s visit never releases the dying man’s memories and guilt, although he comes close at times, and the denouement only comes in the long epilogue, in the form of a military transcript released after Napoleon’s death, in which there are hints of atrocities committed against civilians, but whodunit is obfuscated by the administration. The narrator even tries to explain the non-event at the end, which only makes matters worse.

The plot therefore is ho-hum, and so I looked to the telling of the story and the characterization to redeem the novel, and I was disappointed in both. The narrator is distant and seems unable and unwilling to connect with her sozzled father; she is not even around in his final days, being pre-occupied with her own romantic travails. Napoleon too does not reveal much of himself, and his host, Henry, is just a foil. The constant scene shifts do nothing to elevate the story and while the daughter’s prose is elegant but dense, Napoleon and his Vietnam buddies’ sole claim to hanging tough seems to come from uttering the f-word umpteen times.

I applaud the novelist’s boldness in experimenting and stretching the novel’s form with this approach to writing. Yet somewhere in there was lost why we write novels: story and character were submerged, like the town below the lake, or Napoleon’s memories.

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book, although I'm uncertain about the ending and what purpose it serves. The first part of the book is narrated by a woman and tells the story of her father throughout her childhood and adulthood. He interacted strangely with her mother and her and her sister - although loving them, unable to communicate with them. He had fought in the Vietnam war, and after suffering a bad break-up, the narrator goes to live with her father to learn more about his experiences. He is discovered to have lung cancer, and he erratically tells his daughter some of his war experiences before he dies. His stories are vague, however, and leave both his daughter and the reader unsure of what really happened to him and his good friend who dies in the war.
Skibsrud's writing style is jumpy - I found it made me want to read on to find out what was happening, but I had to flip back in the book a lot just to jog my memory about what was happening when.
Overall, for Canadian fiction, I enjoyed the book - I just wish it had a bit more solidity to the background war stories.

[Em · Rating 2 out of 5]

So far I'm having a really hard time reading this book....which is very diappointing because I was soo looking forward to spending my Christmas vacation getting lost in this award-winner.....I am intrigued....I do want to know the story behind what I am reading....I just find it awkward and hard to follow...I keep having to go back and find out if this part is taking place in Canada or the States...if this is taking place in the present or it's already happened and she's re-telling it or remembering it....but I don't want to throw it down...I'm certain that wonderful story the rest of Canada is talking about is just on the next page!!!!!

I did not finish reading this book.......which I do feel badly about.....it had to go back to the library, as it was on hold......Perhaps I will request it another time when there isn't such a long waiting list....I would like to find out how her story ended up.....

[Heather(Gibby) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just could not get engaged in this book-and I had high expectations going in.

The way the novel was structured with flashbacks, and stilted conversations, I would get interested for a bit, and then it would lose me.

[Zen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Sentimentalists is a haunting, lyrical meditation on life, loss and memory. It poses the central question "can we ever really understand the past?" Skibsrud's poetry/prose hybrid writing style brings to mind that of Michael Ondaatje.

There is no real plot to speak of in this slim volume, but the layers of thought and emotion that it evokes are more to the point. Skibsrud uses several devices to explore the nebulous nature of memory and knowing. The un-named narrator interacts with her father in the hope that perhaps she can understand how his life has impacted hers and that of the rest of her family. Through stories, poems and even a military transcript, the narrator seeks to understand the past and find out the "truth" of her fathers life. Yet what she really discovers is that there is no one "truth" and that memories, even from multiple sources, never quite match up. Like the town that is now buried under the water, one of the central "characters" in the book, the past and memory are forever refracted and murky.

As the narrator reflects on the events of her fathers life and their effect on herself and her family she states:
And among those who, like my mother and Helen and Henry and me, were not aware of them at all, but likewise witnessed, and continue to witness them. Who likewise still hope to uncover, recognize, and subsequently comprehend their otherwise inexplicable presence in our lives.

By the end of the book, the narrator realizes she will never know the full truth of her fathers life: he does not even know it himself. Her father quotes a line from a Keith Douglas poem to illustrate his philosophy:
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead

Perhaps that is all anyone can do in the end. Or maybe Tom Cochrane sums it up just as well in a song:
The secret is to know when to stop . . . Remembering (Cochrane/Cody, 1991)

The Sentimentalists is a worthy winner of the Gilles Prize 2010.
2017 Reading Challenge-a book written by someone younger than you.

[Nikki Stafford · Rating 2 out of 5]

It could be argued that anything written after 1918 is a war novel of sorts; after the devastation of WWI human consciousness seemed to change, and philosophies, thoughts, and worldviews were altered forever. As such, so much of 20th century lit has been made up of war novels, from the sublime Catch-22 to Ondaatje's English Patient. So the war novel has definitely been covered, not just in lit but in TV (M*A*S*H) and in film. The Sentimentalists hinges on one incident that happened to the narrator's father in Vietnam, and I was expecting something like Hawkeye's experience of the woman in the ditch smothering her child, but it was nothing like that.

I wasn't a fan of this book. And in talking to others, I'm not alone. A friend of mine who is a serious bookie asked me what I thought early on, and I said, "I'm on page 60 and waiting for something to happen." She said, "Stop waiting. Nothing's going to happen." She was right. I think the Giller jury wanted to try something different, and gave the prize to this book, but I don't think it's deserving. Every once in a while there's a sentence or even a paragraph so beautifully wrought it actually hurts, but it only happens a couple of times, and otherwise it's a very, very quiet book where almost nothing happens. It's trying to be Ondaatje like, but she simply is no Ondaatje. He's an imagist writer, and this is more of a long philosophical thought-piece. I've read a lot of those that are excellent, but this one just didn't work for me.

[C · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't get into this book at all. I only read to page 54 and it just wasn't holding it together for me and I had to return it to the library. I found the writing style really difficult to follow and disjointed. I'm no english major so excuse my limited knowledge of proper writing terminology and styles, but almost every other sentence in the book was a complex sentence. Example: this book, while it might have been interesting if I would have continued to read it and hadn't gotten distracted by other more interesting books, wasn't that great.
It was like the author would start to say something, make an aside statement and then continue with what she was saying - every other sentence. I found it distracting. Example: Mrs. Brown, who likes to knit and drink tea, is a very good cribbage partner. She plays every Friday at the local legion. She uses her winnings, when she has any left over from playing the slot machines, to buy cat food to feed the strays. Her hair is brown, not that she would admit to it as she likes to think she is a dirty blond, and falls below her shoulders. On and on and on...

[Blake Chapman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read The Sentimentalists because it won the Giller Prize.

The theme that this very short book (~150 pages) explores of memories and the truth hiding below the surface is very intriguing, but hard to discern due to a few stylistic issues.

The story was indeed "lyrical", if that means "teeming with commas". And once I noticed how nearly every sentence was slightly too long, with at least two or three distinct concepts it was hard to look past them for the big picture. Overall, the book could have used a healthy edit, but that probably would have left just a short story.

The plot was very thin, but it's a literary novel so I wasn't expecting a whole lot of riveting action. Nonetheless, the most interesting part came at the end of the novel, during the military tribunal testimony. I wish the author had been able to work that into the main story-line instead of as an add-on at the end.

Overall evaluation: best spend your money somewhere else.

[Ruth Seeley · Rating 1 out of 5]

This Giller Prize winner was so extraordinarily bad I think I might have to write a full-length review. Struggling through the first 100 pages (described by some reviewers as lyrical but in fact hysterically over-written), I started to imagine William Shatner doing the audio book. Once that happened it was all downhill. The second segment was marginally better but is ruined by the third, the supposed 'testimony' of the main character, Napoleon Haskell. In which it is revealed that his syntax and grammar are totally different from that in the first 200 pages of the book. I wish I could say this was merely a book in desperate need of an editor, but I'm not sure that would have helped. This one needed to remain in the slush pile.

[Ann Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The moment I finished reading this book, I zipped over to read some reviews at GoodReads. I needed to know whether I was the only reader who was left feeling puzzled by and dissatisfied with this award-winning book. Apparently I was not (which made me feel a little better).

I really enjoyed most of the book. It was beautifully written; and the narrative was challenging. But then things just got crazy. The plot became hard to follow; and I was more confused than engaged.

I look forward to reading more books by this author, particularly any short fiction she decides to write.

[Denis Farley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It should get a lot of stars. I like the way she thinks, the depth, twists and turns of her observations and reflections. At the beginning of the section marked as Casablanca, there is a quote from Henry James, “The negatives that haunt our ideals . . . must be themselves negated in the absolutely Real. This alone makes the universe solid. This is the resting deep. We live upon the stormy surface; but with this our anchor holds, for it grapples rocky bottom.”

[Carolyn Walsh · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The Sentimentalists","Johanna Skibsrud",
I was disappointed in this book and in myself for not liking or appreciating this recent Giller prize winning novel more. A tedious read.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

Can I give it -1 stars instead? I can't believe this book won the Giller Prize.

[Richard Summerbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, beauty of writing and subtlety of insight are rather in conflict with discrete understanding of people and events. The book won a major award but has also been subjected to much impatience by people put off by the style. The really interesting aspect of Johanna Skibsrud's style is that it approaches both plot and personalities in terms of their emotional impact - the objective observer's overview is overthrown by how various factors in events and in the environment have coalesced into one's feeling a certain way at a certain time. You could call it authorial impressionism. I have to admit I panicked at the high point of the plot because there was so little illumination of the events that took place that I couldn't stand it, and had to flip into epilogues and so on to see if I could pull my mental airplane out of the cloud layer. I suppose I should have had more faith, because the author does provide -- and here I'll avoid going too far into spoiler territory -- a satisfying degree of clarity. I'm left wondering if the book's style is in some way a statement on traditional, arguably male dominated, "this happened then that happened" literature, making more room for the texture of feelings and intuitive associations that blanket our actual lived plot lines in this world.

[Mary B · Rating 1 out of 5]

A Giller Prize winner a few years ago - cannot for the life of me figure out why. I struggled throughout to find any purpose to it. It took at least the first 100 pages to figure out who the narrator was.
If something can be too well written, this was. Later I realized the author is primarily a poet, which may explain that statement.
It bounced around from location to location, as did the father figure, a Vietnam veteran. Learned his name well into the book as well.
That's about it. I have better, far more interesting things to read & do than spend time trying to understand a book of fiction.
Worth reading? Your decision.

[Dessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots to chew on here. For years I’ve heard this book described as literary fiction at its densest — but what I found was actually conversational, casually philosophical. Memory versus history, and how we must form the present out of both.

[Colin Bruce Anthes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ferociously disagree with the Goodreads consensus on this ghostly treasure.

[A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Not half as bad as they make it out to be. Not great, not terrible.