The short answer, in my opinion, is NO.  Our book club just finished discussing The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud, the 2010 Giller Prize winner.  All I can say is, “Huh?”  Major newspaper critics very kindly described it as ‘lyrical’.  That may be true if ‘lyrical’ is a synonym for ‘pedantic’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘self-indulgent’.  It’s 200 pages of an anonymous narrator mostly talking about what’s going on inside her own head.  This is supposed to be a war book, and the point appears to be the exploration of the reasons for the narrator’s father seeking out the father of a war buddy killed in Vietnam.  I ploughed through the endless introspection in the hopes of getting to that conclusion.  Unfortunately, frustratingly, there was no conclusion.  The author left me to come to my own.  When the book ended without that conclusion, I very nearly sent it across the room.  I did come to one conclusion: if the central premise of the Novel is never resolved, then what’s the point of writing it at all?  Frankly I think the author couldn’t decide how to end the book and so didn’t at all.

It’s no wonder that the author went to Gaspereau Press to get published, whose maximum print run for any book is 800 copies.  No major house would consider publishing this mess.  When this book was announced as the Giller winner, Gaspereau created a great clamour for it by initially refusing to farm out the printing to another publisher that could produce it in sufficient quantity.  Finally, they ‘reluctantly’ agreed to allow Douglas & McIntyre to do a mass print run.

Gaspereau is well known for the attention they pay to the materials, design, and binding of a book.  By all accounts it was a beautifully bound volume.  That’s the problem.  If this book is any indication, they seem to be more interested in creating an artifact than publishing quality literature.  This is a case where the publisher most definitely prefers that you judge the book by its cover.