Canada Reads caught in fact-fiction divide
In extending Canada Reads to include works of non-fiction for the first time since the contest’s inception 10 years ago, the CBC has inadvertently transformed a friendly, domestic literary debate into a geopolitical furor focused on volatile questions of truth and justice in distant totalitarian regimes.
Both books singled out for criticism by Canada Reads judge Anne-France Goldwater are first-person memoirs by immigrant women describing their struggles against oppressive governments abroad – the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran in the case of Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran, and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the case of Carmen Aguirre’s Something Fierce. Both describe near-miraculous personal escapes from imminent execution. Despite one judge’s opinion that Nemat’s book was insufficiently Canadian, both fit comfortably within the most characteristic Canadian genre of immigrant literature.
And both, with their intensely personal, unverifiable narratives, challenge readers to re-imagine the clouded borderland between fact and fiction.