The Sentimentalists
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Haunted by the horrific events he witnessed during the Vietnam War, Napoleon Haskell is exhausted from years spent battling his memories. As his health ultimately declines, his two daughters move him from his trailer in North Dakota to Casablanca, Ontario, to live with the father of a friend who was killed in action. It is to Casablanca, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath which lie the remains of the former town, that Napoleon's youngest daughter also retreats when her own life comes unhinged. Living with the two old men, she finds her father in the twilight of his life and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about him; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Montreal poet Skibsrud's first novel, the dark horse winner of Canada's 2011 Giller Prize, is an intricate story about the crushing power of experience. 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." Skibsrud's assured prose and graceful wordplay elevate this delicately structured story of redemption and forgiveness, and her storytelling is so refined and subtle that the punch at the end, while fully anticipated, still has a leveling power.
