The basis for\u00a0Andr\u00e9 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“She had gotten sick and I couldn’t see her,”\u00a0the Giller Prize-longlisted author\u00a0recalls, “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.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Out of those conversations came a series of remarkable stories about his family, including his great-grandfather Harry Short\u00a0from Cape Town, South Africa.\u00a0Over the course of 25 years, Narbonne slowly grew to learn of how his family had\u00a0come 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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Confronting\u00a0family truths\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the course of researching the book, Narbonne learned a lot about his family\u00a0history but\u00a0also learned about stories that contradicted the ones he had heard as a child.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“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\u00a0this\u00a0journey together, trying to get at the facts of the story.”<\/p>\n
Source: Palimpsest Press.<\/p>\n
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Narbonne, along with two of his siblings, spent hours researching and fact-checking\u00a0the\u00a0family\u00a0history that would serve as the source material for his latest work of fiction.\u00a0When it comes to the family’s Winnipeg chapter, Narbonne went to painstaking efforts to get\u00a0an accurate\u00a0portrayal of the city that his mother would have known.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“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\u00a0museums to verify his mother’s descriptions.<\/p>\n
RELATED STORIES<\/p>\n
Fiction as an\u00a0historical\u00a0lens\u00a0<\/p>\n
Narbonne, who was nominated for the Giller Prize back in 2022 for his novel\u00a0Lucien & Olivia, stresses that the accounts in Those Are Pearls are not a biography or an historical account of his family life.\u00a0He prefers what he sees as a more imaginative view when telling his family’s story.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We are arriving at this sense that the histories we form… are in some ways fictions themselves,\u00a0but they’re necessary fictions,” he says as he describes how his family talks about\u00a0their 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.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Fiction allows for irony,” he continues, “and irony is just a sense of doubleness, the\u00a0possibility\u00a0that things are happening on two levels, which you can’t write in a history, but you can observe it in fiction.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The basis for\u00a0Andr\u00e9 Narbonne’s latest novel came from a series of email exchanges that he shared with his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":755931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,22073],"class_list":["post-755930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-winnipeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/755931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}