Category Archives: Arleen Pare

Poets offer fresh take on language

Begin with the End in Mind

By Emma Healey

Arbeiter Ring Publishing

57 pages,  $12.95

 

Pluck

By Laisha Rosnau,

Nightwood Editions

91 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

I find small books of poetry with bluish covers very pleasing. Both Begin with the End in Mind and Pluck are small books with bluish covers. Begin with the End in Mind is the smaller of the two poetry collections; Pluck is bluer. But given that comparisons are generally considered odious — not that it stops most people from making them – I feel I should stop there. Nevertheless, both collections are pleasing.

The degree of irony and humour in Begin with the End in Mind is particularly engaging. Healey plays with truth, with what is real, and with narrative in a way that establishes poetry’s superiority. She begins her collection with a poem, “Everything is Glass,” that describes her origins. The details — date of birth, place, conditions of delivery – are repeated several times and always changed; on the other hand, the accumulation of detail starts to convince us of veracity. The result is unsettling. She begins with intentional disorientation, dislocates the reader while claiming to locate. Everything, frangible as glass. Later, other poems will address the issue of origins, will unsettle the ground, will involve glass. Her style is edgy, risky, shifting, energetic. Quirky.  Adjectives become nouns; nouns, verbs. Ellipses and elisions proliferate. The more sure, the less likely.

In the book’s eponymous prose poem, “Begin with the End in Mind,” Healey writes, “We start ourselves now, in this moment or tunnel, slow, homebound in darkness, the book says, and rustling. We start something simply by shedding our scarves and thinking the end of things hard as we can.” She is, at the same time as being humorous, serious, philosophical, very Canadian. I recommend this book: it is poetic, stylish and thought-provoking.

PluckPluck is Rosnau’s second poetry collection and her third book. She published both Gateway Girl (poetry) and The Sudden Weight of Snow (a novel) in 2002. Twelve years — and now Pluck. Not surprising; one of the main threads in Pluck is young motherhood, leaving behind one’s own youth, the burden of young children which can hamper a writer’s focus, her production. Another thread is vulnerability, of young women and of living in deep nature and the harm that can come of it, the predators, fear and danger. In “Music Class,” a particularly stunning villanelle (Rosnau uses traditional poetic forms throughout the collection), the narrator describes the ordinary horror of having children who must share the same music class as the children of the man who had sexually assaulted her as a young woman: “Sometimes when we make up a life, / we set aside the part when we were taken to the bush / and pushed down so that we can carry on while / our children go to music class.” That kind of vulnerability. Which seems to lead naturally to the use of traditional form, trying to contain, enclose, encircle, against so much opening, splitting, separation, brokenness. She is trying to mend the harm that has gone before, the harm that threatens in the present. I think she succeeds.

Both collections succeed in conveying particular, nuanced points of view and areas of concern in fresh poetic language and, especially in the case of Begin with the End in Mind, a very engaging, unusual new voice.

Arleen Paré is the 2014 recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for her recent acclaimed collection, Lake of Two Mountains.

Eriksson’s characters achingly genuine

 High Clear Bell of Morning

By Ann Eriksson

Douglas and McIntyre

256 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

Few books make me cry. So I was genuinely surprised when I found myself crying when I finished reading High Clear Bell of Morning.  To be honest, I cried half way through too — well, I had tears in my eyes.  Of course, this is a terrifyingly sad story about a family’s struggle to come to terms with the mental illness that overtakes their daughter, Ruby, just as she enters university.  Ruby, it turns out, has schizophrenia – a painful twist in any family’s life.

The reader witnesses the undoing of Ruby through the eyes of her sympathetic father, Glen, who tries over and over to save her from her decline into addictions and deprivation.  We are with him through his initial disbelief, through his slow realization that life will never be the same, through his desperation to save Ruby.  From his perspective, there is no reason why he can’t help her overcome her illness and return to being the Ruby she once was.

Part of Eriksson’s brilliance in this, her fourth novel, springs from her choice to tell this story from two points of view: Glen’s, with whom many readers will identify, and Ruby’s as well.  We sympathize with both.  Ruby has her own reasons to feel unsafe, even if those reasons are not reasonable.  She articulates them, describing her impossible situation.  She tries to manage the voices that interfere with her family life, university courses and friends.  Of course, she can’t.   And because Ruby describes the problems, the haunting seriousness of them, the reader begins to understand too.  Eriksson balances these two points of view, Glen’s and Ruby’s, with respect and considerable neutrality, which leaves the reader aching for Ruby and for the knot that has become the family, the conundrum at the heart of serious mental illness.

At the same time, whales are dying.  Glen is a marine biologist who studies killer whales in the Salish Sea.  He collects data that suggests toxic waste in the oceans off the west coast of Canada is endangering whale habitat and whale populations.  Glen has two problems: Ruby and the whales — and he believes they might be related.

Eriksson is a novelist and an ecologist.  Both interests serve to create this very fine book.  She details the lives of killer whales and their habitat, as well as the lives of their researchers, with convincing authority.  Her descriptions of mental illness and its effects are believable.

High Clear Bell of Morning is not overwritten; it is to the point. All the details — emotional, scientific, medical, social — are presented with a credible, eponymous clarity.  But it is Eriksson’s ability to draw character with care and compassion that most successfully sustains this novel.  That is what made me cry.

Arleen Pare is a Victoria writer; her new book of poetry, Lake of Two Mountains, is published by Brick Books.

Poetry book fine travelling partner

The Book of Places

 By Yvonne Blomer

Black Moss Press

2012, 95 pages.

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

            Book of Places is a neat little square of a book that would fit into most back pockets, most backpacks, most travel bags going most places in the world.  It’s a fit travel companion too, covering not only geographic space, but also psychic space. Adulthood, for instance.  The Past.  And Japan, Thailand, Wales, England, Rhodesia, Canada, Nevada.  Exile.  Sorrow.

But first, full disclosure: the author of The Book of Places, Yvonne Blomer, is a friend of mine. And while it is generally agreed that friends should not review the books of friends, in the case of Blomer, this becomes difficult.  Blomer knows almost all the poets and writers in Victoria, maybe in BC, and many are her friends. She has served as representative for The Federation of BC Writers, continues to host of one of Canada’s most successful reading series, Planet Earth Poetry; and she teaches writing at Camosun College. She knows writers.  Who possibly could review this book without sharing some writerly connection?

The Book of Places is Blomer’s second book of poetry. Her first, a broken mirror, fallen leaf was short-listed for The Gerald Lampert Award in 2007.  Her third, As if a Raven, has just been released.  She has published two chapbooks, has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and co-edited, along with Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, the recent Poems From Planet Earth, itself a stunning anthology.

Places is divided into three parts, with each section occupying a slightly different landscape.  In the first section, for instance, Blomer offers the reader a range of physical places: a field with a woman in it; a desert with a man in it; a road with a boy on it.  All beautifully rendered: in the desert, the “light is pixilated / feather-patterned through dust.”   From “Woman in a Field:” The sun so bright, almost / bright enough to hold her there.”

And “Packing to Leave,” a travel poem, begins with the advice: “Take nothing. All this is someone else’s,” and ends with: “Take your toothbrush / Whisper into the hollows of the house / leave your name.”  Poetic advice, and haunting, the advice of a poet who knows her craft and who has left home.  Blomer is also an avid, no, make that a passionate cyclist. When she writes “Cycling home, Norwich,” she creates a cadence, a tone so true, so convincing, the reader is on the bicycle with her:

the way I let it soar and fall

around each aching corner. How

I barely look up at church, Medieval

stone buildings, the city hall

and falling down, dropping now toward taxi stand, market

I roll: body still, arched, ready

to spring loosely over bumps and bricks I know

are coming.

I must recommend this slim, squared volume, the perfect travel size.  The perfect trip.  And though Blomer has travelled much and far, about places, she admits, “I never knew/ how to leave/ and stay, all the same,” touching on one of the basic conundrums of life, whether in this place or that.

Arleen Pare is a Victoria poet and novelist.

Québecoise fable charms reader

The Douglas Notebooks
By Christine Eddie, translated by Sheila Fischman
Goose Lane Press, 178 pages,  $19.95

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

Charming is the word. The Douglas Notebooks is a charming story captured in a small, charming book. Fable-like and bitter-sweet, the narrative ends on page 160; the last eighteen pages constitute a useful set of endnotes entitled “Credits (in order of appearance).” Despite its size, Notebooks packs an ambitious punch. It not only tells the magical story of Douglas and Éléna, it also critiques a period of historical resource, urban and social development, describing the effects of human greed. At the same time it reveals the effects of the Holocaust on one of the main characters. None of the topics is out of place in this tale; they fit together to complete a very satisfactory read.

In addition to Christine Eddie’s deft integration of characters, plot and history, she seduces the reader with language. She writes, “After his second winter in the woods, loneliness fell on Romain like a bear on a butterfly,” using imagery so arresting that the reader is able to absorb the full weight of his sadness. In another chapter, Éléna reassures Douglas (aka Romain) that she loves him despite his difficult childhood by saying, “I would have liked you even if you were an earthquake.” Later, in the city, “the buildings pour their staircases onto the sidewalks.” This translation by Sheila Fischman, a well-established, award-winning Québecoise translator, is so convincing one could easily imagine it was originally written in English, except that the language is curiously heightened, enriched by a generous sprinkling of fresh poetic idioms.

The two romantic characters are misfits who find each other in a thick forest. They triumph over mean family backgrounds and physical challenges. Although the whole book is sweet (and I mean that only in the best sense of the word), the beginning is the sweetest and most poetic part of the book. I wanted it to go on and on–like a fairytale. But the story divides in two. Tragedy, also known as reality, crashes into their idyllic home. The fallout, the rest of the story, revolves around Rose, the daughter of Douglas and Éléna.

It is a fable, a fairytale with a substantial measure of contemporary social criticism. Like a good fairytale, it is hard to determine exactly where it takes place, which should make it solidly universal. And although it might be universal, somehow the place is important. I wanted to know where the story was happening. The place names are mainly French; I kept, picturing small villages on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. This is part of the mystery. Nevertheless, wherever it really does take place, it is well worth the read.

Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer whose forthcoming book of poetry, Lake of Two Mountains, will be released by Brick Books in Spring 2014.

Steam-punkish humour sparks Musgrave’s novel

Given
By Susan Musgrave
Thistledown Press, pp. 298.

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

Given is the second novel in a trilogy by Susan Musgrave. Musgrave is a poet, a novelist, a writer of children’s books and of non-fiction with over twenty-six books to her name. Cargo of Orchids (2001) was the first in this trilogy. However, while some of Cargo’s characters people the pages of Given, this time around they are not quite alive. Which is a clue. Another clue is the cover. Decidedly ghoulish, it depicts a mechanical model of a human body sans left leg and right forearm. The model hangs from chains, head flopped forward at an awkward angle. Pieces of electrical wire protrude from the openings the limbs once occupied. Coiled springs and empty limbs strew the dark background. A steampunk sort of image. I don’t necessarily judge a book by its cover, but steampunk stayed with me as I read.

The narrator has just escaped from death row in an American prison. Her crime: murdering her own child. Her two death-row friends, Rainy and Frenchy, have already died on death row — for the murders of their children. Death and death images, grief, addiction, ghosts, pain – these fill the book. Humour too. Susan Musgrave is a very funny writer even when her focus is on death. The story follows the narrator as she makes her way to a West Coast island with the help of her slightly estranged husband, Vernal. The names are clever. The penitentiary is called Mountjoy. The pet cat is Aged Orange. Vernal drives an old hearse. And throughout her escape, her arrival on the island, her sojourn to the city, the narrator notes with fitting irony an amazing number of odd and amusing events, signs, sayings in the surrounding world in which she is now a stranger. A radio caller asks Jesus for help losing weight; Rainy (now a ghost) wonders if it hurts flowers when you cut them; the drugstore is called Drugs R Us.

Steampunk is a variety of speculative fiction that appears in a number of literary, theatrical and cinematic forms. Historical steampunk generally situates a narrative in the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian era before the advent of electricity when steam power was pervasive. But steampunk also refers to a literary variety of “gas-lit” horror and fantasy that includes supernatural elements. This is how Given affected me: a melancholy narrative of grief and regret with a fantastical, almost horrific understory. Intriguing, compelling, imaginative. And real. It all depends where the spotlight lands. I had no question that the events described fell more within the range of reality than the fantastical. The descriptions of prison life, the punishments, addictions – all believable. That the child ghosts arrive in red mist – also understandable, under the circumstances. That the narrator speaks with ghosts – of course. Nonetheless, as a whole, Given is fantastical. It is funny. It is literary. It is a most unusual read. I look forward to the third in this trilogy.

 

Author Arleen Paré is a frequent reviewer for Coastal Spectator

A novel to break your heart

The Round House
By Louise Erdrich
Published by Harper Collins, 317 pages $27.99

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

Louise Erdrich is a fine American writer. With over twenty-five books to her name, she is also prolific. Nor is she limited to one genre, besides her fourteen novels, three works of non-fiction, one collection of stories, six books of children’s literature, Erdrich has published three collections of poetry. Her writing is diverse and literary.

She is among my favourite novelists, which is not to say that everything she writes is perfect, though many of her novels come close. Erdrich is an expert craftswoman. She can shift novelistic techniques from book to book to meet the demands of the story. Her primary fictional territory is Ojibwa country, North Dakota (Erdrich is part Ojibwa). Her characters are mainly Ojibwa, often related contemporaneously or from generation to generation. Her literary opus spans centuries.

In her latest novel, The Round House, Erdrich tells a difficult and complex story about a violent rape that shakes up a small upstanding family living on the reserve. The fact that the exact whereabouts of the incident is clouded, and that the perpetrator is non-native, complicates the legalities of crime, prolonging the crime’s unfortunate aftermath. Because the story pivots on this bitter legal detail, an inheritance from the colonial history of American Indians, Erdrich’s novel must also be understood as an admirably political text.

The Round House is told from the point of view of Joe Coutts, the thirteen-year-old son of the woman who has been raped. He is also the son of the reservation’s court judge. Still a boy, Joe is both innocent and troubled, trying to come to terms with the world and the violence that rocks his mother and father. This adolescent POV shapes the novel, at least partly, into a coming-of-age story. Joe is a typical adolescent boy; his friends are too. They sneak cigarettes, beer, marijuana; they are interested in sex and they ride their busted-up bicycles everywhere. But they become embroiled in the crime’s mystery, the whodunit, the revenge. In this way The Round House takes on the flavour of a crime novel. Erdrich is covering a lot of ground in The Round House and tackles a number of important issues. Each issue is covered sensitively, accurately (her research is impeccable), and convincingly. The story’s action unfolds with appropriate drama, the voice is consistent, and best of all, her writing is poignant, eloquent, lucid.

In the bedtime scene that follows the rape, Joe’s mother isolates herself in the bedroom. Joe observes the sadness: “My father was looking so intently at the head of the stairs as he climbed, step by deliberate step, that I crept around the couch to see what he was peering at – a light from beneath the bedroom door, perhaps. From the foot of the stairs, I watched him shuffle to the bedroom door, which was outlined in black. He paused there and went past . . . . He opened the door to the cold little room my mother used for sewing. There was a daybed in that room, but it was only for guests. . . . The sewing room door shut. I heard my father rustling about in there and hoped that he’d emerge again. Hoped he had been looking for something. But then the bed creaked. There was silence.”

These are the details that can break readers’ hearts. Be prepared to have your heart broken.

Arleen Pare is a frequent reviewer for Coastal Spectator.

Beautiful Book, Beautiful Pages

Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page
By Sandra Djwa, McGill-Queens University Press
322 pages (398 including notes).

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

I admire biographers. Biography is a daring, sometimes dangerous genre, requiring time-consuming, research and a finely-tuned sense of diplomacy vis a vis informants, including the subject — in this case Victoria’s illustrious poet and artist, P.K. Page. These qualities of stamina and tact are clearly evident in Sandra Djwa’s Journey with No Maps: A Biography of PK Page. The research is impeccable, the life details, sharp and clear, and the text is always respectful.

This is a beautiful book about a beautiful woman who lived a (largely) beautiful life. The glossy dust-jacket displays a detail of Britten Miller’s gorgeous portrait of the young P.K. Page: she’s wearing her signature red lipstick, her half-face serious against a turquoise sky background. I could hardly get beyond the cover.

Journey is the public version of an artist’s life lived very much in the public eye, both in terms of her role as an icon of the twentieth-century Canadian literary establishment, and her role as the wife of prominent Canadian diplomat, Arthur Irwin. Page broke literary ground. She became a respected woman poet early in the century, when poetry was a hard (male) club to break in to. She appears to be in control of her public image and, despite her death in 2009, PK seems still to have been in control in this admirable accounting of her life. No skeletons, no dirty laundry. Djwa’s writing is scholarly, but refreshingly accessible, and her research is meticulous. There are over fifty pages of endnotes, over ten pages of bibliography and a useful index of thirty pages. The many personal details Djwa has chosen to include are charmingly enhanced by numerous quotes from Page’s own journals, letters and poetry. PK Page kept almost everything, it would appear, and so her life, told chronologically, unfolds in a convincing manner. Very little detail is missing. But the essential, if I may use that term, Pat Page remains elusive. For some reason, I was not able to develop a clear picture of her emotional life. I read about her family background, her interest in Jung, in Sufi philosophy, her passion for words and for paint, her good looks, charm, friendliness, even about her periodic black depressions, but I was not able to develop an emotional sense of her.

Nevertheless, her biography is a major contribution to the study of literature and visual arts in Canada. It reveals that Page actually studied how to live the artistic life as a woman by applying the ideas from Virginia Wolfe’s Room of One’s Own. Page made significant inroads into the male poetry establishment and influenced and mentored many younger, now renowned, poets. P.K. is now considered an important twentieth-century figure. As a diplomat’s wife she also made many international art and literary contacts and won enormous acclaim and countless awards for her visual art as well as for her writing. Her art was shown in numerous galleries and in universities. Toward the end of her life, P.K. Page was named Companion to the Order of Canada in recognition of her life’s work. Journey is a must read for anyone interested in poetry, art, or women in Canada – or, of course, in P.K. Page.

Arleen Pare has an MFA in writing and many pages of her own work published

Courageous writers come clean about mental health

Hidden Lives: Coming Out on Mental Illness,

Edited by Leonore Rowntree and Andrew Boden
Published by Brindle and Glass, 264 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Arleen Pare

The well-known Dr. Gabor Maté writes the book’s foreword. He also writes a back cover blurb which describes Hidden Lives as “(a) privileged if uncomfortable close look at one of the most devastating of human tribulations. For all the honesty of its revelations, Hidden Lives communicates not despair but courage.” These key words, privileged, tribulations, and courage pretty much sum up the reader’s experience. I was keenly aware of the privilege I was being afforded, each page allowing me to regard the details, the emotional pain that mental illness brings to otherwise everyday lives. The tribulations are sorrowful. The courage shines through.

Because I spent two decades working in mental health offices, and because my niece has a serious mental illness, I am personally and professionally familiar with many issues described. Nevertheless, I was riveted. Every story gripped me; I had to keep reading. Each story surprised me with unexpected detail. In “Elm,” Shane Neilson writes “Well, once I wrote poetry. I fell ill. The poetry was in some way intrinsic to the illness. And now I don’t write poetry.” This is an association and a loss I could not have anticipated. Nor could I have expected, in the opening story, “Bad Day,” Joel Yanofsky’s hopelessness about his young son’s future to be so complete that he would welcome the world’s end after reading about an asteroid’s trajectory toward Earth. These are intimate illustrations of the effects of mental illness, the sadness of this human tribulation.

Each story/essay is different not only in terms of point of view (many are written by family members), writerly skill, and proximity to the experience, but also in terms of diagnostic type, intensity of illness, and range of symptoms. Symptoms vary, including threats to others, suicide, or inability to care for self. The results, though sometimes temporary, are often devastating for the individuals with mental illness and for the families who live with and care for and about them.

The order is interesting too. Sometimes a raw piece of writing is juxtaposed against a piece of polished, perhaps professional, writing. At first I thought this structure would be jarring, but in fact, the variety and arrangement worked. Hidden Lives is less about the quality of writing, than the impact of the telling. Even when the writing is raw, maybe especially when the writing is raw, we understand the courage it has taken to put that story on paper. I suspect if all the stories had been polished, the book’s impact might not have been so profound. And it was profound.

After I finished the book, I suggested that my sister, whose daughter has mental illness, might want to read it. She loved it. The sense of support, of not-being-the-only-one-going-through-this-on-her-own, was gratifying. She understood the privilege, and the courage. She understands the hiddenness of mental illness, and she now feels the need to hide a little bit less. Each writer has hidden a little bit less by writing his or her story. This is their courage. Each reader will understand in their own way, and will learn from this book.

Arleen Pare’s most recent book is Leaving Now, published by Caitlin Press

Nothing Small About Gay Dwarves Stories

Gay Dwarves of America
By Anne Fleming
Pedlar Press
205 pp; $21

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

In the world of literary genres, the short story could be entering endangered-species status. Not because fewer people write short stories; quite the contrary, many writers enjoy the short story form, and literary journals still publish them. But because few collections of short stories appear on bookstore shelves — Alice Munro notwithstanding. This means that when a short story collection appears, it must be outstanding. Anne Fleming’s Gay Dwarves of America, with its audacious title, is such a book.

Anne Fleming is a B.C. writer with one earlier collection of short stories, Pool Hopping, and a novel called Anomaly. She is a humourist who, pleasingly, can’t help but highlight life’s ironies. She also displays a flair for the poignant. Her writing is smart, smart-assed, funny, and cool. You feel cool reading these nine stories. That doesn’t mean you won’t also feel deep sadness. Fleming’s writing is self-reflexive too. But mainly, Fleming creates unforgettable characters. She writes character the way some poets write extended metaphor. In Gay Dwarves of America, each story is a character, each crazily different. In an unthemed and unlinked collection, this is key: keeping each story distinct keeps the collection as a whole alive, compelling.
Gay Dwarves, unlike most contemporary collections, takes risks from the start. It begins with one of the least risky, “Unicycle Boys.” Curtis is the unicycle boy; Jenny is the narrator. Jenny is the story. She’s the perfect snooty high school girl. She’s cool, ironic and smart-mouthed. The dialogue, “I ran into (Curtis) at Caravan. He’s kind of a neat guy. In a loserish sort of way,” is perfect high school superior. Curtis of the unicylcle is how Jenny learns what the story conveys. It’s a good lesson.

The second story, the eponymous “Gay Dwarves of America” is considerably more quirky. As a short, gay woman, I read it with trepidation, alert to stereotypes and slurs. The story is about John and his college roommate, Pen. Neither is gay nor a dwarf. They exploit the idea to set up a website. But it’s an idea to keep out the sadness. In the end, both are sad.

The stories continue in this quirky manner. If the character isn’t quirky, and most are, then the situation is strange, or the point of view is unusual, or the subject matter is peculiar. Or the format is challenging. Take, for instance, “Puke Diaries,” about throwing up from six different points of view, including that of a cat. It begins with the cat. Each character has unique vocabulary for it, his or her own reasons for puking. The story grows into wholeness, comes together.
By the time we arrive at the final story, “Thirty-One One Word Stories,” which actually is one word centred on each of the final thirty-one pages, we are able to create our own story from each of the words. This is the tacit instruction. The words are inspiring: Thief, Martyr . . . Martha . . . . I began thinking about Martha. As the last story, it works, as each story does in its own exquisite way.

_______
Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer and poet. Her first book, Paper Trail (NeWest Press, 2007), won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book, Leaving Now (Caitlin Press, 2012) was released this spring. She completed her MFA at UVic in June.

The Sentimentalists

Gasperau Press, 2009, 216 pages hardcover, $27.95 /
Douglas and McIntyre, 2010, 216 pages paperback, $19.95
Reviewed by Arleen Paré

In 2010, Johanna Skidsrud won the Scotia Bank Giller Prize for her novel, The Sentimentalists. This alone guaranteed increased sales for the book, originally published by Gasperau, a small Nova Scotia press, but the resulting controversy about the inability of Gasperau’s small print run to meet post-award book sale demands resulted in greater publicity.   This is Skidsrud’s first novel, again unusual for a Giller Prize winner.   The Sentimentalists is a fine novel; it deserves the attention it received.

The Sentimentalists tells the story of an unnamed female narrator who lives with her alcoholic father, Napoleon Haskell, through the summer he dies of cancer.  During this time, he describes his experiences in the Vietnam War.  The two live with Henry, an old man whose town was flooded by the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s.  Henry’s son, Owen, Napoleon’s war buddy, was killed mysteriously in Vietnam.  The novel, though ostensibly Napoleon’s daughter’s story, told largely from her point of view, focuses primarily on Napoleon.   It begins with Napoleon’s house: “The house my father left behind in Fargo, North Dakota, was never really a house at all.  Always instead, it was the idea of a house.”   As the novel begins, so it proceeds, dealing more with ideas, the hidden and incomplete, more with the invisible than the visible.  The boat her father tries to build never becomes a boat.  Henry’s flooded town was not ever a town.   Her father’s story is pocked with holes.  Owen’s death remains unsolved.

Skidsrud is also a poet.  Her first poetry collection, Late Nights With Wild Cowboys appeared in 2008.   Skidsrud and Gasperau have a Nova Scotia-based history, but now Skidsrud lives in Montreal and The Sentimentalist is published by Vancouver’s Douglas and McIntyre.  Douglas and McIntyre bought publishing rights from Gasperau when the artisan press and printer couldn’t keep pace with post-Giller printing demands.   I have both editions.  They are similar-sized, but the original is slightly thicker, denoting the better quality of paper used.  It’s a handsome book.  The second version, the version most will purchase, is standard:  less subtle, less handsome.   I must be a sentimentalist.  I read the second version, unwilling to blemish the first.

The Sentimentalists might never have been published at all if Gasperau, mainly a poetry press, hadn’t originally given it a contract.  The novel is sufficiently unorthodox that it might not have been accepted by more mainstream publishers.  But its unconventionality and poetic qualities are what make it interesting, prize-winningly so.  As a poet, I appreciate that Skidsrud employs poetic diction and complex syntax, but I think most readers will.  Typical fiction publishers would have considered her long, multi-claused sentences to be excessive, ungrammatical, perhaps, eschewing their rhythmic qualities and philosophical weight.  They might have worried about the novel’s ephemeral narrative, its unlikely plot turns, its phantom-like characters, its shifting points of view, its fictionally unsatisfactory ending.   Traditional fiction-heavy publishers might have balked at the following paragraph:

But as I floated over Henry’s house, and did and did not listen to myself, it occurred to me that the reverse of the thing was also true.  That instead of disappearing – or equally, as we disappeared – we also existed more heavily, in layers.  And that by remaining, as in floodwater, always at the surface of everything, though our points of reference begin to slowly change, it is always so slight a transition, moment to moment, that it is almost always imperceptible.

I savoured every sentence, all six or seven lines of every sentence, in thrall to Skidsrud’s language, her skill to lead the reader through each thoughtful convolution.  The book is beautiful and provocative.  And the mystery remains: how The Sentimentalists slipped through the strict fiction standards to win Canadian fiction’s finest award.

That Gaspereau did not balk highlights the importance of Canada’s small presses.  Some will take literary chances.  Some are loyal to their authors.  But then the almost punitive reversal: when a small press author wins big, a big press must step in, because the small press cannot afford to support the prize.  This dynamic, where risk-taking and discovery on the part of small presses is followed by acquisition and profit by larger presses demonstrates the importance of public support for both large and small Canadian publishers, so that Canadians can go on enjoying such prize-winning novels.