Sentimentalists (Skibsrud)

The Sentimentalists
Johanna Skibsrud, 2009
W.W. Norton & Co.
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393082517


Summary
Winner, 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.

Haunted by the vivid horrors of the Vietnam War, exhausted from years spent battling his memories, Napoleon Haskell leaves his North Dakota trailer and moves to Canada. He retreats to a small Ontario town where Henry, the father of his fallen Vietnam comrade, has a home on the shore of a man-made lake.

Under the water is the wreckage of what was once the town—and the home where Henry was raised. When Napoleon's daughter arrives, fleeing troubles of her own, she finds her father in the dark twilight of his life, and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about his life; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge.

Lyrical and riveting, The Sentimentalists is a story of what lies beneath the surface of everyday life, and of the commanding power of the past. Johanna Skibsrud's first novel marks the debut of a powerful new voice in Canadian fiction. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—Meadowville, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A., Concordia
   University; Ph.D. candidate, Universite de Montreal.
• Awards—Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Currently—Montreal, Quebec

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of The Sentimentalists, winner of the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award. Her other books include the poetry collections Late Nights with Wild Cowboys (shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award) and I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being. She lives in Montreal.

Skibsrud's Giller win also focused attention on the struggles of small press publishers. The book had been originally published by Gaspereau Press, a boutique firm based in Nova Scotia which is one of Canada's only book publishing companies that still binds and prints its own books, with the result that the firm had difficulty meeting the increased demand after Skibsrud's win was announced. Chapters-Indigo, Canada's primary bookstore chain, did not have a single copy of the book in stock anywhere in Canada in the entire week of the Giller announcement.

However, the paper book's unavailability resulted in a significant increase in ebook sales; the ebook version of the novel quickly became the top-selling title for Kobo devices. The company subsequently announced that it had sold the novel's trade paperback rights to Douglas & McIntyre, while it will continue to print a smaller run of the novel's original edition for book collectors. W.W. Norton & Company is the book's U.S. publisher. (From the publishers and Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews 
(As of early 2011, this work has yet to be published in the U.S., so reviews are from Canada. We will add Publishers Weekly, et al, as those reviews become available.)

Skibsrud knows what she's doing: The slow fuse of the novel's first half turns out to be a very effective setup for the explosive second.
National Post (Canada)

A solid debut and a beautiful tribute to a father-daughter relationship.
Globe and Mail (Toronto)

I read it twice, and it’s amazing even the second time, and I think it would be even more amazing the third time. She’s a tremendous stylist.
Michael Enright - Sunday Edition (Canadian Broadcast Company)

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Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Sentimentalists:

1. What is the meaning of the book's title?

2. One of Skibsrud's thematic concerns is the fragility and unreliability of memory. In what ways specifically, both large and small, does that theme play itself out in the novel? (Consider, for instance, the field glasses turned the wrong way around.)

3. Talk about the metaphor of Casablanca's having been flooded—and especially the canoe rides in which Henry and Napoleon's daughter skim over the place where Henry grew up.

4. What is Napoleon's relationship with his daughters? In what way has his war experience shaped his role as a father?

5. Discuss Napoleon's marriage and the narrator's mother with her depressive episodes.

6. Comment on Napoleon's statement, "Women think they can make sad things go away by knowing the reason that they happened." True, false, neither—not just the part about women, but also whether understanding why sad things happen is an antidote to sadness?

7. The Vietnam War is central to the second part of the book. What exactly happened during the war that has so deeply affected Napoleon? Is it possible to sort out the truth from all the conflicting accounts?

8. Does the narrator truly come to know her father at the end of his life...or by the end of this novel? What does she know, or understand, about him?

9. Johanna Skibsrud approaches the novel as a poet. Can you point to evidence of her poetry background in The Sentimentalists? Think about the rhythmic quality of her prose, her diction, the use of imagery and symbols.

10. How did you experience this book? Was it a difficult read for you? Did it hold your interest?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
 
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