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    The Sentimentalists
    The Sentimentalists
    The Sentimentalists
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Sentimentalists

    Written by Johanna Skibsrud

    Narrated by Celeste Ciulla, Greg Steinbruner and Joey Collins

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Johanna Skibsrud won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for this compelling debut novel. Napoleon Haskell lives in Casablanca, Ontario, on the shores of a man-made lake that covers the remains of the former town. When his daughter's life unravels, she retreats to Casablanca and is soon immersed in the complicated family stories that lurk below the surface of everyday life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 10, 2011
    ISBN9781461804857
    The Sentimentalists
    Author

    Johanna Skibsrud

    Johanna Skibsrud is a Canadian-American writer, whose debut novel, The Sentimentalists, was awarded the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, making her the youngest writer to ever win Canada’s most prestigious literary prize. She is the author of two novels, two collection of short fiction, three collections of poetry, and the co-author of a children's book, Sometimes We Think You are a Monkey -- proceeds of which are being donated to the Himalayan School Project. She received her BA in English Literature at the University of Toronto, her MA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal, and her PhD in English Literature at the Université de Montréal.

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    Reviews for The Sentimentalists

    3/5

    155 ratings22 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I liked it and I didn't. The use of commas and some of the sentence structure intruded on the flow making me start sentences over so I could make sure I didn't miss any of the nuances in the story. Glad I read it but know it would have limited appeal with others in my family.
    • 4/5
      A beautifully written novel that deserves to be read slowly; I read it at a pretty steady pace so I am sure I missed a lot. It is multi-layered and a moving story about a daughter trying to understand her father and the unreliability of memory.
    • 1/5
      This novel's is based in part on the author's father's experiences in Vietnam. However, this is a difficult novel to read and I found it work to get through it. If an author wishes to tell a story important to them, they should make it interesting and readable. The narrator is a daughter of a Vietnam vet who she and her sister move to the shores of the St. Lawrence River in Canada from his home in Mexico, NY just as the St. Lawrence Seaway is filling with water. He is an alcoholic and generally an unpleasant man who his children have few pleasant memories of from their childhood.He and his daughter live with the father of a friend of his who was killed in Vietnam. Part of the novel and the reason for the father's problems is he was at the US Marines actions at Quang Tri in October, 1967 which led to an investigation of the murder of Vietnamese women & children by the Marines.
    • 3/5
      I had some reservations while reading the first third of the book, but they mostly went away when I started to read the 2nd section. The writing is almost architectural, and she uses the lake to great effect. What really won me over though was the epilogue which includes a transcript of, what I assume is, her father's testimony at a military trial followed by her notes about the trial. Plus there were really fabulous passages.
    • 3/5
      I honestly don't even know what to think about this strange little book. Parts of it are lovely, parts of it utterly pretentious. The epilogue made it seem like less of a novel and more of a memoir.
    • 2/5
      Though The Sentimentalists was awarded the 2010 ScotiaBank Giller Prize for excellence in Canadian fiction, I was mostly put off by it. Judging from the mediocre average scores in Goodreads (2.7/5) and LibraryThing (2.9/5), where generosity tends to prevail, other readers are not connecting much with it either. Maybe it is just more of a critic's book than a reader's book? I will say this for Skibsrud: she masters the wistful voiceover. Funny to think of such a thing in a novel, but I felt like I was listening to a voiceover for much of it. This hovering presence not only detracted from the story, such as it is, but this particular voice, the daughter's, did not have the voiceover's usual authority. It was weak, tentative, and bewildered. It also does not help that the author seems unable to resist being oblique. If you are looking for straightforward, you won't find it here: convolution and withholding are the orders of the day. Being too mysterious eventually catches up with Skibsrud, necessitating an overly long epilogue, (20% of the novel), where she finally rolls out some muddled information about the oft alluded to, but never elucidated, Viet Nam war incident. In the end, this novel felt more like a notion than a fully formed idea. And I don't need to go to a novel for the vague and incoherent. My own mind is already teeming with that stuff.
    • 2/5
      While I recognize that this book was very well written, and deserving of its accolades, I found the style of it to be very distancing. Maybe intentionally. Though there were moments that struck me fiercely ("To think that despite our best intentions we may, in the end—and necessarily—leave the people that we love quite extraordinarily alone."), it was ultimately just not the book for me.
    • 2/5
      My God! What were the people drinking to give this book the Giller? It is an interesting storyline, and characters that I can appreciate. However the plot is so disjointed, so chaotic, that getting into the novel is like snuggling up to a porcupine (pleasant, eh?). At any rate still reading.
      *EDIT*
      The only reason that I kept the above statements of when I was still reading this book, is that they are still true. I can understand now why the premise would have gotten a Giller, but the practice was terrible. First the prose is so convoluted and confusing I often had to read the pages 2 or more times to understand what the author was trying to say. I also felt that she did not clearly end the story, she sort of let it peter off without trying to emphasize....well anything.
    • 2/5
      I wasn't engaged by the characters or the slow, meandering telling of the story. First-person narratives often don't appeal to me. In my view, this is not a compelling addition to literature about impact of the VietNam war.
    • 1/5
      It is very rare for me to close a book, unfinished, and know that I will likely never go back to try and finish it. I closed this book on page 65 still not clear on who the characters were or what their stories are. This book won the Giller prize - I had an expectation of a good read that fell far, far short.
    • 2/5
      In 2010 Johanna Skibsrud won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the youngest author to date to take the coveted literary award, for her debut novel, The Sentimentalists.My own experience of The Sentimentalists was not entirely positive. There are a few moments of poetic writing and beautiful insight; but overall character development often ran to obscurity and confusion, so that it was difficult to connect relationships and individuals. Geographic locations were often muddled, as were nationalities and the justification of characters’ actions.And while this is a tender tribute to Skibsrud’s own father’s experience during the Vietnam War, there are moments when his wartime memories are revealed, only to devolve into a philosophical daydreaming that didn’t rise much above the navel. To be honest, I closed the book and remained unsure what, exactly, had been the point of the novel. But maybe that was the point. If so, it’s the most subtle and obscure of rationales I’ve come across in some time. And this from the reader who adored Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.In the end, I remain quite confused as to why this novel merited the Giller.
    • 2/5
      I had to renew this book twice to get through it, and it's not that long, so what does that tell ya? I finished the last 50 pages in one night because I thought it was actually getting good and going somewhere, and then at the end, I thought, "Huh." There were way too many commas, parentheses, and "in fact"s. Boring. Waste of time.
    • 3/5
      I felt obligated to read the The Sentimentalist when it won the Giller; I became obligated when it ended up as one of the Book Club selections. Not loving it. I find my mind wanders and I wonder what's going on as the plot unfolds upon itself. There is one bit I like, though, and that is the boat that was purchased with the intention to fix up and and then sits in the driveway for years. It moves when it is trailered from one place to another, floating along the driveway (and I imagine, sailing down the hiway). Reading this right after The Tale of the Unknown Island, the metaphor gains even more significance. I will go back to this again in August and give it another try....
    • 3/5
      This book comes with an odd but alluring pedigree. Not only did it win the prestigious Giller Prize, Canada's top literary honor, it did so after being published by a "micropublisher," Gaspereau Press, who originally printed a whopping 800 copies of the book. The book took down many more commercially imposing titles to win an award that has previously gone to literary titans like Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. After its win, it became a hot item on the Kobo ebook platform, and now W.W. Norton is set to publish it here in the states later this year. How can you not love a story like that? This is the Milan High School basketball team of the literary world.So it's with some sadness that I say that I didn't love the book. It wasn't because it was a chore to read -- I read it in two sittings -- and that's not to say that there weren't many terrific aspects of it. For instance, I think the premise of the book is very intriguing. A woman decides to move her aging father from his home in Fargo, North Dakota, to the house where she spent many of her childhood summers, Casablanca, Ontario. Casablanca is a town that was moved in the 50s when a dam flooded the site of the original town. Consequently, there is a submerged town lurking nearby. While this image might strike you as a touch heavy-handed -- the past, submerged, but still so close -- Skibsrud doesn't over do it, and the result isn't a cloying whimsy, but a sense of mystery, of intrigue.That intrigue extends to the inhabitant of the narrator's father's new home, the so-called "government house," Henry. At first, Henry's relationship to her father is a secret, though it is revealed early on that the narrator's father was friends with Henry's son Owen, who died in a war. The narrator assumed that her father and Owen knew one another in childhood, but she soon discovers that her father, too, fought in a war. What happened to Owen? And what is the true nature of the narrator's father's relationship to Henry? That sounds great, doesn't it? It sounds like exactly the sort of book you'd like to read, right? Me too! But alas, I felt the second half of the book didn't fully make good on the promise of the opening. (I'll spoiler this part, as much of my discontentment with the book has to do with the plot.)Nothing -- and I mean nothing -- is really revealed in this book. What happened to Owen? He died in the war. Depending on who you believe, he was either killed in action or he was murdered by his fellow Marines for attempting to prevent a minor civilian massacre. This is probably my own fault, but I was convinced for most of the book that Napoleon (the narrator's father) was actually Henry's son, a sort of Canadian Don Draper. There really wasn't much evidence of this in the narrative, so it was probably my own wish-casting. Napoleon reconnects with Henry after years apart, and then takes to driving his family into Canada every summer. It just seemed like there had to be more. But the mystery that book promises, or seemed to promise, goes nowhere. It was a case of literary blue balls, so to speak.In addition to my issues with the plot, the prose was sometimes bewildering. There's no doubting that Skibsrud is a poet -- gorgeous imagery abounds here -- but at times, the book feels overwritten. Sentence after sentence unfurls in a series of complicated clauses that made the prose feel both idiosyncratic and repetitive; not a great combination.Still, there is much to be admired in this book, and I have no doubt that many will find its tone enchanting. Perhaps I put too much into some vague references early in the book and set myself up for disappointment. Whatever the case, I'm disappointed not to have loved this story.
    • 3/5
      This is the story of Napoleon who is dealing with haunting events from his time in the Vietnam War and his daughter Helen who is dealing with her father. I'd heard so many negative comments that I started this book with low expectations. I, like so many others, found the writing style annoying and somewhat confusing; however, I also thought it fit with the author's main message that we cannot really understand someone else's past. My disappointment is that she didn't give us much of a sense of her characters at all. Nobody does much; they don't say much, either. I,therefore, found it hard to empathize with the issues of forgetting, escape and loss they were struggling with.
    • 4/5
      This is clearly the book of a poet. Skibsrud's writing style is always lyrical, often oblique, and occasionally infuriating. Many reviewers have commented on the author's love of commas, and there are times in which I found myself agreeing. That said, once I gave myself into the author's style, I was hooked. I think that, in the end, the stylistic challenges of the book are perfectly suited to the difficulties of interpreting the past.
    • 3/5
      I was surprised to not really enjoy this book. I have been reading all the Giller Prize winner books and have really enjoyed them. This one won the prize in 2010 and I expected a fantastic book, but to me it wasn't. I found it rambling and unclear and didn't really get the message or the plot at all. In fact, I didn't understand the point and am disappointed. I don't think I'd recommend this book.
    • 2/5
      Unfortunately, I'm pretty disappointed with this book. After the Giller Prize and all the surrounding hype, I was expecting something different. The premise of the book, an adult woman finally getting to know her father and learning of his horrific experience in the Vietnam, is interesting but I think Ms. Skibsrud failed in the delivery. I almost gave up on the book after a few pages because I started to get frustrated with the long sentences overdosed with commas. I finished the book but I can't help feeling that a lot of words were used but not much was said. I just got the feeling that the author was trying too hard.
    • 4/5
      I had mixed feelings about this book. I liked the writing and the way the author used the language but found the metaphors to be too numerous and a little forced. Also thought the Epilogue was unnecessary; it left me with the feeling that the author didn't quite trust me, as a reader, to 'get' the nuances she worked so hard to convey.Having said that, I did enjoy the book and thought the flow of the tale was handled well; I found myself 'seeing' the characters as they walked, drove, sat and talked; they were 'alive' to me and a book that can do that is well worth reading.
    • 2/5
      Further to ajsomerset's review, I found this book annoyingly imprecise in its imagery. (Well noted, sometimes a sad horse just walks into a bar)For this sort of flowery impressionistic prose to work, the imagery needs to be spot on. Alas, it was not.The flooding of the St. Lawrence seaway was more expertly evoked by Anne Michaels in "The Winter Vault", to name one other author who does the poetic prose style well. Or see Mr. Ondaatje, who's reach often exceeds his grasp, but always startles us with interesting imagery.
    • 4/5
      This book about war is definitely not filled with action, adventure nor even passion. It is about memory, perceptions, forgetting and loss. It is also about escape, reconciliation and ethics. This is all reflected in long and slow journey through the narrator's attempt at delving into her father's mind, understanding his past to explain his present. I loved the symbolism of Casablanca, the lost town that holds its inhabitants prisoner, the mystery surrounding the past and the projects that never finish: all symptoms of a life paralyzed by experiences and moral quandaries too painful to absorb.This short book is definitely not an easy or quick read: one must sit down in a reflective mood to get into its intricate and complex flow.
    • 2/5
      Started out quite wonderfully, but soon became rambling and disjointed both in style & plot lines. Disappointed.