Banc-de-Pêche-de-Paspébiac, where my ancestor James Day landed. A bit like the moors, no?

The evening’s unintended lesson seemed to be this: when you’ve got the hard facts about torture, secret detention, extraordinary rendition and the assault on habeas corpus, writing a fiction about such events can be a self-indulgent bust. I felt both annoyed with and embarrassed for Dorothea Dieckmann who read an excerpt from her forthcoming novel Guantánomo, informing the audience that she wanted “to imagine what it was like inside the prison,” exploiting our current moment with banal on-demand prose to be published in the U.S. later this year, perhaps to the chagrin of Antoine Audouard who can’t get the memoir he co-wrote with Mourad Benchellali, A Journey to Hell, published in our country (it appeared last year in France), a book which...