“The Sentimentalists” by Johanna Skibsrud

“The Sentimentalists” is the debut novel by Canadian author Johanna Skibsrud, and the winner of the 2010 Giller Prize, Canada’s annual top award for literature.

Although a work of fiction,”The Sentimentalists” draws heavily from the author’s own life and that of her Vietnam veteran father.

The book details the struggles of the narrator — unnamed in the novel — who is learning to care for and live with her aging father, Napoleon Haskell.

The story begins after the narrator has recently moved her father from his trailer home in Fargo, North Dakota, to a small town in Ontario. The town also happens to be the home of a man-made lake, which has flooded the former site of the town — an allegory for the murky nature of memory which is the key narrative of the book.

The book doesn’t so much delve into the backstory of the narrator, as it does her efforts to unlock her father’s past amid his encroaching senility and his reluctance to discuss the war years that dramatically altered his life.

Dying of lung cancer and alcoholism, Napoleon is haunted by his memories. The narrator spends the majority of the novel combing through whatever details of her father’s past she’s able to uncover. Much of that comes from Henry, the father of one of Napoleon’s war buddies who was killed in Vietnam.

The most significant reveal comes towards the end of the book where a 30-page army transcript details an incident which altered the trajectory of Napoleon’s life.

Skibsrud’s background as a poet is on full display throughout the elegant prose of the slowly unfolding novel.

The novel does an excellent job of dealing with the often nebulous nature of memory and with the challenges of living with a dying loved one who has been deeply affected by their own past

Johanna Skibsrud
Credit: Global News.ca

It’s also a touching portrait of a father-daughter relationship. The constraints of time add an urgency to the storytelling as the daughter realizes her father’s death is imminent and she attempts to truly know her father.

It’s a struggle that many children go through, as it often is only later in life that we begin to consider the story of our parents and the desire to remember them once they’re gone.  

In the end, it seems there is no one single event that made Napoleon the man he is. Like most of us, it’s a collection of moments which led Napoleon to the person he becomes in his final days.