Fifty pages into Johanna Skibsrud debut novel The Sentimentalists (2009) and I find the narrator's family spread too thin to be anything more than writing, and I love writing.
The second chapter ("Casablanca", 46-65) opens with an even more interior "voice". Closer to William Faulkner than to Marian Engel.
This:
The birds on the top strand of the telephone wires whose notes, which had remained always, in previous days, a background melody that I had not heard, seemed suddenly to hit precisely the chords which resonated in my own stopped heart, (47)
I wonder who at D&M edited this book. There's some broken-shoelace sentences that might have warranted post-it notes. Is this the form trauma takes? Is The Sentimentalists "about" trauma and its inheritors.
This:
In reminder to myself that although it felt like it might there was no way that a two-day trip could last forever, I imagined the different ways I might recount its events even as they occurred. (29)
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