Searching for the Thing - A Review of The Sentimentalists

This is a low energy book (some people might call it meditative or dreamy). From the first page we are awash in poetry, in fact a regular tsunami of fine writing. Alas, it sometimes seems that the poets have taken over Can Lit and this book is no exception. We have no idea of what the characters look like but a lot of words are spent on the setting and even more on the interior thoughts of the narrator who is on a quest to understand her family history (or at least I think she is trying to understand her family history. On the other hand, she may be trying to understand her alcoholic father’s history). She describes the search in words such as the following:

The story that I was telling was not my own. That I would never be able to understand it—because even then simplest things appeared to me to be the most complicated puzzles, for which I had only the most inadequate of clues. And that by reading backwards along the line of objects, and the things that I learned piecemeal from my parents, and the rest of the world, I was only being thrown further and further off course and was by now very far from the straight and deep waters for which I had always felt I was somehow bound. And that, each time I thought I was coming closer to the unknown region I desired, I was actually following an altogether different route: a small estuary quite sideways to that true course of things, ending up in a distant and uncomfortable regions I had never dreamed of visiting before.

This was only one of many passages that I had to read several times. Like passengers on a Greyhound bus travelling across the north, we know we are somewhere but we are not sure where.

Constantly tazered by the rhythm of the sentences, I was forever backing up and rereading in order to tease out a meaning