The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud

From The Week of July 03, 2011

Of all the cruelties humanity has, spawned during its time on Earth, none can match war for its corrosiveness. It has shattered families, inspired generational hatreds and ended entire civilizations. But while the physical and societal damage it has wrought is obvious and detectable, its deepest cut, its gravest perversion, is the extent to which it corrupts the souls of the pure. For the Greatest Generation, those many veterans who returned from World War II, it lived in their pained silences. For the soldiers who suffered through Vietnam, it was in the shame imposed upon them by a violently antiwar populous. And for those who've prosecuted our most recent conflicts, it is in the PTSD brought on by never knowing friend from foe, innocent from combatant, bomb from IED. These wounds linger. They change lives and alter destinies. They make it impossible to live as one might have wished. And it is this idea which empowers Ms. Skibsrud's tale of quiet, quirky family life in the wake of tragedy.

The Sentimentalists concerns itself with an adult woman's reflections upon her eccentric adolescence. Growing up in the northern midwest of the United States and southern Canada, the daughter of a father who served in Vietnam narrates her childhood's key events, most of which center on her father's amusing peculiarities: his addled good humor, his fantastic projects, his endless stories, and his strange and devoted friendship with a disabled man tied to his past. Gradually, as the story develops, the reader comes to understand that many of the father's (Napoleon's) oddities are externalities of his time in the Vietnam War, and though he's initially reluctant to burden the narrator with his soldiering there, he eventually confesses that he was a witness to a war crime, committed by his company, an outrage which, to his credit, he tried to bring to the attention of his superiors. Armed with this new information, the daughter, who never names herself, realizes how her father's experience in the war changed him and made him into the quirky, dysfunctional and yet lovable man she's known for so long.

Though Ms. Skibsrud does a wonderful job illustrating the cost paid by an unprotected mind forced to witness atrocities, and while this provides the foundation for a story about family, the skill with which she reconstructs the thrills and the strangeness of adolescence is breathtakingly accurate. Her spare, reflective prose succeeds in conveying all of childhood's little details, the quirks, the rituals, and the jealousies, which shape our youth and form the language by which we learn to dialogue with our parents and the world. In this, Ms. Skibsrud has written an intensely authentic work which deploys the trappings of the humble family to say something profound about the human experience and the extent to which it is guided by what has come before. It's no wonder this piece of poetic fiction won the 2010 Giller prize. Beautiful in its sadness, its nostalgia and its ruminations on life as we understand it. (4/5 Stars)