Clarissa's Blog

People will ask where all these great Canadian books I’m recommending suddenly come from. But it’s really simple. There’s a literary award in Canada called “the Scotiabank Giller Prize.” The banking industry in Canada is heavily monopolistic, so it’s always a “bank something” for every event.

The prize is good, though. Yes, it’s awarded to a fair amount of diverse crap. All of those novels about “the plight of the Armenian-Laotian-Quechua immigrant community in Canada.” These novels are all identical and deeply embarrassing, and I say it as a member of an immigrant community in Canada. Immigrants are typecast as having to write about being immigrants, and their novels always feature a pair of hard-working, earnest parents who want to preserve their cultural heritage, a rebellious teenager who just wants to fit in, an aunt with a spicy personal life that scandalizes the earnest parents but intrigues the rebellious teenager, and the wise old grandma who is traumatized by a long ago famine / civil war / genocide or some other atrocity.

I dislike these books not only because they are monotonous but because they make it sound like all immigrants do is sit there, thinking about how they are immigrants. And it’s stupid. One does a million things that have nothing to do with how one emigrated 20 years ago.

But once you weed out the books representing increasingly outlandish (pun intended) immigrant communities, the Giller Prize has some excellent authors. I’m discovering that Canadian literature is very different from US literature. This doesn’t mean it’s better or worse. It’s simply different. And I like it.

So prepare. I’ll probably be at it for a while.