The Sentimentalists : a novel
/ Johanna Skibsrud
- New York : Douglas & McIntyre , 2011
- 216 p. ; 22 cm
As elderly, alcoholic Napoleon is being moved from his home in Fargo, N.D., to that of widowed family friend Henry Carey in Casablanca, Ontario, the unnamed narrator, one of Napoleon's two daughters, recalls time spent throughout her life in the Carey home and the strange story of her father, whose life fell apart after he returned from Vietnam. The story moves from the narrator's childhood; Napoleon's pivotal wartime service with Henry's son, Owen; and Napoleon's abandoning of his family, which crushed the narrator and her sister. Poetic ruminations are frequent but not oppressive, and provide uncommon perspectives on the characters: Napoleon's deathbed confessions "opened a seam through which the rest of the world now burst"; the narrator realizes, at her sick father's side, that her "own sadness seemed, at those times, to draw itself in-a complete and separate object-so that it seemed to have nothing to do with me anymore.
English
ScotiaBank Giller Prize Winner
9781553658955
Vietnam War, 1961-1975---Veterans----Fiction Fathers and daughters----Fiction Authors, Canadian