BOOK REVIEW: IOANA-GABRIELA NAN, ”TRUE TALES. A CASE FOR LITERARY JOURNALISM”, CLUJ-NAPOCA, CASA CĂRȚII DE ȘTIINȚĂ, 2018, 279 P.

Abstract

The question prompting the author’s research has been around for at least several decades now, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world of letters. Interestingly enough, the book’s publication coincides with renewed interest in the debate surrounding it. From Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to the latest controversy sparked by Karl Ove Knausgaard’s extremely popular and richly award­ed My Struggle, the question of fact versus fiction has preoccupied linguists, semanticists and narratologists alike. The author acknowledges such previous contributions by summing up the existing research on the issue in all these fields. However, her approach is unexpected in the sense that she does not proceed by analysing the novelistic output of authors such as the above. Instead, she follows the consequences of the manifesto of New Journalism, published by Tom Wolfe in 1973, whose text was announcing nothing short of a revolution in the way novels were to be written, using all the journalists’ tools to produce non-fiction that was to be read “as fiction”.