The basis for André Narbonne’s latest novel came from a series of email exchanges that he shared with his mother back in New Brunswick while he was completing his Ph.D. in Ontario. 

“She had gotten sick and I couldn’t see her,” the Giller Prize-longlisted author recalls, “so I thought I would start asking her questions about the family and that maybe the conversation would be enlivening, something she’d look forward to.” 

Out of those conversations came a series of remarkable stories about his family, including his great-grandfather Harry Short from Cape Town, South Africa. Over the course of 25 years, Narbonne slowly grew to learn of how his family had come from Cape Town to Winnipeg in the early 1900s to fighting in Flanders Fields in the First World War to spreading out all over Canada. These stories became the basis for Narbonne’s latest novel, Those Are Pearls. 

 

Confronting family truths 

Over the course of researching the book, Narbonne learned a lot about his family history but also learned about stories that contradicted the ones he had heard as a child. 

“What I confronted in part was the way that families tell stories to themselves, to the younger generation,” he explains. “My mother would tell me stories and then I would find out that they weren’t true, that she had been given a sanitized version of things. And so, my mother and I both went on this journey together, trying to get at the facts of the story.”

The cover of 'Those Are Pearls'. Source: Palimpsest Press.

 

Narbonne, along with two of his siblings, spent hours researching and fact-checking the family history that would serve as the source material for his latest work of fiction. When it comes to the family’s Winnipeg chapter, Narbonne went to painstaking efforts to get an accurate portrayal of the city that his mother would have known. 

“I would ask her things – ‘What did it look like? How did it feel to be here? What was the school you went to? What were people like in 1945?’,” he says, adding that he would then call on resources in Winnipeg such as museums to verify his mother’s descriptions.

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Fiction as an historical lens 

Narbonne, who was nominated for the Giller Prize back in 2022 for his novel Lucien & Olivia, stresses that the accounts in Those Are Pearls are not a biography or an historical account of his family life. He prefers what he sees as a more imaginative view when telling his family’s story. 

“We are arriving at this sense that the histories we form… are in some ways fictions themselves, but they’re necessary fictions,” he says as he describes how his family talks about their history amongst themselves. “They’re fictions that make sense of our past, that make sense of our identities, and they may not be exactly true, but maybe like the book, they do have the straight ruler of facts keeping them as guardrails on them becoming too hyperbolic.” 

“Fiction allows for irony,” he continues, “and irony is just a sense of doubleness, the possibility that things are happening on two levels, which you can’t write in a history, but you can observe it in fiction.”