pickDefinitely deep in the poetic stream. This does not always lend itself to the full story as I might have chosen to structure this differently- reserving the imagistic for the Vietnam segment so beautifully juxtaposed with the father‘s decline. Ultimately this is a beautiful story of love, family bonds, and events that shape us.
pickThanks to @Lindy for welcoming me to this buddy read!
Beautifully written, a winner of Canada‘s Giller prize, but also challenging in its intentional lack of clarity. The nature of truth and memory, voice and silence, and past and present are explored through a narrator‘s relationship with her father, a Vietnam War vet, and the father of her dad‘s killed war buddy, living together in her dad‘s last years near an underwater childhood home.
pick“I don‘t believe in ghosts. I just think about them sometimes.” This is a haunting, lyrical, fragmented novel about history and how trauma affects subsequent generations. Napoleon is a veteran of the Vietnam war. In the final year of his life, his daughter seeks to know him better, and what happened when he was a soldier. There are no clear answers, but the emotional resonance rang through me like a bell. #CanadianAuthor
So that even in those after-years, when my father had disappeared completely beyond the line of our horizon, it seemed as though, on fine days, I could see him still — a faint outline, a trace of himself — buoyed by the stubbornness of my memory, walking tentatively along the endless and otherwise uninhabited waters of my childhood.
At the end of the corridor was the room my father referred to as the “second library”—the “first” having reached its limit years before. My father was a great reader and a great rememberer of things, though he never remembered anything in the right order, or entirely, and always had just little bits of all the books and poems he‘d ever read floating around in his mind.
This one won the Giller here in Canada in 2010, but the ratings here and on Goodreads are extremely mediocre. Anybody care to disagree?
so-soTook me a while to finish this small quiet book. It reminds me of a book I read ages ago that I can't remember the title of. I did like the ending. The whole book inched sooooo slowly towards this one accounting of something that happened during the war. What is the truth? You can't handle the truth
Still working on my #novemberreads stack ( I got hijacked by the Gilmore girls revival)
The Sentimentalists: A Novel | 
