To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
We must find the time,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I wanted to offer you one last book. All the books I sent you earlier were comparatively short, usually under two hundred pages. But this one is far, far longer. I’ve chosen to send you a six-volume box set of Marcel Proust’s complete In Search of Lost Time not to thump you with a 4,347-page club of irony, but because it’s a work I’ve been meaning to read for years. It’s surprising that I’ve never read À la recherche du temps perdu. After all, French is my mother tongue and I lived in France for ten years, the first four in the very arrondissement where Proust was born, the 16th. And I’ve read other very long novels, The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky,  and War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, for example. So why did I never take on Proust’s masterpiece? I suppose for the same reason that many books are left unread, a mixture of fear and slothfulness, fear that I wouldn’t understand the work and unwillingness to spend so much intellectual energy reading all those pages. But as you and I both know, fear and slothfulness lead nowhere. Great achievements only come through courage and hard work. In sending you Proust’s monument, then, I’m reminding myself that I, too, must read it. I’m committed to reading it from start to finish before I die, and I hope you join me in making that same commitment.

Proust’s ten-page description of the eating of a madeleine is famous. It is, apparently, a bravura piece of writing, moving, profound, life-changing. The experience of reading In Search of Lost Time as a whole is said to be life-changing. I don’t need my life to change, I don’t think, but I do want to discover what people mean when they say that of Proust’s masterwork of nostalgia. I want to understand how ten pages can be devoted to the eating of a small cake and how my life could possibly be different afterwards. I invite you to join me, on your own time, in reading this mammoth novel. I do believe it will bring stillness to our souls.

And now our little book club truly comes to an end. The project has been, in many ways, as much a gift to me as it has been to you. Because of it, I have read or re-read over one hundred books. I will miss the challenge of finding you a new short book every second week. But in foregoing that activity, I hope to find the lost time I need to read Marcel Proust. I hope you find the time, too.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one box set with six inscribed trade paperbacks

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A voice that rises up against erasing,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

This letter, I’m quite sure, will be my last one to you. I said, over and over, that I would persist with our exclusive book club as long as you were in power. But selecting a book for you; reading or re-reading it; thinking about it; writing the letter that goes with it; having the letter translated by my parents and discussing that translation with them; scanning the cover of the book; uploading the English and French letters onto their respective websites; and finally mailing book and letter so that they reach you on time every second Monday—all this takes time and effort, and while it’s been a great pleasure for me (I don’t know about you), I’ve been doing it for close to four years now and I want to move on. I have the luck of living with two pregnancies at the moment: the first is my partner Alice’s, who is carrying our second child, a girl due at the end of May, and the second is mine, a new novel gestating in my head. I’m having a small writing studio built in my backyard so I can have a space to take care of my novel not far from where Alice and I will take care of our new baby. I’m very excited about the new novel. It will be called The High Mountains of Portugal and it shimmers in my mind like snow-capped mountains catching the sun. I already have lots of notes written, I’ve been gathering material I intend to read for research, and the story in my head is bursting with promise. I can’t wait to get started on it. I’m of course equally excited about the new addition to our family. Both babies will require lots of joyful work.

And it so happens that this is the hundredth letter I’ve written to you. One hundred. One, zero, zero. The same as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That’s a lot of letters and books. And come to think of it, it’s the same number of chapters as in my novel Life of Pi. One hundred is a nice round number and a good number to end on. (The number of times you personally have written back to me is also a nice round number, by the way: 0. That’s zero, naught, nada, zilch.)

It’s true, too, that I’m tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

Now what would be your send-off book? The question preoccupied me. We started on a strong note—with The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy, if you remember, which I sent you on April 16th, 2007—and I wanted to end on a strong note. The answer came naturally when I received an invitation from the Artistic Director for French Theatre at the National Arts Centre, in Ottawa, a one-minute walk from where you work. I was invited to participate in an evening event called Mais que lit Stephen Harper?, in which books and reading would be celebrated. I eagerly accepted and I hope that you will come, too. Take this as a personal invitation. The event is at the NAC’s 900-seat Theatre Hall at 7:30 pm on Friday, February 25th. It’s sold-out, but I’m sure two tickets can be found for you and Mrs. Harper, if you want.

The invitation, I mean my invitation, came from Wajdi Mouawad. There, I knew what book to send you, I had our hundredth book. Wajdi Mouawad is not only the Artistic Director for French Theatre at the NAC, he’s also a brilliant playwright. I liked the idea of ending our book club with a play of his for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I haven’t sent you enough drama (or poetry). Secondly, because what better way to signal to you that art is partial and unfinished because its meaning is forever changing and evolving, that art demands a constant and renewed involvement on the part of the reader, listener, viewer, that art is the work and joy of a lifetime for maker and receiver, what better way to signal that than by sending you a play script, a play on the page, which is partial and unfinished because it’s unstaged? By doing so, I end our book club not with a full stop, but with suspension points. Thirdly, a play by Mouawad is an excellent choice for our final book together because he’s a multilingual Québécois of Lebanese origin, and thus a typical hybrid Canadian, and I wanted to end with a Canadian writer. Fourthly, I’m sending you Incendies—Scorched, in Linda Gaboriau’s lively English translation—because, as I’m sure you already know, the Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic adaptation of the play has just received the nod of an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. Yet another Canadian work of art receiving international acclaim. Fifthly, and lastly, I’m sending you a Mouawad play because, as I just said, he’s brilliant. The man has got fire in his guts and bile on his tongue. He’s an Angry Young Man (do you know the movement? British, postwar, vocally dissatisfied with the status quo—I once saw their emblematic play, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and years ago, while living in Mexico City, I had the privilege of meeting and hearing a reading by another of their lions, Arnold Wesker).

Scorched is appropriately titled. Part of the action of the play takes place in a war-torn country which, though unnamed, is obviously Lebanon, a hot place where one is likely to be scorched by the sun. But more to the point, the play scorches the soul. It tells the story of a twin brother and sister, Simon and Janine, and their mother, Nawal, who falls into complete silence for a reason her children will discover only after her death. The play turns on a revelation that is truly disturbing. I read it and felt dazed. And this is after merely reading it. The effect upon hearing it from a stage, revealed by an actor, brought to life, would be something close to shell shock, I’d think. And the emotional impact lingers in the mind, too. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story that more potently symbolizes the horror and insanity of war. In a few pages the power of art is revealed: just a few people talking on a stage, pretending to be someone else somewhere else, quite obviously a device—and yet, at the end of it, you walk away feeling as if you’d lived through a war that’s ripped your life apart.

I’d love to see the play staged, and I can’t wait to see the movie.

Now that we’re closing down our literary duet, there are so many books I regret not sending you. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tristram Shandy, Martin Buber’s I-Thou, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, more of J.M. Coetzee, the list goes on. Oh well, they will wait for you on a shelf in a bookstore or library somewhere. Books are patient. They have time. They’ll still be there long after you and I are gone.

What I’ve been trying to do in this long epistolary dead-end with you, beyond the plying of irony, is to make the following point: that the books available in bookstores and libraries throughout Canada, that the exhibits to be seen in this nation’s galleries and museums, that the movies coming out of this country, that the plays and dance pieces seen on its stages, that the music heard in its concert venues, be they bars or orchestra halls, that the clothes that come from our designers, the cuisine from our best restaurants, and so on and so forth with every creative act of Canadians, that all these cultural manifestations are not mere entertainment, something to pass the time and relax the mind after the “serious” business of the day is over with, the earning of money—no, no, no. In fact, these manifestations are the various elements that add up to the sum total of Canadian civilization. Take these away and nothing worthwhile remains of Canadian civilization. Corporations come and go, leaving hardly any trace, while art endures.

Yet it is corporations and their voracious demands that regulate our lives nowadays, far more than theatres, bookstores and museums. Why is that? Why is it that people work so crazily hard these days, at the expense of family, health, and happiness? Have we not perhaps forgotten that work is a means to an end, that we work so that we might live, and not the other way round?  We’ve become slaves to our work and have forgotten that it’s in moments of leisure and stillness, when we’re free from working with a hoe or at a keyboard, that we can contemplate life and become fully ourselves. We work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as they move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves. And so that has been the point of my fruitless book-gifting to you: to raise my voice against Canada becoming a nation of erasers.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A history of reading, a history of being,
From a Canadian writer (and reader),
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I have only now and then sent you non-fiction, but Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading is so perfectly suited for our sort-of dialogue that I’ve chosen it for this week. It’s an engagingly erudite and cosmopolitan work that effortlessly whizzes through history and over borders, as if planet Earth were a book and Manguel had carefully read it through, noting every reference historical, literary, religious, philosophical, physiological, archaeological, sociological, biographical, commercial, geographic, technical, personal, and anecdotal that had to do with reading. As it turns out, reading is everything. Not because everyone is a reader of books. That is not the case. Rather, because the world, and everything in it, is indeed a book of sorts. Manguel quotes Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass:

In every object, mountain, tree, and star—in every birth
          and life,
As part of each—evolv’d from each—meaning, behind
          the ostent,
A mystic cipher waits infolded.

(Good stuff, Whitman. He’s a thrilling poet, one whose poetry quickens the reader’s sense for life.) The world, like a book, demands elucidation. So an archaeologist reads a fossil the way a reader reads a detective novel, wondering What happened here? So a lover reads the face of his or her beloved the way a reader reads a romance, finding comfort and security there. So a politician reads a poll the way a believer reads scripture, asking What is my fate? And just as it’s a pity when a reader finds it not his or her worth to finish one book, and then another, and then another, and so on, until that reader becomes, ipso facto, a non-reader, so it’s a pity when a man, woman or child turns from the world, feeling it not worth the read. In both books and world there is mystery, a “cipher…infolded,” and what a joy it is to bathe, to swim, nearly to drown in that mystery. Among the many fine qualities of Manguel’s book is this one, that by dint of the abundance of curious and interesting facts, it jubilantly makes the case that we are a curious and interesting species.

Unlike a novel, which is like a long thread that must remain taut if it is good and so requires on the part of the reader an attention that is regular, if not constant, A History of Reading is composed of many short, colourful threads and benefits from stint reading. Manguel’s style is leisurely and elegant and it links with no apparent strain its many elements. Despite its breadth, A History of Reading remains a personal work, not only because Manguel’s charming, urbane  I voice regularly slips in to share an experience or anecdote from his long and satisfying life as a reader, but because it really is a personal work. Note the article in the title; it’s A History, not The History of Reading. With this choice, Manguel is merely reflecting one of the delightful powers of a reader: to select and interpret as he or she wishes. Manguel’s history of reading might be very different from yours or mine. His is rich, varied, joyful. What would yours be like?

I do believe that my next package to you, book and letter, will be my last.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes for 2011,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Why not start the new year, which we hope will be good, with something old and most certainly good? A few weeks ago I happened to bump into Doug Thorpe, the genial chair of the English Department at the University of Saskatchewan. He’s very knowledgeable about Sir Walter Scott, so I asked him if he didn’t have a short Scott to propose for our reading purposes. He shook his head. “There are no short works by Sir Walter Scott. He was terribly long-winded. Every tome he wrote has at least six hundred pages.” So much for Sir Walter Scott and our busy-busy-busy-short-book-club. Did he have anything else to propose, off the top of his head, I asked. He thought for a second. “Have you sent him Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?” I hadn’t. Doug invited me into his office and fished around his bookshelves for a few moments. “Here you go,” he said, handing me a copy of the book in question.

Indeed, here you go. I was doubly touched by the gift in that a name on the front cover jumped out at me: James Winny, the editor and translator. James Winny taught at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, where I did an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He was my tutorial leader in a first year introductory English course I took. I’m sure Professor Winny entirely forgot me the moment our course ended, but I still remember him clearly. Once a week, eight or so of us students would troop into his office, where he would lead us into discussion on a work of literature. He was a patrician figure in his sixties, with a resonant voice and an elegant English accent, and he was friendly in a phlegmatic way. Times have changed. Now, in a university system in Canada more geared to producing economically useful workers than critically thinking citizens, it’s unimaginable that eight first-year students would have hour-long weekly meetings with a full professor, but so it was at the time, in the early 1980s at Trent University. Those tutorials marked me. Once Professor Winny read aloud T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. He mastered a range of English accents and he brought the poem to life for us, did he ever. I remember another discussion we had about Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which he deemed—with an authority that nonetheless felt like a suggestion—a perfect novel. With each meeting, he made us see more in a work than our immature minds had first seized. It was a thrill to be led on such an intellectual ride.

I remember James Winny clearly, but I hadn’t thought of him in ages, and here, twenty-five years later, his name and his work were suddenly before me. It’s been a pleasure to be in the orbit of his mind again. I wish I had been in a class in which he discussed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Sir Gawain was composed by an anonymous poet in the late 14th century “in a regional dialect characteristic of north-western England,” as Winny’s introduction informs us. The advantage of the Broadview edition I’m sending you is that it’s a bilingual one, with the original text printed on the even pages, on the left, and the translated text on odd pages, on the right. To me, the Middle English dialect is nearly opaque, and I have no patience for this kind of linguistic game. To every language I don’t speak I’m ready to grant all the beauty and subtlety the human mind can come up with, and a cultural content greater than any museum could fit in its galleries, but the first thing I notice is the barrier of incomprehension. I might as well be talking to a clarinet—except a clarinet is meant to be beautiful, while a language is meant to communicate, with beauty a bonus. I find that my eyes, looking at the text on the left, jump about, seeking words or phrases it can understand, and they quickly grow weary of the exercise, whereas the pages on the right shatter and grip with their clarity. On the right, I don’t so much see words as images. But see for yourself. Perhaps you’ll find enjoyment in deciphering the Middle English.

What surprised me in Winny’s translation into modern English of Sir Gawain was how close the story was brought to me. Over and over as I read the poem, one thing came through: personality, be it that of Sir Gawain, or the Green Knight, or Lord and Lady Bertilak. Compare that to another work of old European literature I sent you recently, the German Nibelungenlied. I never imagined Sivrit or Kriemhilt, Prunhilt or Hagen as real people. They were rather literary symbols embedded in a vivid story. Sir Gawain is also such a symbol—for the codes of chivalry and courtly love, which can be seen as medieval ideals that tried to reconcile the loving kindness of Christ with the brutal social realities of the time—but he’s a symbol whose human form seems palpably real. Take these lines:

And when the knight saw his blood spatter the snow
He leapt forward with both feet more than a spear’s length,
Snatched up his helmet and crammed it on his head,
Jerked his shoulders to bring his splendid shield down,
Drew out a gleaming sword and fiercely he speaks—
Never since that man was born of his mother
Had he ever in the world felt half so relieved—
“Hold your attack, sir, don’t try it again!”

It’s the leaping forward, the rush to get his equipment in place, the plain statement of his relief and then the fearful warning—I can’t imagine Sivrit of the Nibelungenlied displaying such all-too-human emotions.

Or take the stanzas in Part Three in which Sir Gawain, lying in his bed resting, is repeatedly tempted by Lady Bertilak. The eroticism of those pages reached up and tempted me. I don’t know how Sir Gawain resisted those very human feelings.

What’s fascinating to read is the conscious working-out in Gawain’s mind of what his code requires of him. We see a man trying to uphold his ideals, and lamenting his failure when he doesn’t manage it. It’s not only interesting; it’s moving. Each one of us, you and me, must struggle every day to live up to our ideals.

Sir Gawain is a work of remarkable intimacy. That is achieved not only by the small number of characters, but also by the interiority of the drama. Despite being spread over much of the British isle, a wide geographic scale for the time, the story essentially unfolds in the close company of Sir Gawain. The reader is Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote.

The descriptions of the seasons, winter in particular, are lovely. The hunting scenes are breathtaking. And all is carried to the reader by a poetic language that is clear, vigorous and true, that truth whereby language sorts and makes sense of reality. Such language comes only from great writers, and our anonymous poet from north-western England was surely that, a great writer.

I’ve told you nothing of the plot. Sir Gawain is at Camelot with Arthur and the other Knights of the Round Table. It is Christmas, many games are being played, and a good time is being had by all (in this story, there is much having of a good time, the comfort of it, the fun of it). Then, into the hall, strides a knight who is a stranger to everyone. He is a giant, but he makes a striking impression for another reason: both he and his horse are entirely green, bright emerald green. He strides in, gets off his horse and tells them he wants to play a Christmas game: he will receive a blow unprotected from anyone in exchange for returning a blow a year and a day later. He taunts the court until Gawain steps forward. Gawain takes hold of an axe. The Green Knight stands unflinching. Gawain slices his head off. Far from falling over, the Green Knight reaches for his head and lifts it in the air. The head speaks: See you in a year and a day, Sir Gawain. The Green Knight then climbs onto his horse, head still in hand, and rides off.

A year goes by quickly when its end is dreaded. In the fall, Sir Gawain sets out to find the Green Knight and fulfil his part of the terrible bargain…

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can be read as a Christian allegory—though one that treads lightly, aware of the weakness of the flesh—or it can be read simply as a good story. Either way, I hope it helps you prepare for the challenges, temptations and rewards of 2011.

Happy New Year.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

incl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Three French lessons,
Three Christmas gifts,
From a Canadian writer,
Merry Christmas,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

The comic book is a well-established Franco-Belgian tradition. I grew up on it, having spent four years as a child in France. I adored Asterix and Obelix, Tintin, Lucky Luke, Spirou and Fantasio, Philemon, and many others. When I returned to Canada at the age of twelve, I found the comic books that were most widely available here—Marvel Comics—to be compelling, but grim and humourless—and foreign, since Marvel Comics are American.

You’ve made commendable efforts to master the French language, as I mentioned in an earlier letter, so I thought I’d send you three comic books in French, Le géant de la gaffe, by André Franquin, and Le lotus bleu, by Hergé, both from Belgium, and Paul à Québec, by Michel Rabagliati, who is from Quebec.

Le géant de la gaffe features Gaston Lagaffe, an office boy who is nominally in charge of reader correspondence at the magazine he works at, Spirou. In fact, he does nothing but tend to his own interests, which vary from the artistic to the technological and never, ever involve letters from readers. He is prone to gaffes, which has the same meaning in French as in English. But Gaston’s gaffes are in a class of their own. He is the terror of his fellow office workers and, indeed, of his entire neighbourhood. Curiously, despite his many catastrophic misadventures, he’s never fired.

Each page in the album stands on its own, telling its own gag, so there is no continuous story. But the same characters appear throughout. The genius in the Gaston Lagaffe series is primarily visual. Take page 8, in which Gaston offers Prunelle, his boss, a ride in his ancient car. He’s just installed a newfangled device, seat belts (we’re in 1977). Prunelle is a little worried, but Gaston reassures him: he installed them himself. Alas, Gaston has accidentally attached Prunelle’s seat belt to the motor’s drive shaft, so as he drives off the seat belt starts to wind itself around the shaft, pulling Prunelle down through his seat into the frame of the car. Have a look at the middle illustration, three rows down, in which Prunelle has been completely sucked into his seat. See his raised foot, his clenched fist, hear the loud CRRRAC sound. It’s unspeakably funny. Even better: page 29, in which Gaston has given Lebrac, a colleague, a taste of his chilli pepper sauce to see if it’s spicy enough. Behold the effect on Lebrac. The drawings are extraordinarily expressive.

By comparison, Tintin is quite witless. The jokes, when there are any, aren’t particularly funny. And the drawing style is more workmanlike. But the genius with Tintin lies elsewhere, in its narrative breadth. The long Tintin series—the first one, Tintin au Congo, came out in 1930, and the last one, the twenty-second, Tintin et les Picaros, in 1976—is dramatic in intent and has endeared itself to millions of readers around the world because of the adventures told within. Le lotus bleu, the Tintin I am offering you this week, is an early one, from 1934 (in its original black-and-white edition), but even there the adventure sweeps you along. And some of the illustrations are nonetheless startling. Have a look at the large ones on pages 6 and 26, for example.

And we should place Hergé in his historical context. He practically invented the illustrative language of comic strips. The way the stories are told frame by frame so that the narrative is clear and fluid, with close-ups and wide shots; the details to convey emotion, for example stars circling the head for pain or beads of water for anxiety or wonderment; the ambition to tell entire stories that are memorable and gripping—all this started with Georges Rémi (he inverted his initials to create his pen name). I don’t want to venture too far, not being a historian of the subject, but I do believe that Tintin is the grandfather of the Franco-Belgian narrative comic strip. He is the giant upon whose shoulders subsequent artists stood, including Franquin and, on our side of the Atlantic, Michel Rabagliati, the author of Paul à Québec.

Paul à Québec is the sixth in a series. It tells a sad story, of the illness and dying of Paul’s father-in-law. It’s very moving. I doubt you’ll be able to finish the story with your eyes still dry. Paul à Québec speaks with a confidence that shows how the comic book has come of age, capable of telling stories as serious as any told using written language, with illustrative details that are as powerful as the well-chosen metaphors of an accomplished novelist. Paul is entirely rooted in the language and culture of Quebec. I read it with a degree of nostalgia, recognizing many of the elements (the strange restaurant in the opening scene, for example, that stands between Montreal and Quebec). This is where I come from, I thought. These are my people, these are my stories.

I wish you and your family a merry Christmas.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

Encl: three inscribed comic books in French

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

One of the great monuments of 20th century European theatre is Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello. A few biographical details, quickly: Italian; 1867 to 1936; short stories, novels, plays; Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.

Six Characters was first performed in 1921. Like many daring works, it divided before conquering the public. It made Pirandello famous around the world. It was a play like none before it. It starts with a bare stage, a space not pretending to be a living room or a garden or anywhere else, but only that: a bare stage. Eventually some actors wander on, soon joined by a director, a prompter, a prop man and the various other members of a theatre company. They are about to rehearse a play. Now, the device of a play within a play is not so revolutionary. Shakespeare used it in Hamlet, for example. But that is a finished play within a finished play. Here, at the start of Six Characters, the inner mechanics of that artifice called theatre is displayed with complete nudity, so to speak; the actors appear as themselves, standing around, chatting, smoking, reading a newspaper, and the normally hidden director and others are out in full view. It all has the appearance of real, ordinary life. Then—and this is where the Pirandellian revolution starts—the doorkeeper apologetically interrupts the director to inform him that some people are here to see him. The director is annoyed. A rehearsal is never to be interrupted! But these people, they’re insisting, says the doorkeeper. In fact, they’ve already made their way to the stage, six of them, a man, a woman, a young woman, a young man, and two children. The director asks impatiently: Who are you, what do you want?  

The Father replies: “We have come in search of an author.” They—that is, the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Boy, and the Child—are characters abandoned by an author. They’ve come to this stage hoping that the director will become the author who will allow them to fulfil their purpose. They are met by disbelief and consternation on the part of the director and the actors. After all, they are not ghosts, these characters, they are flesh and blood. Yet they insist that they are characters. Do they apologize for their strange status? Not at all, because, “you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”

The words “real” and “true” come up often in the play. They are at the heart of what the play is about. The fanciful premise of characters appearing in real life is never abandoned during Six Characters. On the contrary, it is insisted upon throughout. What Pirandello aims to do is blur the distinction between the real and the true, the concrete and the imaginary. Because what is real may not contain any truth beyond a base material factuality and what is true may not need the stamp of reality to be any more true. Such insistence is not twee literary fancy. Much of life is illusion. Who you were yesterday, Mr. Harper, when you were a Young Turk of the Reform Party, has vanished. It was real, but then it vanished. Who’s to say that who you are today won’t once again disappear into a haze as you move into who you will be tomorrow? Billions of people on Earth have similarly disappeared, their reality dissipated into nothingness, first in subtle ways as they mutated from one incarnation into the next as they grew up and then grew old, and then wholly and concretely as they were swallowed up by the oblivion of death. Look at the literary character, on the other hand. A character is always who he or she is, never changing, permanent, immortal. Every audience that has seen Hamlet has, eventually, died, but Hamlet remains, alive and unchanging in the pages of the play. As the Father says at one point, a character “is always ‘somebody.’ But a man…may very well be ‘nobody’.”

More twee fancy, you might huff. But think of it this way, then: art is the essence of life. Art is life minus the humdrum, the ordinary, the mundane. In a novel, a character never wastes the readers’ time with a trips to the supermarket or with the brushing and flossing of teeth, and in a play the viewer is spared the Hellos and the How are yous and the other banalities that pepper our daily speech. That is left out because the novel and the play are there to relate only the essential. That being so, they do indeed have a truth greater than that of much dull and inane reality. If you continue to insist that novels and plays nonetheless lack reality, shouldn’t that be said with pity rather than arrogance? Don’t we want life to be more like art? Many, many people would like that, I suspect. And some people actually pull it off. Isn’t that a common expression, to say of someone who makes a vivid impression upon us, that he or she is a “real character.” That’s right out of Pirandello!

Pirandello’s point, as I see it, is to question the content and appearance of reality. Reality is less real than it might appear. And truth can be hard to see, let alone accept. Another way of putting it would be to say that life is more a product of the imagination than we realize. So we too, at times, are characters searching for an author, for direction, for meaning, while at other times we are actors, consciously—or perhaps unconsciously—playing our role. 

I hope you get to see Six Characters in Search of an Author on stage one day. I saw a modern version a couple years ago in London. It was bracing stuff. 

I’m sorry the translation I’m sending you is not very good. It’s nearly sixty years old and in dated British English. One character even exclaims, “By Jove!” It makes me cringe, but it’s the only one I could find on short notice. And the book is falling apart, too. But that’s only the passing reality of an otherwise truthful work of art.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
To have chatted with Thomas Hardy,
To be like Rosie,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

The cover is dreadful, but the book is good. Cakes and Ale is the first Somerset Maugham I’m sending you. Maugham, an English writer who lived between 1874 and 1965, was a prolific author of novels, plays, short stories, and travel writing. His masterpiece is Of Human Bondage. Oh, what the lovesick soul submits itself to! But Philip Carey’s misery at the hands of Mildred will be for another time, when you have more time to read: Of Human Bondage is a long book, close to seven hundred pages. So Cakes and Ale instead, at a neat 190 pages.

Maugham would not generally be placed at the forefront of English literature, I don’t think. He was too old-fashioned in his technique, too lacking in newness and experimentation. He was writing novels at the same time as his modernist contemporaries like Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf were rewriting the novel. But who cares, it’s not a competition. So long as the reading is enjoyable, let’s keep on reading. Maugham relied on those mainstays of the good story—character, plot, emotion—and did very well with them.

Cakes and Ale features members of my own profession. I thought you might find that amusing, seeing how scribblers operate. The main characters—Edward Driffield, Alroy Kear, William Ashenden—are all writers. The first is portrayed as at the forefront of late Victorian literature, the second as having more ambition than talent, while the last is our modest but slightly cantankerous narrator. It is said that Maugham based Edward Driffield on Thomas Hardy. Maugham mentions in his Author’s preface meeting the elderly Hardy once at a dinner party and chatting alone with him for three-quarters of an hour (imagine that: chatting with Thomas Hardy!), but explicitly denies the link. He has this surprising assessment of Hardy: “I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was eighteen with such enthusiasm that I determined to marry a milkmaid, but I had never been so much taken with Hardy’s other books as were most of my contemporaries, and I did not think his English very good.” So says Maugham, but then his character William Ashenden gives the same lukewarm assessment of the fictitious great writer Edward Driffield. To give a character an aura of fame is difficult, and Maugham succeeds admirably with Driffield, but if it helps you to think of Driffield as Hardy, go for it. There’s no problem with adding fiction to fiction. It will only increase your reading pleasure.

What links these three characters, certainly the first and the third directly, is the voluptuous, carefree, beautiful Rosie Driffield. She is Edward Driffield’s first wife, William Ashenden’s former lover, and Alroy Kear’s problem. Kear, you see, has been charged by Driffield’s second wife to write the great man’s biography, and the shamelessly promiscuous Rosie is both awkward to deal with and impossible to avoid in his biography.

What is shocking to see in the novel is how considerations of class so regiment the lives of the characters. There are people whom one can know and frequent, and entire classes of others whom one should deal with strictly on a stiff professional basis. Rosie stands out as the only character who lives the life she wants, unencumbered by such notions of propriety. And that means living her emotions, no matter where they lead her.

See if you like this first sample of Maugham. His short stories are wonderful too.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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Reply:

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To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Three years ago (yes, that long ago) I sent you the novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by the English writer Jeanette Winterson. If you remember—and hopefully enjoyed—it was the story of a girl, Jeanette, who is caught between two worlds, the world of evangelical Christianity and the world of her nascent lesbian sexuality. She must choose to which she wants to belong. It is one or the other. She cannot be both Christian and lesbian, not at that time, not where she lived.

The novel I’m sending you this week, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by the American writer Sherman Alexie, plays out a somewhat similar conflict. Junior, the protagonist, a teenage Spokane Indian, lives on a reservation in Washington State. It’s a lousy place. Most of the adults are poor, miserable alcoholics, and most of the kids are poor, miserable and on their way to becoming alcoholics. Junior decides one day to switch schools. He’ll leave the school on the rez and go to the high school in Reardan, the small farming community just down the road. But there’s a hitch: Reardan is an all-white school. The only other Indian there is the school mascot. And many on the rez see Junior as a traitor to his people for leaving. But Junior feels that if he stays, a part of him will die. He goes ahead and starts attending Reardan High School.

True Diary is a very funny book in a sad sort of way. The prose, simple and effective, is aimed at teens. The story will speak to any reader, teen or adult. It asks difficult questions. How do you get on with life when your life really sucks? What keeps you going when the going gets tough? Alexie’s answer is that earthly salvation depends on one’s spirit, on the ability to find inner resources to endure and overcome adversity. But there is a cost to every battle, even the ones that are won. So Junior does well at Reardan High, but he’s also now living in a white world and leaving behind the Indian self he knew. Unlike Jeanette’s dilemma in Oranges, which demands an exclusive choice, Junior’s dilemma is less radical. It’s not a question of one identity or another, but of two identities uncomfortably merging, white and Indian, hence the title: a part-time Indian. In saving one part of himself from dying on the rez, will another part of Junior die in the white world?

It would be nice to think that one day Junior will stop being tormented by these perceived existential opposites, that his Indian self will be enriched by becoming a little bit white (whatever that might mean) and his white world will profit by becoming a little bit Indian (whatever that might mean), until there is no longer any friction between the two worlds. It’s good, after all, to be something only part-time. Part-time Indian, part-time white, part-time writer, part-time father, part-time this, part-time that—isn’t that just another way of saying that Junior has grown into a normal, 21st-century hybrid human being, a rich world unto himself, varied and complex but still whole?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Have you made a mistake?
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Politics is the art of compromise, the saying goes. When a newspaper prints a photograph of two politicians shaking hands and smiling broadly, whether in Washington, the Middle East, or elsewhere, it’s likely that a compromise is being celebrated, a breakthrough in which opposing parties have reached an agreement by making concessions. The fruitful compromise is the great enabler of social peace, whether between competing groups or of a lone person relating to others. Any individual or group that stands too firmly, that is unwilling to negotiate in any way with another, is soon at the heart of incessant social friction and loses any peace it might wish to have. To compromise, on the other hand, helps not only to establish social harmony, it also helps to build relationships, since a compromise is normally the result of open dialogue and increasing familiarity with one’s adversary. Such relationships, in addition to making a compromise possible, may also go to diluting the differences that provoked the antagonism in the first place. In politics, the fruitful compromise often makes the difficulties go away. Take Northern Ireland, for example. The Troubles, as they came to be called, started in the late 1960s, and for three decades Protestant unionists and Catholics nationalists were at each other’s throats, killing men, women, and children, some actively involved in the Troubles, others mere bystanders. The hatred couldn’t be more intense. Yet eventually, by dint of slow, unremitting effort, the warring parties signed a truce, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and now peace generally prevails in Northern Ireland. A compromise ended the Troubles and, over time, as peace becomes part of the social fabric, the root causes of the Troubles will, one hopes, disappear. The compromise of the Good Friday Agreement has made, and continues to make, the difficulties go away. That is good politics.

Now, compromise is not your way. You went into politics early on, without any entrepreneurial or significant work experience to teach you the value of yielding. There was the National Citizens Coalition, of which you were president for a few years, but being an advocacy group, it’s hardly the place to learn the motto “Let’s talk”. You stand by your principles and ideology and wait—expect—the country to come round to your views. To be honest, I doubt that’s going to happen. You’ve been in office for over four years now, at a time when the opposition has been fragmented and, in the case of the Liberals, discredited, and still you’ve only managed two minority governments in a row, and polls don’t show your fortunes improving significantly.

Let me introduce you then to Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Yevtushenko is a Russian poet who was born in 1933. He was twenty years old, and coming of age as a poet, when Stalin died in 1953. Yevtushenko profited from the let-up in repression in Soviet life  that followed under Nikita Khrushchev and quickly became the poetic voice for a post-Stalin generation that yearned for greater freedom (it’s at this time that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I sent you a while a go, was also published). Yevtushenko wrote poems that no poet living under Stalin would have dared to write, not if that poet wanted to stay alive. An example is Babi Yar, which is included in the collection of poems I’m sending you this week. Babi Yar is a ravine on the northern edge of Kiev, in Ukraine. An estimated 100,000 innocent people of all ages were murdered there by the Nazis. The victims were Roma and POWs but overwhelmingly they were Jewish. Yevtushenko, who is not Jewish, wrote the poem to protest the proposed building of a sports stadium by the Soviet authorities on the site of the massacre. The poem mourns the Jewish deaths, but also excoriates the Russian people for their Jew-hatred. It’s a moving poem, and also, in taking on explicitly the victimhood of the Jews as the poet’s own, affirming his common humanity with them, a brave poem coming from a citizen of a land so notoriously inimical to Jews.

Yevtushenko gained great fame and honour both East and West in the 1950s and 60s. He travelled extensively to the West. If you look him up on Wikipedia, you will see a 1972 picture of him chatting with President Richard Nixon (which reminds me that President Obama wrote to me—who knew American Presidents had such a history of paying attention to writers). “Here,” the Soviet Union seemed to saying, “is proof that we are not a repressive society. We too can produce great poetry that is critical of us and here is our poster boy.”

How does his poetry measure up? Well, in this slim volume, it fares quite well. Except for Babi Yar, politics intrudes very little into it. Or no more than politics might in a collection of American or Canadian poetry. Much of it is quite bucolic, reminding me that Russia, the largest country in the world even without its former Soviet satellite states, is, ipso facto, mostly rural. Many of the poems exude a common sense and an approachable humanity that brings to mind Robert Frost.

But did he compromise himself? The Soviet Union was from start to finish a repressive state where every freedom was, if not outright curtailed, then under constant surveillance. In such a state, was it possible to be a free poet? Yevtushenko was criticized by many, including by no less than the great Russian-American poet and critic Joseph Brodsky (have you heard of him?), as a duplicitous fake, as a poet who had around his neck a collar that was tied to a leash held by the Kremlin and that he barked and growled only when and so much as it suited them.

Clearly, some writers paid a greater price for their writings, being forced either into exile, like Solzhenitsyn or Brodsky, or, worse, into jail in the Soviet Union. Was it perhaps the case that Yevtushenko hoped his country would change and open itself to greater civil liberties? Maybe he simply loved his country, including its communist ideals? Maybe the idea of permanent exile, of living forever in a country whole language, ways and food would be foreign, chilled his soul. In other words, did Yevtushenko simply believe in his country in a way that Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky did not?

I have no position on the matter. I don’t know enough about Yevtushenko or Soviet history, and so cannot judge. His poetry is a pleasure to read, but the political man behind the poems remains elusive. What is certain is that Yevtushenko has been accused of compromising himself in his dealings with the Soviet state. His standing has paid a price. Compromise, you see, does not have in the arts the worth that it has in politics. The compromised artist is likely to be seen as a failure, while the compromising politician, as a success. If politics is the art of compromise, then art is the politics of uncompromise. Artists need and fiercely defend their freedom. It is precisely from that freedom, from that individuality, that art springs. To compromise, to conform, to give in is to kill the creative impulse. True art is uncompromising. The great artist lets rip, saying “This is where I stand, this is my vision—take it or leave it!” In the arts, there is no parliament to which the artist is accountable, no Question Period to which he or she must submit. Art is the place for those who do not accept compromise.

Hence my question to you, Mr. Harper. Have you not chosen the wrong profession? Could it be the case that you are a frustrated artist? 

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Do you play chess? I’m sure you have. It has a rare allure among games. Stefan Zweig puts it nicely:

…ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance–but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end?

(It occurs to me that Zweig’s musing could also apply to sex, except for the invocation of sterility, but that’s neither here nor there.) Chess is a game of stumping complexity. With the exception of go, I can’t think of another game that offers so many possible plays. And there’s another appeal to chess: the complete absence of luck. Chess is an entirely logical game in which there is no “luck of the draw”. You win or you lose entirely based on the mental powers you bring to the chequered board. And so the aura of genius that surrounds the great chess players of history. But if genius it is, it’s a peculiar one, deep perhaps but also very narrow, confined to the movements of pieces on a board. Bobby Fisher once said, “Chess is life.” Well, not really. Life very much has an element of luck to it, the luck of where and to whom we are born, the luck of our genetic inheritance, the luck of our circumstances, and so on. Nor is life logical. In fact, according to a good number of thinkers and writers, it’s not even certain that life makes sense. But chess has simple rules that yield a vastly complex game, just as life, one might argue, has simple rules that yields a vastly complex experience. And we meet opposition in life, just as there is opposition in chess, black against white. So the parallel is rough, but it pleases, this simplification of life in which only force of personality matters and fate is entirely in one’s own hands. One looks at the chessboard and imagines a battle scene—or perhaps Question Period.

Stefan Zweig’s Chess (also known at The Royal Game or Chess Story) was published posthumously after the author’s suicide in 1942 in Brazil, to which he had fled with his wife to escape the Nazis. Zweig is the quintessentially continental European writer of the interwar period, a man caught between bloodbaths who tried to make sense of a world gone mad. He did this by applying himself to the “real” world in a series of biographies and by “escaping” that world in works such as Chess. But escape is never possible. The reality of Zweig’s life seeped into his fiction. You will see this in Chess. The story takes place over the course of a few days on a passenger steamer travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. Aboard is the world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic. Some chess amateurs lure him into a game, him against all of them. Czentovic easily defeats them. They play again. The amateurs look like they’re once again going to lose. But then a voice from the crowd makes a surprising suggestion for the next move. They follow his advice, as they do for the following moves, each given urgently by this stranger. To their amazement, the game ends in a draw. The stranger reluctantly agrees to play a game one-on-one the next day with the world champion. But who is this stranger? Where—how—did he acquire his prowess at chess? Chess has that unity of time, action and place that Aristotle said was a key characteristic of the good story, and it is a good story indeed. It sucks you in. You climb aboard the ship in your mind and you hurry, like the chess players, to the smoking room where the games are being played. But despite the appealing fictional setting, so removed from the world and its hurly-burly, the world can’t be so easily forgotten. Stefan Zweig’s experience with the Nazis infuses the middle section of his novella. Chess there is portrayed as a necessary escapism, an obsession that allows his character to hold onto sanity.

Because that is another appeal that chess holds: a game that is entirely logical, where wild emotions have no play, where rigorous sanity wins the day and defeat comes only from an inner lapse of reason, such a game, in a world gone mad, is a relief.

Perhaps there are days on Parliament Hill when you feel like retreating to your office and playing chess, Mr. Harper. After all, you’re still stuck with a minority government, and then there’s the uproar over proroguing Parliament, the fight over the Afghan detainee documents, the billion-dollar summits, the furore over the elimination of the mandatory census, the fruitless effort to kill the gun registry, the fury of the veterans ombudsman, and other controversies—these must wear you down. You like to be in control. You have notions about how things should be, but constantly you don’t get your way. Constantly, the unpredictable happens. Wouldn’t it be nice if politics were a chess game and you could just sit down and bully your way to a checkmate?

Alas, thankfully, the political system in Canada is not so arranged. Instead, you’re playing a life game in which you’ve lost a fair number of pawns. How will the game end, I wonder?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I was in Germany last week to promote my latest novel and I thought that while there I’d find something German for you. My first thought was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a virtuoso piece of short fiction. But as I was browsing through the foreign-language section of a bookstore in Frankfurt, my eyes fell upon the book I’m sending you this week, The Nibelungenlied. It’s the medieval illustration on the cover that drew my attention, and then I was further drawn by the imprimatur just below the title: Oxford World’s Classics. This was a classic I’d never heard of—what better reason to read it? The title is somewhat unattractive, but I assure you: this is a great book.

The Nibelungenlied arose from the oral tradition and was finally written down—whether with accuracy or great liberties is not known—by an anonymous poet roughly in the year 1200, and it is, in the words of the introduction by the translator Cyril Edwards, “the greatest medieval German heroic poem or lay, a revenge saga on an epic scale, which has justly been compared with Homer…” The introduction, by the way, is useful but not essential. You can plunge directly into the epic. Despite the chasm of time between then and now, and the ensuing profound changes in thinking and mores, there is an emotional appeal to the work that makes it intemporal. Our world isn’t inhabited by knights and damsels any longer, but love, devotion, heroism, envy, treachery, lust for revenge—these are emotions we still feel today, and they continue to feature in novels and movies of all genres, from literary ones to romances and thrillers.

The language of the work, both of the minstrel narrator and of the various characters, is gracious and courtly, full of ornate flattery. Every knight is a hero of blinding good looks, dressed in the finest garments the world has ever seen, mightier than Samson or Arnold Schwarzenegger, and richer than Croesus or Bill Gates. And in a like way with the ladies. But the action betrays the words. Treachery is done after the nicest exchanges. Queens follow up social niceties by calling each other wenches and whores, and a knight who has sworn eternal loyalty to another then proceeds to stab him in the back. It makes for glorious reading.

I doubt The Nibelungenlied describes with anthropological accuracy the actual ways of central Europe’s nobility a thousand years ago. It is a work of literature, not of history. But there’s something to be gained thereby for the modern reader. If true ways are not described, ideal ways certainly are. The treachery of Prunhilt, of Gunther and, especially, of Hagen—you will see how profoundly perfidious they are—stands in strong contrast to the good and honourable behaviour of those they betray, Sivrit and Kriemhilt. The characteristics of this good and honourable behaviour offer a fascinating look at the mindset of the time.

For example, you might notice the surprising cosmopolitanism. The characters in The Nibelungenlied come from a variety of places: Burgundy, Netherlands, Iceland, Hungary, Austria, Denmark. (One name place never mentioned is Germany, which didn’t exist yet as a nation; Bavaria comes up in passing, but only as a dangerous nest of brigands.) Yet all these characters mix and match without any linguistic or cultural friction. And the good relations go beyond language. The Hungarian characters, with King Etzel at their head, are Huns, and therefore pagans. Nonetheless, they get along very well with the Christian characters. Better than that: Etzel, King of the Huns (historically, Attila the Hun) marries Kriemhilt, devout Christian lady and widow of slain Sivrit.

What struck me even more in the relations between the various nobles is the material generosity of their exchanges. I had in mind that these kings and queens, these lords and ladies would keep tight control of their goods and chattels. Being at the top of the feudal pyramid, they would be the recipients of much of the commodities produced by their vassals. And don’t wealthy people tend to cling to their wealth? Don’t the rich hoard, giving to charity only as much as will not diminish their abundance, as in the parable of the poor widow in the Bible? Well, not in The Nibelungenlied. Take this line, describing what Kriemhilt does when she arrives at the court of her new husband, King Etzel:

The queen then distributed gold and garments, silver and precious stones. All that she had brought across the Rhine with her to the Huns had to be given away in its entirety.

In its entirety? And this is just one instance of giving. Such abundant giving happens again and again in The Nibelungenlied. People are constantly giving, giving, giving, and not just to allies, which might have an element of self-interest. No, the giving also goes to guests who are strangers. This constant gifting reminds me of a book I sent you earlier. Do you remember The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. It too spoke of societies based not on the hoarding of wealth but on its flow; that is, societies where wealth is perceived to increase if it is kept in motion and to decrease if it lies stagnant. I did not expect to find such a dynamic in 13th century central Europe. Of course, such incessant giving was probably not the reality. I imagine that many a lord sat on his bags of gold, glowering at every passing stranger. Nonetheless, it is interesting that this is the ideal portrayed in The Nibelungenlied, one of wealth shared over and over. The ideal noble is noble because he or she gives without restraint.

Another surprise was the degree to which characters—kings, lords, knights, husbands and wives—consult and seek advice from each other. It undermines the authoritarian image I had of those distant times. Oh, and the women are strong. Prunhilt literally: she trusses up her new husband and hangs him by a nail for the night when he gets too frisky. But also morally, Kriemhilt for example.

And lastly, the entirely secular tint of the work. Christianity is mentioned here and there, and Jesus is invoked on occasion, but overwhelmingly the world portrayed is secular, with the pleasures and torments very much earthbound. Again, my image of a medieval Europe in a Christian deep freeze was altered.

There’s a curious narrative device that occurs often: the paragraph that ends with a comment in brackets by the author. These comments often announce some future event in the story, usually tragic. It may remove an element of suspense in the story, but a highly effective sense of foreboding is created in its stead. Since the story was initially spoken, not read, I do wonder how these brackets were signalled. These are some of the intellectual perks of The Nibelungenlied. Mostly, though, the ride is just to be enjoyed.

There’s a sad postscript that needs to be mentioned. The Nibelungenlied vanished from notice in the 16th century. It was rediscovered some two hundred years later and became one of the canonical elements of German nationalism in the 19th century, used by Wagner, for example, in his Ring of the Nibelung cycle of operas. And then, alas, the Nazis exploited Sivrit’s fate, or Siegfried’s, as the name had become, as a literary warning of what might befall the Aryans if they did not resist the treachery of “lesser races”. In such ways do politicians sometimes pervert literature.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I met Al Purdy once. Or rather, he was pointed out to me at a small party at a literary festival in Eden Mills, Ontario. Purdy was sitting, I was standing; Purdy was elderly and revered, I was young and upcoming. I made nothing of the occasion because I had never read his poetry. He was just a name. I regret that now, not having gone over to shake his hand and chat with him. The writer as a man is like any other man until you’ve read him. It’s only once you’ve read him that the writer makes a greater impression. Had I read Purdy before that party, I would have approached him with a measure of trepidation. But I gather he was exceedingly generous with writers, especially younger ones. I’m sure we would have had a good conversation. 

Now I have read Al Purdy and I can see why he was revered. He’s an intensely Canadian poet, which I don’t mean as a limiting qualifier. Every poet comes from somewhere, but some feel more universal than others, their specific cultural origin leaving only a discreet mark upon the poetry. Not so with Al Purdy. He’s all about Canada. You see that right away in the places that inspired his poetry. The first poem in the collection I’m sending you is called The Road to Newfoundland. Other poems mention Vancouver and BC. Still others, the Canadian Arctic. And at the centre of this poetic geography, holding it together like the fixed point of a compass (I mean here the measuring instrument consisting of two pointed arms held together by a pivot, but the other instrument, to determine the cardinal points, serves the metaphor just as well), is Roblin Lake, near the hamlet of Ameliasburg, Prince Edward County, Ontario. Several poems evoke the lake, and one senses that the A-frame house Purdy built there was the capital city of his poetry (more on that A-frame a little later). Other geographies are mentioned too—Cuba, for example—yet even with these poems the sensibility is entirely Canadian. What this Canadianness means is that a reader from Canada reading Purdy’s poetry will likely recognize our country in it, while a reader from abroad will likely learn about our country. But to repeat myself using different words: there’s nothing local-yokel about Purdy’s work. You see that in the historical, literary and political references sprinkled throughout. Al Purdy clearly was a man who read widely and thought freely.

The language is colloquial, the tone conversational. There is therefore a deceptive simplicity to Purdy’s poetry. Just a guy talking on the page, with funny line breaks. But then an image hits you, and you (or, to be more accurate, I) go Wow! Take the first poem, the one I mentioned above. It starts:

My foot has pushed a fire ahead of me
for a thousand miles
my arms’ response to hills and stones
has stated parallel green curves
deep in my unknown country
the clatter of gravel on fenders registers
on a ghostly player piano
inside my head with harsh fraying music
I’m lost to reality
but turn the steering wheel a quarter
inch to avoid a bug on the road…

My foot has pushed a fire ahead of me/for a thousand miles—have you ever thought of a car in those terms? I’ll certainly never forget it. And then that modern image, of a man driving an internal combustion engine, is linked to an older one, when precious fire was carried from camp to camp in a moss-lined basket. You get an inkling here of how Purdy effortlessly spans history and geography with that startling compactness that is poetry’s forte. There are too many poems to discuss in detail, but if you want a taste, if you’re in a rush, I’d suggest you have a look at The Cariboo Horses, Late Rising at Roblin Lake, One Rural Winter, Interruption, Married Man’s Song, Fidel Castro in Revolutionary Square, Hombre, Trees at the Arctic Circle, Lament for the Dorsets, House Guest, At Roblin Lake, Poem, Wilderness Gothic, and Roblin’s Mills (2). That should give you an idea. But you shouldn’t be in a rush. That’s not the way to read poetry. No point either in reading one poem after another, page after page, like a novel. That would be like eating twenty good meals in a row. Best to read only a few poems at a time, like opening a window for a moment in the autumn to breathe in the invigorating air before closing it again. And poems thrive on increased familiarity. Repeated reading will make you comfortable with the cadence and help you unpack the imagery. I’ve chosen to send you a Selected Poems published in 1972 by McClelland and Stewart. It has a good and vigorous introduction by George Woodcock.

I will mention one other poem, Hombre, in which Purdy remembers meeting Che Guevara in Havana, actually meeting him, and shaking his hand—astounding. The mythical Che. Since when do poets and politicians meet and shake hands? Have you ever met and shook hands with a poet? Well, I guess that’s the prerogative of revolutionary politicians, ones who are willing to go off into the jungles of Bolivia to die for a dream. Purdy met Guevara in Cuba in 1964, when the charismatic Argentine doctor was the Minister of Industries. Was the poet in awe of the revolutionary? No. Purdy was a man of the people, for sure, but also a democrat and one senses in the poem, as one does in the other poems inspired by his visit to Cuba, a suspicion that Castro’s and Guevara’s dreams for the people might not take into account what the people actually wanted. Again, Purdy shows himself to be profoundly Canadian, preoccupied with the small details of common decency rather than the grand visions of truculent idealism.

This meeting between a poet and a politician brings me back to the A-frame house on Roblin Lake, where so much of Purdy’s poetry was written and where so many literarily inclined visitors came to visit. This A-frame is both a cornerstone and a crossroads of Canadian poetry. Purdy died in 2000 at the age of 81 and a campaign has been launched to purchase his property, create an endowment, and establish a writer-in-residence program in the A-frame. It’s a great idea. Literary culture of course is kept alive by the publishing and reading of books, but the places that inspired books are also important. After all, if the spirit of a place inspired a writer, it will likely inspire others. I myself now want to visit Ameliasburg. And cultural memory lasts a long time. Businesses come and go, but a great poet’s house—that’s the stuff of plaques and museums, which The Al Purdy A-frame Trust is trying to avoid. It wants to keep Al Purdy’s generosity alive. Where one poet lived and worked, others will too. That is their mission. An Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology has been published by Harbour Publishing (they’re the guardians of Purdy’s legacy: they’ve put out a more recent Selected Poems, covering the years 1962 to 1996, in addition to the complete Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy). All proceeds of the sale of the A-frame Anthology go to the Trust. I meant to send you my copy, but it’s too lovely. It’s an evocative mix of reminiscences, poetry, and photographs. I knew no more about Al Purdy than I suppose you do, yet the anthology made me feel the creative energy of the place and the fun Al and his gang had there. The A-frame Trust hasn’t reached its fundraising goal yet. If you’re interested in helping, please visit their website www.alpurdy.ca. You can make a donation and you can also order a copy of the anthology.  

If you’re lucky, one day you might end up on the shores of Roblin Lake, shaking hands with a poet.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

for Mr. Palomar:
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book of observant stillness,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

for Three Lives:
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Pretty much one of the worst books I’ve ever read,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Perhaps you noticed that the last book I sent you, the poet Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, starts with a quote by Gertrude Stein. That got me thinking. Every literate person has heard of Gertrude Stein. Paris fixture for forty years; friend of Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; coiner, it is said, of the term “a lost generation” to designate those American writers who were born out of the disillusionment that followed the First World War; sayer of “A rose is a rose is a rose” to debunk literary pomp and pretence; and so on—Gertrude Stein is a name that has endured. I have in mind the image of a smart, genial, open-minded woman who liked to be at the centre of things. All artists need patrons and supporters, and what a nice thing it must have been to have Gertrude Stein play that role, to be admitted into her salon in Paris, full of stunning modern art, and offered drink and food and conversation, if one were a young and poor expatriate writer or painter. If Paris was a moveable feast, as Hemingway put it, I imagine Gertrude Stein as the hostess of that feast.

But who has read Gertrude Stein? Her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is purportedly about her lifelong companion but is in fact about both of them and their lively lives in Paris, is Stein’s best known work. Though as biography it’s  fanciful, with the facts largely filtered by a cheerfully opinionated subject, it’s still not a work of fiction. What of Stein’s true fiction? I had never read anything by her, and couldn’t even think of a title. So there, my choice was made.

I found Three Lives, a collection of three long stories first published in 1909 and more recently reprinted by Penguin Classics. The introduction, by an American academic, whet my appetite. In it, I discovered that the style of each of the stories was highly influenced by a different modern painter. So The Good Anna was marked by Paul Cézanne, Melanctha by Picasso, and The Gentle Lena by Matisse. How odd and intriguing, I thought. In what way could brushstrokes affect the writing of words? How could the play of paint on a two-dimensional surface influence the composition of a story on a page? I settled in for a thrilling Modernist ride. I have often thought that no one has pushed and pulled the English language quite so much as the interwar writers of the last century. Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, to mention only a smattering off the top of my head—they made English say new things in new ways. I thought I would witness such experimentation with Three Lives.

Well, I was disappointed, angrily disappointed. It’s all very well to have ideas and theories, and experiments do need to be made, in art as well as in science, and one should make allowances for risk-takers—but my god, what a boring book! I worked my way through The Good Anna, I started off on Melanctha, but forty pages in I gave up, my reading ground to a stupefied halt. Of what I read, I have this to say: there is no concern for realism, neither of setting nor of psychology, there is no eye for detail or ear for dialogue, nearly everything is told, not shown, the characters are only fitfully plausible, there is only the odd heartbeat of a plot, the language is plain and unappealing, and the repetition—that which was announced as Stein’s great gambit—is as interesting as watching paint dry, which is the only link I can make between Three Lives and what Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse did. Most surprising to me, coming from one who I thought would be a fountain of bon mots, was the utter witlessness of Gertrude Stein’s writing. Oh yes: the racism, that too came as a surprise. I noted a few squeaks by the author of the introduction to explain it away, but I took little heed of this warning. After all, there’s that line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, of the character Robert Cohn, how he had “a mean Jewish streak”. That second adjective wouldn’t pass muster nowadays. But it’s just one line among many, one line in a magnificent body of work that only there jars with its prejudice. It’s a smudge upon the timeless art made by a man who is of this time, formed and limited by its biases. And more to the point, The Sun Also Rises is not The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The comment on Robert Cohn is a line in passing, a throwaway line in no way central to the novel. Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, on the other hand, is something else. See how this paragraph sits with you:

Rose Johnson was careless and was lazy, but she had been brought up by white folks and she needed decent comfort. Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature. Rose had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people.

As for our heroine:

Melanctha Herbert was a graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive negress. She had not been raised like Rose by white folks, but then she had been half made with real white blood.

Rose Johnson is a proud one:

“No, I ain’t no common nigger,” said Rose Johnson, “for I was raised by white folks, and Melanctha she is so bright and learned so much in school, she ain’t no common nigger either, though she ain’t got no husband to be married to like I am to Sam Johnson.”

They’re a fine pair, Sam and Rose:

The child though it was healthy after it was born, did not live long. Rose Johnson was careless and negligent and selfish, and when Melanctha had to leave for a few days, the baby died. Rose Johnson had liked the baby well enough and perhaps she just forgot it for awhile, anyway the child was dead and Rose and Sam her husband were very sorry but then these things came so often in the negro world in Bridgepoint, that they neither of them thought about it very long.

I like the “perhaps she just forgot about it” and then the huffy, what-you-making-so-much-trouble-about “anyway” that follows. As for the death of a baby not being thought about “very long”, I’d think that’d be inaccurate even of a mother gnu who’s just lost a baby gnu to a lion on an African plain, let alone of two human beings. And this tripe appears in the first two pages alone. After that, it gets no better, it goes on and on in the same register, because Melanctha is all about black folks as they exist in Gertrude Stein’s mind.

You see now why I stopped reading. Whatever theory of literary composition Gertrude Stein might have wanted to bring to light is buried by a thick layer of toxic racist sludge. I’m willing to forgive the odd slip of an artist if the aim of the work is high. But when the slip is central, when the slip is all you see and get, then the high aim is lost. Gertrude Stein’s book is all the more galling if you consider that she was both lesbian and Jewish, and therefore, you’d think, slightly more sensitive to prejudice. But no, not Gertrude Stein. Stupid, stupid woman. I see now why she has survived among readers only in her incarnation as hostess to young greats.

Why then am I sending you her book when I so loathed it? Because maybe I missed the point. Every reader has his or her limitations. Clearly I’m not up to this Penguin Classic. You might have a different opinion. Perhaps you will get something out of Three Lives.

But in that order of books, of writers who try something new, there’s much better than Gertrude Stein. Take Italo Calvino, for example, an Italian writer who lived between the years 1923 and 1985. I’ve chosen Mr. Palomar for you. Here you have a book that is plotless but fascinating, that is experimental yet rewarding, that is different without becoming tiresome, that is rooted but not restricted, that is beautiful though not in a classical way. Mr. Palomar is a book that charms and stimulates in equal measure. It makes you see both language and the world in a slightly different way.

It’s a hard book to describe. I suppose one could say that it’s a collection of short stories. But that’s not quite right. It is indeed divided into sections that can be read in any order, like a standard collection of short fiction. But they’re not stories, not really. They would be better described as fictional meditation pieces. In each one, the discreet, attentive, concerned Mr. Palomar has an encounter or an experience upon which he dwells. His name is the same as that of the famous observatory in California. That gives you some idea of the scale of Mr. Palomar’s musings. And yet his scale is also very small, so that sometimes his telescopic viewing becomes microscopic. There’s a pleasing harmony to that, as the very, very small, the molecular, has much the same layout as the very, very large, the cosmic, and both, to the mind, are quite dizzying in their vastness. But I’m not being concrete enough. In The naked bosom, Mr. Palomar is walking along a beach and he sees, up ahead, a woman lying on the sand, topless. How is he to deal with this, what should he do with his gaze, where should it lie? The piece, three and a half pages long, describes the choices that come to Mr. Palomar’s mind and their ramifications. In From the terrace, Mr. Palomar looks out upon Rome and contemplates the significance, from a bird’s perspective, of that vast panorama of variegated roofs. In The albino gorilla, Mr. Palomar wonders about the meaning of why a gorilla is holding onto an old tire. In The order squamata, the variety of reptiles, and how they live in time, is mused about. In Serpents and skulls, the meaning, or lack thereof, of pre-Columbian Mexican architectural motifs is discussed. And so on. The settings are varied (Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Japan, Mexico), sometimes the very large is looked at (night skies, planets, oceans), sometimes the very small (a gecko, a Japanese sand garden), throughout the language is apt and intensely evocative, and always there is a concern for the meaning of things, how this is related to that. Italo Calvino is like a spider and with his words he links the most incongruous elements so that finally everything is linked by the thin thread of a web, and order and harmony are thereby established in the universe. Mr. Palomar is both whimsical and philosophical, an odd mix. It’s a book that assures the reader that his or her gaze upon the world is not only important, but essential, because only in watching, in observing closely, can things be seen.

Which point was entirely lost on Gertrude Stein, but we won’t go there again. Enjoy Mr. Palomar. It brought upon me a sort of Zen peacefulness, that stillness which I mentioned so long ago to you.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: two inscribed trade paperbacks

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Poetry to make you think and feel,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

“Art is heart.” My uncle Vince, a photographer, said that once. What he meant is that expression that is not rooted in emotion, or that does not evoke emotion, is not art. Art can of course make one think.  Art that aims to last should do that at least in part, since emotions tend to froth up mightily but then fade, while a thought can calmly stay in the mind for a lifetime. A thought can be fully revived simply by the act of thinking, while an emotion remembered is far more tepid than an emotion felt. A story that is all emotion, a romance, say, may move, but it will be quickly forgotten as it will leave nothing for the mind to mull over. Nonetheless, despite the perishability of emotion and the cool immortality of thought, it is emotion that marks us most. Nothing goes deeper than emotion, and after that, in shallower depths, we think. Thinking that is significant may trigger an emotion. Remember Archimedes shouting “Eureka! (great emotion) after his discovery that a submerged object will displace its equivalent volume of water (great thought). Which do we remember most? I think it’s that cry and that image of the exultant man running down the streets of Syracuse naked after jumping out of his bath.

Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red then. Anne Carson is a Canadian academic. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and is a classics scholar who has taught at UC Berkeley, at Princeton, at McGill, among other universities. Which is very impressive—but not, I would argue, an ideal background for a poet. Universities do wonders for dead poets, teaching them and therefore keeping them alive, but they’re deadly for living poets. It’s pretty well impossible to make a living as a poet, so many poets have sought shelter in universities, earning degrees from them and then teaching there. I don’t know why that is so. Why wouldn’t poets seek shelter in plumbing or farming? Whoever determined that poets should have soft, uncallused hands? The damage universities have done to poetry stems from the kind of thinking that thrives in these institutions, and which is indeed necessary if they are to produce quality scholarship: thinking that is rigorous, codified, impersonal. Such hyper-thinking tends to kill the spontaneity, the liveliness of the poetic instinct. Walt Whitman is taught in universities, but Walt Whitman would never have survived university.

Academic cleverness  is on display in Red. The first five sections—Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?; Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros; and then three appendices—and the last section, Interview, are interesting but in a puzzling, cool, clever, archly droll way. You have to know who Stesichoros is. I’d never heard of him. Then you have to care. I didn’t really. Compared to some of the other poetry I’ve sent you—Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters or Gilgamesh, for example—these sections are not memorable. Thank god they’re short.

But then there’s the meat of the book, the Autobiography of Red in question, which is by far the longest section. It’s great. It’s a novel in verse that tells the sad story of Geryon, a red monster, and his unhappy relationship with Herakles (or Hercules, as you might know him better). Geryon loves Herakles, and Herakles loves Geryon too, but in a fickle way, in a way that doesn’t accommodate Geryon’s love. So Geryon loves and suffers, while Herakles loves and cavorts about with Ancash, his Peruvian lover who loves and suffers as much at the hands of Herakles as Geryon does. The names are classical, but the setting is contemporary as is the language and the imagery. And the emotions are there. Take these lines, of Geryon and Herakles lying next to each other:

Not touching
but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.

And the story ends with an astonishing image that will stay with you. I won’t ruin it by quoting it out of context. You must earn the image by reading your way to it. Then it will have its emotional impact on you. And you will perhaps be left thinking.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Yann Martel
Ashton Grey

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A genie escaping a bottle,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

A few weeks ago I was at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words. It’s a friendly celebration of literature held in the pleasant Prairie town of Moose Jaw. I’m sure you’ve been (to the town, I mean). One of the days I was there, as I was leaving the public library where the festival takes place, a man on a park bench hailed me. He was holding a baby in his arms and was sitting next to another man. I might’ve just waved and walked on, but there was that baby. I have a baby. So I approached the two men. It turned out that the other man was the dad, and the genial man who had called out my name was his friend. The three of us chatted for a few minutes. I was about to go when the man holding the baby asked me if I would buy his book. I had noticed the thin volumes spread out in a half-circle on the ground in front of him. ”Special Festival price, seven dollars,” he said. I gave him ten, he signed my copy, and I walked away with Sweet Home Chicago, by Ashton Grey. I saw Mr. Grey again the next day, on Main Street this time, near the Mae Wilson Theatre, still hawking his opus. Someone told me that Mr. Grey, who looked to be in his thirties, couldn’t afford the bus from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw, so he’d hitch-hiked to come sell his book at the Festival of Words. Such dedication, I thought. And he had the good karma earned from holding a baby the previous day.

I decided to read his book and now I pass it on to you. Sweet Home Chicago is forty-nine pages long. I remember Mr. Grey saying on the park bench that he didn’t like calling it a novella. I didn’t ask what he had against the term, but out of respect for his wishes, let’s call it a long short story. If you look on the copyright page, you’ll see that it was “first printed” in 2009 and then printed again by Bindle Stick Publications of Hamilton, Ontario in 2010. The number 3 appears below that information. My guess is that Sweet Home Chicago is onto its third printing. Now, whether Bindle Stick Publications is Mr. Grey’s own self-publishing operation and he lives in Hamilton, Ontario (and how he got from Hamilton to Winnipeg), or whether Mr. Grey lives in Winnipeg and does business with Bindle Stick Publications, a tiny vanity press in Hamilton, Ontario—to all these questions, your guess is as good as mine.

Sweet Home Chicago is a long short story with many flaws. There are lots of spelling mistakes. On the very first page you’ll read the sentence, “He reached over the bar and ceased Ronald’s coat trying to jerk him awake.” Ronald’s coat was more likely “seized”. The dialogue is consistently wrongly punctuated:

“I guess you should call the police.” He said with a voice that expressed his sorrow that nothing else could be done.

That should be a comma after “police” and the personal pronoun that follows should start with a small letter, since the statement is all one sentence. On a broader level, some of the exposition is awkward, many details are unnecessary, and it’s not entirely clear to me what the story is about thematically. And yet it has narrative drive, the characters have their charm, there are funny parts, and underlying it all is an uncynical tenderness. It’s a booze-fuelled story, so to seek out the flaws is to soberly miss the point. Best to read Sweet Home Chicago with the unfocussed, good-humoured indulgence of the slightly drunk. The story relates the consequences to the unnamed protagonist of being in a bar next to a man who has the misfortune of keeling over and dying right then and there. Our hero finds himself in an alcohol-soused pickle.

This story is no Under the Volcano.(Do you know the novel? Malcolm Lowry? It’s Canadian. The overconsumption of alcohol achieves there its greatest literary expression.) But that is another book. The attraction for me in sending you Sweet Home Chicago lies not with the quality of the work but with the intent of the author. It’s Ashton Grey’s strong desire to tell his story that struck me, a desire so strong that he self-published it and now self-promotes it, even hitch-hiking from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw to share it, and all this without any serious chance of critical or commercial success. But that’s what stories do to a person and, collectively, to a people. Stories are like genies: just as a genie wants to escape its bottle, so a story wants to escape the man, woman or child into which it finds itself. A shared story is a living story. Stories are passed down through families and through history. They endure while the storytellers die. Now that Ashton Grey has committed his story to the page, it will live on. That is a good thing. We need stories, all kinds of stories, because without stories, our imagination dies, and without imagination, there is no real appreciation of life. You have the luck of owning one of the few copies of Sweet Home Chicago. I hope you realize what a rare privilege that is.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one paperback, inscribed both by the author and by me

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Poetry that has crossed the desert of time,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I’m back and you’re still there. So let’s resume this lopsided duet where I read, think, write, and mail, and you say and do nothing. Your silence doesn’t particularly bother me. It’s future generations who will damn you or, more likely, mock you. Me? I feel like a cowboy in a western who is about to cross a fearsome desert. To comfort myself, I talk out loud. Does my horse answer me? No, it doesn’t. Would I therefore want to do without it? No, because without it I would lose what defines me as a cowboy—and I would have to cross that desert on foot. You are my democratic horse through which I exist as a democratic cowboy. Better to ride on your sullen back than to be trampled down by a dictator. As for these troubled times, the desert that faces us? I have faith that we’ll get through it, somehow. I’ll be guided by the books I read and the people I meet. And you, our leader? I don’t know. Do blind horses get across deserts? Are they not swallowed up by the sands?

Before I go on, I should ask: have you enjoyed the books that some fine fellow Canadian writers have sent you while I was on tour for my latest novel? I am grateful to Steven Galloway, Charles Foran, Alice Kuipers, Don McKay, René-Daniel Dubois and Emile Martel for contributing to your burgeoning library. Those are interesting titles they sent you.

Poor Greece. It’s certainly received a beating these last few months. The mismanagement of their finances has cost the country—and a number of European banks—very dearly. I’m not entirely sympathetic to their woes. By the sounds of it, the blame for the problems of the Greeks can largely by laid on the shoulders of the Greeks—and then they were prayed upon by greedy banks, who saw profit in making easy loans to them. A real mess, an insolvency that will tar and mar the country for years to come.

Yet a country can’t be reduced to its pockets, whether deep or full of holes. Poor Greece, rich Greece, mismanaged Greece, recovering Greece—next to that monolith of a proper noun those adjectives are mere twigs. Greece is Greece is Greece, and there is much to that. For starters, the language and its alphabet, lovely and arresting. I count the Greek language as one of the most pleasing vocal instruments our species has come up with. Italian, spoken next door, perhaps has a more lissome, mellifluous form, but Greek has the staccato intensity of content. Western philosophy, and therefore Western civilization—since before we do we must think—started with the Greeks, specifically with the Greeks living in Ionia, in Asia Minor, now Turkey. They became known as the pre-Socratics since they were not quite weighty enough to be given their own name but rather became defined by the illustrious philosopher whom they preceded. Nevertheless, those pre-Socks—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, elsewhere the formidable Parmenidies of Elea, besides others—are important because they were the first to try to understand the world relying not on myth but on reason. They observed the world, something that hadn’t been done before in the West. That inspired intellectual approach, which brought Greece a blaze of renown, was such a singular achievement that when the Italians did the same some two thousand years later, inspired in part by the rediscovery of some forgotten Greek philosophers named Plato and Aristotle, it was called the renaissance, after the initial naissance brought about by the ancient Greeks.

Well, at the same time as the Greeks were thinking, some of them were also feeling. So Sappho. I haven’t sent you poetry in a long while. Sappho was a woman who lived on the island of Lesbos roughly between the years 630 and 570 BCE. She is held to be the first woman poet in literary history. Those who came before her have been lost to time. Sappho’s poetry itself—some 9,000 lines in total, it is estimated—has barely survived the predation of time and exists only in fragments. In the late 19th century in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, an ancient garbage dump containing vast quantities of papyrus was discovered. Much of it had been used by the ancient Egyptians as stuffing to fill the empty spaces in coffins and mummies. In one mummified crocodile’s stomach, a fragment of poetry by Sappho was found. (That must have been one happy croc, to be digesting a morsel of Sappho’s poetry for centuries.)

Though Sappho wrote on a variety of subjects, she is best known for her love poetry. It is simple and moving. Take this fragment:

Sweet mother, I can’t take shuttle in hand.
There is a boy, and lust
Has crushed my spirit—just
As gentle Aphrodite planned.

Weaving was a female activity. A virginal girl who properly married would continue weaving as the head of her household. But if she was lead astray… It’s interesting to note the feminine empowerment in this fragment. The girl is aware of the options that are available to her. It is for her to choose whether to take hold of the shuttle again and focus on her weaving, or turn to the boy. Another fragment gives us a clue about her choice:

Since I have cast my lot, please, golden-crowned
Aphrodite, let me win this round!

Here’s another heartfelt cry from twenty-six centuries ago:

That impossible predator,
Eros the Limb-Loosener,
Bitter-sweetly and afresh
Savages my flesh.

Like a gale smiting an oak
On mountainous terrain,
Eros, with a stroke,
Shattered my brain.

But a strange longing to pass on
Seizes me, and I need to see
Lotuses on the dewy banks of Acheron.

Acheron was one of the rivers of the Underworld, and the lotuses on its edge were associated with forgetfulness. The poet is so love-sick that she wants to die and eat the flowers of amnesia.

Some of the poems are surprisingly explicit:

‘Time and again we plucked lush flowers, wed
Spray after spray in strands and fastened them
Around your soft neck; you perfumed your head

‘Of glossy curls with myrrh—lavish infusions
In queenly quantities—then on a bed
Prepared with fleecy sheets and yielding cushions,

‘Sated your craving…’

It’s the “yielding cushions” that really makes this hot stuff.

Sappho laments the ravages of old age:

As you are dear to me, go claim a younger
Bed as your due.
I can’t stand being the old one any longer,
Living with you.

She also widens her gaze to topics that might be called political, and what she has to say is pertinent to this day:

Wealth without real worthiness
Is no good for the neighbourhood;
But their proper mixture is
The summit of beatitude.

I’ll quote one last fragment, a prescient one:

I declare
That later on,
Even in an age unlike our own,
Someone will remember who we are.

Indeed. Sappho lived among people who were mostly illiterate. Amazing that poetry performed aloud and preserved initially only in the memories of her listeners should survive to this day. They are fragments, true, and who is to say what treasures were obliterated by time (or continue to lie dormant in a mummified animal lying under Egyptian sands). But what survives still speaks—and what more can one ask of a poem? The passion of Sappho’s poetry has something volcanic to it: the print may be thin and black, but just beneath it runs molten lava.

So when you have Greece on your mind, as I’m sure you have recently, I hope you manage to take the long view. Economics is a short-term concern. What endures is art. Ask any crocodile how to survive a desert and it will tell you: better to have a poem in your stomach than a number in your head.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
A book to colour your imagination,
Sent by a writer,
Alice Kuipers

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Books sometimes come to you at serendipitous times. For me, the reading of How I Live Now,by Meg Rosoff, coincided with a time in my life when I was spending several weeks in rural England. The novel is wonderful.  It starts with fifteen year old Daisy arriving in the UK to stay with her cousins on a farm. Their mother leaves, and then a war begins. Rosoff never tells the causes of the war. Daisy is not interested. She’s too busy falling in love with her cousin, the compelling and startling Edmond. Soon the events of the war separate them and Daisy is transformed. 

In the UK this Easter a strange thing happened. The skies closed because of the giant ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano. Planes were prevented from flying. I was in Devon in a cottage on Dartmoor. After a couple of days with no flights, I began to notice how eerily quiet the skies were. I lolled in the flower-filled garden, the moors spread before me, the book dangling from my hand as I stared into the empty blue above. The extraordinary story of Daisy and her cousins roaming around a rural landscape blighted by rationing and violence had seeped from the pages, staining my imagination. The creepy silence of the skies echoed the cessation of flights in the novel. I couldn’t laze around the garden without feeling the cousins hurtling around behind me on their way to their barn. I couldn’t get up and walk over the moors without seeing Daisy frantically searching for Edmond. 

Meg Rosoff published How I Live Now in 2003 and gave up her career in advertising shortly after that. It was her first book but since then she has published many more (a thrilling discovery for me as I now have all the rest to read). She regularly updates her blog online at www.megrosoff.co.uk.  She wrote of her most recent novel:

For the best part of two years, the book has been constantly in my space, whining, stonewalling, refusing to play ball. I’ve been hating it, loving it, neglecting it; threatening, cajoling, pleading, throwing it out with the bath water, retrieving it; practicing tough love, bribery and suggesting it go play in traffic. Once I even told it I wasn’t its real mother.

She seems to feel that her book is somehow alive. I wonder if she felt the same way when writing How I Live Now.  I’m going to hazard a guess that she did. Writers feel that way about their characters and their stories. And when a writer is as talented as Rosoff, the reader feels life pulsing from the pages of her books. 

Rosoff’s writing is brave and moving. She writes of a teenager who is sent to England because she is destroying herself—both emotionally and, we discover, physically. It’s almost too late for Daisy, yet during her time in this country at war, she discovers that she is so much more than she gave herself credit for. It’s a classic story of trial and redemption, and it’s a love story. It’s a story of survival and of longing. This novel is alive. It leaves the page and tints your imagination like water coloured with a drop of blue dye.   

This year as the sky lay empty of planes, as the moors before me filled with Daisy and her story, life spilled from Rosoff’s pages and Ifelt more alive.

I hope that this novel comes at a serendipitous time for you too (although maybe without the drama of an entire country shutting down its airspace!). May it stain your imagination blue.

Yours respectfully,

Alice Kuipers 

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

September 3, 2010

Dear Ms. Kuipers,

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence, with which you enclosed a copy of the book entitled, How I Live Now.

Thank you for sending this book to the Prime Minister. Your thoughtful gesture is most appreciated.

Yours sincerely,

T. Lewkowicz
Executive Correspondence Officer

To Stephen Harper,
the splendid translation of a most entertaining Québec novel,
from a Canadian poet and translator,
Émile Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

In a democracy, it is a cherished privilege of the citizen to address directly the leader of his or her country. We all know in our hearts that it is the duty of the leader to respond to these efforts. Matters of interest or concern may need to be addressed this way and adequate responses often ensure an element of serenity to the citizen who has initiated the dialogue, as well as providing the leader with clues about the soul and the mind of his or her fellow citizens.

When Yann asked me to join in on the whatisstephenharperreading book club, I was positively elated because it gave me a role, as a poet and as a translator, in this campaign, which, you will have learned, has been noted and admired in many a country and matches a cherished belief I have in international cultural relations, a foreign policy your government absurdly dropped, to the great loss not only of Canadian artists and creators, but of Canada’s image abroad.

The novel I’m sending you today was published in French in Montréal in 2007 and received the Governor General Literary Award for translation to English in 2009; so you have two books here resulting from the special and exceptional talent of two artists: a novelist and a translator.

The book, Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner was very well received both in Québec and in France; it won many prizes, and it was beautifully translated by Lazer Lederhendler.

The profession of translator is a discreet and humble one. We translators are seldom noticed and hardly anybody ever believes that we did our work right. There is always a nuance, always the shadow of an emotion which we missed, or there is a smell or a taste which we have exaggerated or understated. Whatever we do, we know that another translator in a few years will do differently, may even do better, just as a reader or a writer who understands both languages is likely to say that the original is much, much better than the translation. Of course, it’s better! Most of the time.

But the translator can sometime take some sort of a revenge. There is an anecdote I like to tell: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet at the very end of the sixteenth century. About one hundred years later, Voltaire was born in France. Two pillars of European and world culture. Naturally, Voltaire knew of Shakespeare and read his works. And one day, I would venture that he wanted to share with his readers and in French the most famous line uttered by Hamlet:

To be or not to be: that is the question.

How would these ten words be translated in a way that respected not only the desperate intensity of the original English, but adopted the common form of French verse in use at the time, the twelve syllable rhyming “alexandrins”? This way:

Demeure, il faut choisir, et passer à l’instant
de la vie à la mort, et de l’être au néant.

An interesting exercise would be to take Voltaire’s two verses without knowing Shakespeare’s original verse and translate it back to English. Translation can be a magical cave revealing beauties even the author did not know about…

Returning to Nikolski, whichever version you will want to read first, the French original or the English translation, your attention will be drawn to the cover illustration: three fish, the same three fish, actually, but swimming in different directions, horizontally and vertically. I believe there is a slightly different message there. I’m not sure which. What do you think?

The novel is a splendid construction of twisted and adventurous lives where various characters hover around each other in a dance of chance and luck, mostly around the Marché Jean-Talon, in Montréal, but also in other places in Canada—among them the Prairies and the North shore of the Saint-Lawrence—and in distant Caribbean countries. Piracy is important in this book, and navigation. And a fishmonger, and… and… You’ll love that crowd once you get to know Noah and Joyce and the narrator who sells used books on rue Saint-Laurent.

The French version has a dedication from Nicolas Dickner to our grand-daughter Catherine, encouraging her to “return to the novel”. She’d told us that she hadn’t read a novel in a while. But she already had a copy of the book. So allow me to encourage you too to return to the novel, fulfilling the wish of Nicolas Dickner.

With my best wishes,

Émile Martel

(Translation by Émile Martel)

encl: two inscribed trade paperbacks, one also inscribled by the author.

Reply:

Pending…

INSCRIPTION:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Caligula, an extraordinary play
About pain
            The quest for Power
                           And human scale,
With respect,
René-Daniel Dubois O.C.

Lettre:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

It is with strong feelings that I send you today Caligula, by Albert Camus.

You will note that I am enclosing two versions: one, the original, in French, of course, but also an English version, in a skillful translation by Stuart Gilbert.

I think—mistakenly perhaps and please correct me if I am wrong—that if you are not yet familiar with this author, the opportunity of comparing form and content from one language with another can only prove to be enlightening.

There are many reasons for my having chosen this work.

Here are two of them.

The year 2010 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Albert Camus, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

I usually refrain from categorizing authors as being either “major” or “minor”: I have always thought that literature is a treasure in which each contribution is essential, and the older I grow the clearer this becomes to me. There is a style or none, a voice or none. If there is a voice, there is literature. If not, it isn’t literature.

However Camus—amongst very few others—is clearly an exception. He not only talked, he dove in, canvassing the woven link between the soul of Man and his rebellion. From this immersion, he brought back exceptional works, notably The Rebel, a deeply moving and passionate essay on the genesis and history of this rebellion, and Caligula, of course, the play which is the transposition of this Rebel. Not just a simple sketch, nor a dialogued representation, but more: an incarnation.

If, for example, one compared The Rebel to the plans of a mechanical device as drawn by engineers, Caligula would constitute the locomotive itself, charging ahead, never veering from its course, crushing everything in its path.

The second reason behind my choice relates to the fact that while the character of the emperor Caligula may have seemed to Camus to be an excellent illustration of the myth seething through the events of his time—just before WW2—, it is certainly plausible to claim that in our time this myth acts overtly and has become…omnipresent. It has even succeeded, in the Western public spheres at least, to repress anything that might tend to contradict it. Revenge against life and its corollary, the cult of pure blind power, are to be seen everywhere today. Signs of their reign assault our eyes, wherever we look.

In one word: Albert Camus has left us an extraordinarily inspiring body of work that can undoubtedly help us to better define who we are, what drives us, and to better understand our fellow man as well as our era.

At the heart of this work is Caligula.

Albert Camus has achieved with Caligula what Sigmund Freud, in his own times, has done through Oedipus: from an ancient story, he has brought forward an essential myth for all men of all eras. And he has given it a name.

The story line? Very simple.

The Emperor of Rome, beloved by all, has just lost Drusilla his sister who was also his lover. And he becomes a monster. Why? Because this loss makes him see that, simply put, ”Men die; and they are not happy.”

Drusilla’s death has awaken in him a yearning for the impossible. In his quest, he will be ruthless.

My wish for you, Mr. Prime Minister, is that reading this appalling yet magnificent play will provide you with as luminous a source of inspiration as it has for me.

Respectfully,

René-Daniel Dubois O.C.

(Translation by Josette Bélanger)

encl: two books, one inscribed

Reply:

Pending…

May 24, 2010
Book # 82

Letter:

Dear Prime Minister Harper:

As everyone on the planet probably knows by now, Yann Martel is busy touring with his new book, and has asked other writers to take over in his absence. Today it is my pleasant duty to present you, and readers of his website, with a classic of Canadian writing, John Steffler’s The Grey Islands.

When I say “classic”, I am placing it among other masterpieces of environmental writing like Thoreau’s Walden, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild; it is a book that engages wilderness in an intense way that alters our way of perceiving it. Unlike those texts, The Grey Islands is, technically, fiction, but it is based on John Steffler’s actual experience alone on the uninhabited Grey Islands off the coast of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. It contains some of the most vivid, and varied, writing anywhere, including prose narrative, lyric poetry (which frequently registers aspects of the place in acute close-up), tall tale, ghost story, dream sequences, essay, maps, census charts, and songs. What emerges is an unforgettable evocation of this remote windswept island and a record of one man’s difficult passage into wilderness. But along with this, there’s an increasing focus on the former residents of the island and the fishermen who still visit it, the narrative opening itself to include their voices in the many-threaded weave.

I’d be hard pressed to say whether I love this book more for its central story (the progress of the protagonist from town planner to pilgrim) or for its wonderful nooks and crannies. There is such economy in the language, and such a sure musical sense in Steffler’s ear, that each of the passages—whether in the voice of a Newfoundland fisherman or the narrator-as-poet—hums with its own energy. When I first read it, back in the eighties, I found it hard to believe he was really pulling it off, making a book so various, with such diverse parts, yet working as an organic whole. It still seems unlikely, as unlikely as confederation, another structure whose mysterious strength—as Canadians discover over and over—lies in its diversity.

I realize that this gift may be redundant—John Steffler having been the Parliamentary Poet Laureate a few years ago. (If you already have a copy, perhaps you wouldn’t mind passing this one along to another parliamentarian.) The Grey Islands should be as inescapable for Canadians as Walden is for those south of the border, an iconic book that sets dramatically before us, in a way that is richly complex, at once meditative and entertaining, the difficult and essential encounter with wilderness.

As a bonus, I’m also including the talking book version, published by Janet Russell of Rattling Books, the intrepid Newfoundland publisher of such distinguished books as Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot and Michael Crummey’s Hard Light—two more books that should be included in any Canadian’s reading repertoire. On the CD, narrated by John Steffler himself, you will also hear Frank Holden speaking the part of Carm Denny, a deceased resident of the island, thought to be mad. It’s a passage not to be missed, and includes the greatest bath scene anywhere. Eat your heart out, Hollywood. My thought is that, what with what I’m sure is a very tight schedule, the CD might squeeze in now, and the book be reserved for a time of greater leisure.

Strong writing enables us to live imaginatively as well as practically; it enlarges the scope of life. When it engages the theme of wilderness, it can also enhance our understanding of ourselves as citizens of the world, as well as of a country. Of course such understanding will embrace not only our hardihood and courage, but our disgraceful blindness to the value of wilderness in and for itself. While that blindness was certainly part of the colonial experience, it remains a lamentable feature of some current attitudes, attitudes often registered in government policy. In the end, reading books like The Grey Islands can help make us better, more thoughtful, inhabitants of the planet.

I hope you will find this a stimulating addition to what must by now be a pretty fascinating, and eclectic, library.

Yours sincerely,

Don McKay

Reply:

Pending…

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
China’s Tolstoy, China’s Hugo,
from a Canadian writer,
with thanks,
Charles Foran

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I read a newspaper article about a poll conducted by the largest on-line media company in China. The poll produced a list of the country’s ten most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, as chosen by the Chinese themselves. A full five of them were writers and three more were singer/actors. One, curiously, was a rocket scientist, while the final selection was an obscure soldier who became the focus of a propaganda campaign.

The list was familiar to me from fifteen years of reading and writing about China, and five years of living in Beijing and Hong Kong. Three of the choices, author Louis Cha and actor/singers Leslie Cheung and Faye Wong, were alive until shortly before the poll was conducted. Others, such as author Lu Xun and opera singer Mei Lanfang, continued to exert influence many decades after their deaths. I noticed strong patterns to the selections and remarked on how difficult, and extraordinary, these lives had been. I decided as well that, while far from definitive, the list was sound, and a window onto the values and sentiments of the Chinese people.

I also had a thought: imagine substituting these names with their equivalents in the West. For Faye Wong, think Madonna; for Leslie Cheung, Elvis Presley with a twist. Mei Lanfang has been called China’s Paul Robeson and scientist Qian Xuesan’s impact was akin to that of Robert Oppenheimer. Further back, Lao She’s novel Rickshaw had asserted the same kind of moral force as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, while Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged could be likened to a Shanghai version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Louis Cha’s populist wuxia novels are the match of Zane Grey’s westerns and John Ford’s films. As for Lu Xun, the oldest and most revered of the ten, he has no exact parallel. To appreciate his significance, it is necessary to look to Tolstoy’s importance to 19th century Russia or Victor Hugo’s to the Europe of his age.

The exercise left me wondering to what extent most of us really know China. Can someone claim to know the United States, say, if they’ve never seen a western or heard of The Grapes of Wrath? If they are oblivious to how Elvis Presley and Madonna altered the pop landscape? Our understanding of China remains stubbornly imprisoned by the most obvious markers: its rapacious economy and repressive political system, a population of staggering size and expectations. Yet a country is foremost a culture and a culture is the sum of the values and efforts, dreams and yearnings, of the people who dwell in it. To understand a nation, you must be intimate with its dreams and with its dreamers.

As it happens, Lu Xun has been a touchstone for me since I first started thinking about China. To the extent that this towering figure is known in the West, it is for his short-stories, which literally birthed modern Chinese literature in the 1920s, and which remain vivid, unsettling examinations of a crumbling society and an enduring psyche. I hope you enjoy this sampling of Lu’s most essential work.

Best wishes,

Charlie Foran

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

May 20th, 2010

Dear Mr. Foran,

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your recent letters, with which you enclosed a copy of Century by Ray Smith, and one of Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun.

The Prime Minister wishes me to convey his thanks for sending him these publications. You may be assured that your thoughtful gesture is most appreciated.

Yours sincerely,

S. Russell

Executive Correspondence Officer

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A great Canadian novel,
With sincere regards,
Steven Galloway

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper


Prime Minister of Canada

80 Wellington Street


Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

It’s me again. I hope you enjoyed the last book I sent you, King Leary. Even if you haven’t yet read it, or don’t intend to read it, I still hope you enjoyed receiving it. Unexpected and free books arriving in the mail have become, now that the mysteries of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are blown, one of the few joyous gifts that come my way.

The book I have sent enclosed for you is another one of my favourites. I was in University when I read it for the first time, and it became one of the books that made me want to become a writer. It’s hard to argue that David Adams Richards’ novel For Those Who Hunt The Wounded Down doesn’t have one of the best titles of any Canadian novel, or any novel period.

I’m sending you this novel for several reasons. For starters, it’s a wonderful book. Few writers capture working class life as well as Richards, and few are as able to make seemingly ordinary lives feel extraordinary. He’s written thirteen novels, most of them set in New Brunswick. He was recently made a member of the Order of Canada, and has won about every possible prize for this writing.

I think that one thing Canada is good at is being able to productively discuss ideas where there is disagreement. Tomorrow, I’ll be getting up before the sun and flying from Vancouver to New Brunswick where I’ll be taking part in Moncton’s Frye Festival. All across Canada, literary festivals are organized by people making little or no money. They are attended by readers of all political stripes, who happily part with some of their hard earned money to spend an afternoon or evening talking about and thinking about books and the ideas contained within them. Even when they don’t like the book. And the best festivals, the ones where people are the most energetic, are in places like Moose Jaw, Campbell River, and Sechelt. These festivals are often supported in part by the Federal Government. For this I am thankful. It makes us a better country.

It’s not about meeting the authors, though some people like that. But often meeting an author is a terribly disappointing event. Often the person’s not what you expect, isn’t as clever as their books, says something not so brilliant. And sometimes it’s your fault. A few years ago, I was in my publisher’s office in Toronto for some reason or other, and I was told that David Adams Richards was in the building if I would like to meet him. Well of course I did. We met as he was coming out of the lunch room, and he had a cup of coffee in his hand. I shook his free hand with too much gusto, which made him spill his coffee all over his shoe. It was completely my fault, and I felt like an idiot. Since then I have scrupulously avoided running into him again in the hope that he didn’t catch my name and that by the next time we meet I will have aged enough that he won’t recognize me.

Why do I mention this in a letter to the elected leader of my country? In a round about way, I’m trying to show you that writers aren’t elitists. We often sound like we are, and occasionally we even act like we are—when you spend most of your time in a room by yourself, misunderstandings are bound to occur. But on a base level, we’re ordinary people who happen to be good at writing down stories. And I think our stories are a big part of this country. Come to Moncton or anywhere else and you’d find a lot of people who think so too.

With sincere regards,

Steven Galloway

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book to remind you of the pleasures of life and of the written word,
From a writer,
With thanks,
Alice Kuipers

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper

Prime Minister of Canada

80 Wellington Street

Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Yann came up with the idea to send you a book every two weeks nearly three years ago. I remember the moment it happened. We were walking together along the river in Saskatoon. He’d just got back from his visit to Ottawa and was deeply troubled that the anniversary of the Canada Council had been so unimportant to Canada’s politicians. Yann, like most writers, lives and breathes books—both those he reads and those he writes. He wanted to share that passion with you.

And so we walked along the river, the sun shining as it so often does in Saskatchewan, when Yann came up with the thought that perhaps if he sent you a book every two weeks, you might read one or two of them. He was excited and I was disparaging. I thought it would take up too many hours. Yann decided to choose short books out of respect for your time, and to include a letter with each book explaining why he chose it. He reads, or re-reads, every book he sends you and carefully writes his letters to you.

Along the way, I think Yann has rediscovered the joy of reading widely. As a successful writer, he often only had time to read for research. But now I see him sitting up late at night, turning the pages, kidnapped by Pearl S. Buck or dazzled by Zora Neale Hurston. He sent you my own personal favourite—Property, by Valerie Martin—fairly recently. My own bookshelves have been somewhat depleted by Yann’s ferocious hunt for books.

It took me a while to know what to choose to send you as many of the books under 200 pages that I’d already discussed with Yann have long since left the house and arrived in Ottawa. But I notice that Yann hasn’t given you much children’s literature, and so it seemed to me that Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White would perhaps interest you. I suspect you’ve already read it, but it certainly bears re-reading. I’d say most of E. B. White’s words hold up well to being re-read.

Elwyn Brooks White was born in the final year of the nineteenth century. The son of a piano manufacturer, he went to Cornell University where he took a course with Professor William S. Strunk Jr. Years later, White edited, revised and added to Strunk’s The Elements of Style—an extraordinary book that every writer should have close to hand. It is full of bossy tips on how to write well. I’m lucky enough to have an illustrated edition. It has stood on my bookshelf for years. Writing to you now reminds me that I’d like to read it again. One of the joys of reading books is that, inevitably, they lead you to read other books. They are road maps to onward journeys. Just as Charlotte’s Web leads me to The Elements of Style, so, hopefully, it will lead you to another book.

It’s not entirely clear when White decided he wanted to be a writer, but it’s known that he turned down a teaching job with the University of Minnesota to pursue that goal when he was in his early twenties. By 1927, he was a contributing editor at The New Yorker, the magazine with which he was associated until his death. His wife was an editor there. He wrote many brilliant essays (a collection of which lies next to my bed) and from there went on to write Charlotte’s Web (among other books). All this to say that writing was his life. It permeated White’s family, his work, and his thoughts. Writing does that to some people. He wrote, “All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world. I guess you can find it in there, if you dig around.”

I love that he wrote that. I love it because it speaks directly to the pleasure you will get from Charlotte’s Web. White worried that the book would be too low-key for most kids with its simple, delightful evocation of life (and death) on a farm. Yet every carefully placed word (heeding Strunk’s demand in The Elements of Style that we Omit unnecessary words!) hums with White’s pleasure at being alive.

The story is about Wilbur and his friends Fern, Templeton, the goose, the sheep, and above all, Charlotte the spider. Wilbur is a sweet, innocent pig who discovers that he is being fattened up to be killed. He doesn’t want to die. As he says, “I just love it here in the barn…I love everything about this place.” And so Charlotte puts her mind to working out a way to save him. She uses her web to write words to the people in Wilbur’s life. Words such as TERRIFIC or SOME PIG. The image of the farmhand coming to pour the slops, stopping in disbelief as he stares as the dewy web inscribed with the words SOME PIG is etched into my mind, as the words on the web as etched into the consciousness of those who control Wilbur’s destiny.

Don’t be fooled. The simplicity of the language, the bucolic setting, the folksy animals, all build to Charlotte’s swan song—a swan song to her friend the pig which is, at the same time, White’s swan song to a way of life, written in the most elegant language. Charlotte using her strength to write those words in the web reminds me of how essential words can be. Charlotte’s Web is a testimony to the power of language, both in its tale and its telling.

This is why Yann writes to you. Like Charlotte the spider, he believes that the written word can shape lives and save lives. I hope by reading about E. B. White, and more importantly, by reading his books, you’ll be reminded that as we need politicians and prime ministers, so we need books and writers.

And if reading Charlotte’s Web does not do that for you, hopefully it will evoke a time and a place that stays with you. You’ll be there with Wilbur as he tries—ridiculously—to spin a web. With Charlotte as she makes the ultimate sacrifice. With Fern as she tries to pull the axe from her father’s hands. And with E. B. White as he shows us Wilbur for the first time:

There, inside, looking up at her, was the newborn pig. It was a white one. The morning light shone through its ears, turning them pink.

“He’s yours,” said Mr Arable.’

And so now this book is yours.

I hope you enjoy it.

Yours respectfully,

Alice Kuipers

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book still patiently awaiting its readers,
From a Canadian writer,
With thanks,
Charles Foran

Letter:

Dear Mr. Harper,

Books, like people, can get overlooked. I’d like to use this slot, so generously offered by Yann, to tell you about a wonderful Canadian work of fiction that still awaits real discovery. Ray Smith’s Century first appeared back in 1986, and didn’t cause much fuss. It had a decent publisher, and Smith had already released two books that had won him a small but noisy crowd of admirers: Lord Nelson Tavern and the humbly-titled Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada. These were charming, off-the-wall fictions, of a cheerful piece with the prankster stuff then emerging from the coastal regions of the United States. Smith, a Cape Bretoner exiled to Montreal, had his own coastal vibe, but it wasn’t stoner/surfer cool: it was late night FM radio, chill and iconoclastic, joshing of mainstream tastes with bite but no malice.

Still, Century didn’t launch. It took Ray Smith a long time to finish, and it wasn’t as easy in its literary skin as his earlier work: more moody and anxious, less sanguine about the triumph of light over dark. It was also set mostly in Europe, and spanned a near century in just 165 compacted, almost pointillist pages. Things had changed in Canadian culture and literature in the interim, and Smith responded by, in a sense, going even further off-shore than the island where he comes from (and now lives again, in retirement). Whatever Century was, it wasn’t “Can Lit,” as the impulse or industry was being dubbed.

I called it a “work of fiction” for a reason. The book, which has six parts linked by a single character and regular tonal overlaps, could be classified as a novel of the, yikes, post-modern variety. But, besides having no interest in any desiccated academic trope, the stories are all self-contained, as in a collection. Even Smith’s one discernable theme—how art must embody the morality largely absent from a corrupted world—isn’t writ in BLOCK LETTERS, so everyone will get it. Century defies categories and shrugs off expectations. Look, says the text, of course this isn’t life; of course it’s just a book. Allow these elegantly arranged words to fall over you, confetti at a wedding, and then decide what the marriage is comprised of.

“Matter of fact,” one admirer recently observed, “the textures [of the prose] may be the meanings; Smith has too much respect for language, and too little patience with theme-speak, to insist any overarching concerns upon these smart, bright words. At moments, he may even be counting on musicality to serve as medium and message alike.” Actually, I wrote that about Century, for a preface to new edition published in 2009. Dan Wells, editor of Biblioasis Editions in southern Ontario, has been both re-issuing old Ray Smith books, and supporting his newer ones. I won’t say Biblioasis has been overlooked as well, but both these men are original, nervy literary sorts, operating from either the margins, if you insist on drawing the cultural map that way, or simply from where they need to be, as artists and publishers, in order to consider their day’s—or life’s—work worthwhile. I’m most happy to include my last copy of the Biblioasis Century with this note.

Sincerely,

Charlie Foran

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
I hope this book makes you laugh, remember and look forward,
from a Canadian writer,
with thanks,
Steven Galloway

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper

Prime Minister of Canada

80 Wellington Street

Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Please don’t be disappointed. I know that for some time now you’ve been receiving books in the mail from Yann Martel, and I suppose you’ve grown used to this. Even though his letters have yet to garner a response, I like to imagine you reading them in your robe and slippers in the morning over coffee. Is that an odd thing to imagine of one’s Prime Minister? Perhaps. I apologize if so—you are, however, the leader of our country, and leaders exist as much in our imaginations as in physical being.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m not Yann. My name is Steven, and I’m a writer from Vancouver. Yann sent you one of my books, The Cellist of Sarajevo. I hope you liked it. If you didn’t, thanks for not letting on. Our friend Yann is out on the road promoting his new book, Beatrice and Virgil, and he’s asked me to fill in for him. I’m happy to do so, because I fancy myself a helpful sort of guy, and because even though a lot of writer types think Yann is tilting at windmills in sending you these books, I like to think that maybe you look at some of them, and maybe you read or have already read some of them, and that no one, anywhere, would think that receiving seventy-five free books in the mail with a letter from an internationally renowned author would be a bad thing. In a way, you’re in what must be the world’s most exclusive book club, albeit somewhat unwillingly. I bet Mr. Obama is jealous!

There’s a band from Winnipeg called the Weakerthans that I really like. They have a song called Night Windows, written by John Samson, that is about the sensation you get when you think you see someone who’s died, and for a moment, before you remember that person isn’t alive any more, you feel about them like you did when they were alive, you see them as they were when they were alive, and for that moment it’s like they never died. This sensation, which is rare and wonderful and sometimes sad, is why I love reading. It’s also for this reason that I’ve chosen to send you Paul Quarrington’s novel, King Leary.

It’s a hockey novel. One of our best ones. I read somewhere that you like hockey, and recently saw you on TV at the gold medal game sitting next to Wayne Gretzky. That must have been a fun experience. I was at home sitting next to my aunt and a guy named Jay and it was still pretty great. Anyhow, in the novel, Percival “King” Leary was once the best player in the NHL. He won the cup in 1919, scoring the winning goal after dodging Newsy Lalonde and executing a perfect St. Louis Whirlygig. Except for a glass of champagne on that occasion, he has never in his life drank alcohol. His beverage of choice is ginger ale, which he maintains makes him drunker than anything else ever could. The novel opens with him as an old man in a rest home with his pal, newspaperman Blue Hermann. He’s offered a whopping sum of money to go to Toronto to make an ad for a ginger ale company. The story unfolds from there, and I don’t want to ruin it for you, but our King is in poor health, and he has demons in his life that he’s been trying to keep at bay but are catching up to him. He has many moments where he sees the dead, and in his case the dead have much to say about the way in which he’s lived his life. It’s a funny novel, a sad novel, and the sort of novel that only a Canadian would write.

Paul Quarrington died recently of cancer. He was only 56. He was a terrific guy. Sometimes, reading his work, I feel for a second like he’s still alive. Most people never knew Paul, or any living or dead author for that matter, but when you read a book you often have that moment Samson describes—I bet the Germans have a name for it—with a voice in your life, or the collective lives of everyone. I suppose a cynical person would call it a sort of nostalgia, but I like to think of it as a reminder. A reminder of how things were or are or could be.

Sometimes these reminders cost billions of dollars. Take the Olympics. Though I’m not a fan of the cronyism that accompanies them, I think the stories they create, and their illustration of the bond we share as Canadians, makes that money well spent. But there are other ways to do this as well, ways that don’t fizzle if Crosby doesn’t score in overtime (phew). Books are one of the best examples of this, and they’re a whole lot less expensive. Sometimes free. I hope you like King Leary.

Sincerely,

Steven Galloway

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel about terrible governance,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

The coolest thing happened to me last week. There was a stiff, mid-size envelope in my mailbox. I don’t get as much mail as you do, but I do get my fair share (and I don’t have any staff to help me with it). So what was this, what request, what demand? I noted that it came from the US. I opened it. Between two pieces of cardboard, a smaller envelope slipped out. On the front, top left, was the return address: The White House, Washington, DC 20500. I was intrigued. Not The White House. I opened the envelope, and there it was, on White House letterhead, a handwritten note from President Obama. I do believe my heart skipped a beat. A week later I’m still gingerly taking the note out to marvel at it. The President of the United States wrote to me—to me! For sure I’m going to have the note framed. If there was a way of tattooing it on my back, I would. What amazes me is the gratuity of it. As you would know, there is a large measure of calculation in what public figures do. But here, what does he gain? I’m not a US citizen. In no way can I be of help to President Obama. Clearly he did it for personal reasons, as a reader and as a father. And in two lines, what an insightful analysis of Life of Pi. Bless him, bless him.

Not all heads of government are as good. For proof, the book I’m sending you this week, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Joseph Stalin made his people miserable for all of his reign as leader of the Soviet Union, from 1922 to 1953. Or to put it more accurately, whatever good he did was obliterated by the nearly immeasurable evil that came with it. The title of most heinous dictator of the 20th century of course goes to Adolf Hitler, but Hitler burned out quickly, in twelve years, and was atypical of German leadership. Stalin, on the other hand, he lasted, he died an old man while still in power, he was a beacon of steady and stable evil. And while his crimes—social upheaval, economic catastrophe, massive and systematic human rights violations, widespread famine and poverty—were worse than those of his predecessors or successors, Russia didn’t fare well before him under the Tsars, didn’t fare well after him under the Soviet leaders that followed, and isn’t faring well under the authoritarian regime now in place. I am reminded of that adage, “Man’s inhumanity to Man”, but with a variation for this case: “Russians’ inhumanity to Russians”. It has always puzzled me how the Russians, despite the blazing individual geniuses they have produced in the arts and sciences, have otherwise been such a calamity to themselves (and to the Europeans who had the misfortune of living in the shadow of their empire). What other country has produced a Nobel Peace Prize winner—Mikhail Gorbachev—who sought only to liberate his people from themselves? And this, in a country that has never been colonized and whose ills cannot be blamed on others.

There’s a paragraph on page 104 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that summarises the attitude I’m talking about:

He could barely stand any longer. But he kept on somehow. Shukhov [that is, Ivan Denisovich] had once had a horse like that. He had thought highly of the horse, but had driven it to death. And then they had skinned the hide off him.

He had thought highly of the horse, but had driven it to death—and with no explanation as to why. It’s just what you do. And the ”he” mentioned at the start is not another horse but a human being, a fellow prisoner, one whom Ivan Denisovich also thinks highly of and will just as blithely see worked to death. One feels like crying out, Where’s the humanity, the benevolence, the compassion? Well, there’s precious little of that in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This short novel tells the story of an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary prisoner in the Gulag, the massive forced labour camp system that was nearly a parallel society in Communist Russia. At most, the roughest of fraternity is fleetingly expressed during moments when fear and want have momentarily abated. At all other times, each prisoner strictly looks out for himself. It makes for appalling living, lucidly documented by Solzhenitsyn, and a searing indictment of what Stalin did to his own people.

I sent you, nearly three years ago now, Animal Farm, by the English writer George Orwell. It’s interesting to compare that novel and Ivan Denisovich. Both works cover the same ground, but very differently. The first portrays the evil of Stalinism by means of allegory, the second by means of realism. Which do you prefer?

I need to inform you of a temporary change in our little book club. Up till now, it’s just been you and me. But I’m leaving on a four month trip soon, in part to promote my next novel, and I was worried that the logistics of getting a book and a letter to you every two weeks while on tour would be too much of a strain. So I’ve decided to invite other Canadian writers to join our literary journey. I’m glad about the decision. This is certainly a case of making a virtue of necessity. After all, why should I be alone in making reading suggestions to you? My knowledge of the book world is very limited. Why not plumb the literary depths of other writers?

So your next book and letter, to be delivered to your office in exactly two weeks, on Monday, March 15th, will come from a different Canadian writer. I won’t tell you who—let it be a surprise—nor do I have any idea what the next book will be. That too will be a surprise.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book from far away,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

It happens every few years that the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a source of surprise and consternation. The gasp is audible nearly around the world: “Who?!“ That’s exactly how I reacted in 2004, I remember. I’d never heard of Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who was the recipient that year. Of course, German-language readers surely knew of her and no doubt applauded her win. The Nobel Committee has the wisdom and discernment to cast its net wide, finding worthy winners in writers who are not widely known or who write from cultures on the margin of our Anglo-American dominated world. I discovered Elias Canetti, for example, a wonderful writer, when I had another “Who?!” moment way back in 1981.

Well, Stockholm has done it again. A few months ago, the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced and it was—move over, Elfriede—another “obscure” woman writer who writes in German, Herta Müller. And since the Winter Olympics are on right now in Vancouver, with hosts of foreign athletes visiting our land, I thought I would heed the Nobel Committee’s high commendation and offer you something by Herta Müller. Nadirs, her first book, a collection of short stories, is the only one I could find at McNally Robinson. It is a curious book. Right off, it feels foreign. We don’t write like that in English. It’s not a matter of translation. I wouldn’t know it, not speaking German and so not able to compare the original with the translation, but I doubt the book is poorly translated. It is rather the sensibility. The writing feels impersonal, nearly mechanical, it is laconic in the extreme and there is little effort at being beautiful. The stories, except for anecdotal bursts, are plotless. They’re full of details, yet many of them are unreal, dreamlike, nightmarish. It helps to know a little about Herta Müller: she’s from a German-speaking region of Romania called the Banat. A minority speaker in a poor country: that would explain the sensibility, so different from mine. I’m sometimes struck by the strange inner realities that come from central and eastern Europe. There are books from parts of the world that should feel more alien to me—for example, the book I sent you a month ago: Things Fall Apart, from Nigeria—yet that don’t feel so alien to me. I felt quite comfortable slipping into the African skin of Okonkwo. And then Europe, my ancestral continent, a continent on which I lived ten years, three of whose languages I speak, whose majority religion I broadly adhere to, whose people look and dress like me, produces stories that completely puzzle me. Perhaps it’s the result of that very European mix of cultural diversity, economic chaos and political misery. Whatever the case, I read Nadirs and I thought, “Gosh those Germans certainly know how not to have fun.”

A worthy book nonetheless. A reminder that great literature brings us to foreign shores and makes us less narrow.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book in praise of soaring over limits,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Have you ever felt limited by language? I’m sure you have. A common instance would be when you’re speaking with someone and you want to convey an idea, but you’ve momentarily forgotten the word, it remains on the proverbial tip of your tongue, and you struggle to explain what you mean to say in a roundabout way. Another common occurrence of language limiting expression is when one is speaking in a foreign language. You, for example, have made admirable efforts to learn French, but it remains a language with which you’re not fully comfortable. When you give a speech in French, I’m sure you prefer to speak from a written text vetted by a native speaker, and when you have to ad-lib, I imagine you seek safety in the set phrases and expressions that you’ve learned; otherwise, you must struggle, trying to express your meaning in the limited knowledge you have of the language. In English, on the other hand, you must feel no sense of limitations. I imagine you feel, like most native speakers of a language feel, that what you think, you express, effortlessly and without any delay or searching.

Of course, this sense of freedom, this perfect match between thought and expression, is an illusion born of comfort and familiarity. Faced with an utterly new experience, whether beatific or horrific, we often lose the capacity to speak, we are rendered speechless. And expression is more than simply a question of vocabulary. Experiences that are not emotionally overwhelming but intellectually complex can also have us struggling to speak meaningfully. In such situations, it is not necessarily words that fail us, but the preliminary understanding that leads to the choice of words. All this to say that sometimes we are tongue-tied—and we don’t like it. We value expression. So, humming, hawing, non-sequituring, we struggle until we manage to put idea or experience into words.

The book I am sending you this time—the poetry collection Eunoia, by the Canadian writer Christian Bök (pronounced Book), both the book and the CD (effectively read by the author)—is all about limitations and the soaring over-passing of them. Bök, a fervent admirer of Oulipo, the French experimental writers’ collective, has taken one of their favourite techniques, the lipogram, to a very high level. A lipogram is a composition in which a letter is missing throughout. A fine example of a lipogram is George Perec’s novel La disparition, written entirely without the most used vowel in French, the letter e. If you think a lipogram sounds like a gimmick, think again. In the case of the Perec novel, the letter e in French is pronounced the same as the word eux, them. La disparition refers not only to the disappearance of a letter, but of them. Them who? Well, to start with, Perec’s parents, who were Jewish and who were swallowed up by the Holocaust. La disparition is a metaphor on the wiping out of a good part of Jewish civilization in Europe, something very much equivalent to an alphabet losing one of its key letters. No gimmickry there, I don’t think.

Bök has taken the challenge even further. With Eunoia, he has written a series of poems that omit not  just one letter, but several, and not consonants, of which there are many, but vowels, and not just one, two or three vowels per poem, but four vowels. That leaves just one vowel per poem. The opening lines of the collection gives you right away the treat you’re in for:

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art…

The hero of the vowel A is the Arab Hassan Abd al-Hassad, while E features Greek Helen, who

Restless, she deserts her fleece bed where, detested, her wedded regent sleeps. When she remembers Greece, her seceded demesne, she feels wretched, left here, bereft, her needs never met.

Who would have thought that Homer’s Iliad could be retold using just one vowel? The vowel I allows the author to speak about his project and defend it:

I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz—griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.

In O we read that

Porno shows folks lots of sordor—zoom-shots of Björn Borg’s bottom or Snoop Dogg’s crotch. Johns who don condoms for blowjobs go downtown to Soho to look for pornshops known to stock lots of lowbrow schlock—off-color porn for old boors who long to drool onto color photos of cocks, boobs, dorks or dongs.

With O, we also get a wink at Clockwork Orange, the novel by Anthony Burgess I sent you a while ago:

Crowds of droogs, who don workboots to stomp on downtrod hobos, go on to rob old folks, most of whom own posh co-op condos.

Even U, that vowel the sight of which makes a Scrabble player’s heart sink, manages to speak on its own:

Kultur spurns Ubu—thus Ubu pulls stunts.

So it goes, the wit and inventiveness dancing across the pages, the stock of single-vowel words of the English language expended to discuss a surprising range of topics, from the bawdy to the lyrical, from the pastoral to the historical.

And the purpose of it all? It may seem to you to be a mere game, with the lack of seriousness that one might associate with playing. To that, two responses: first, in playing, in toying, comes discoveries, the result of chance juxtapositions; and second, language is never just about itself. This language playing that Bök delights us with comments on the world because every word, whether invested with one vowel or five, connects eventually to a concrete reality. So speaking in mono-vowels though he is, Bök is also speaking volumes. Eunoia, which means “beautiful thinking” and is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, is a narrow but perfect work. It is a gambol through language, and it would be a sad mistake to dismiss it as merely facetious, which word—lo!—contains all five vowels in order. After such wordplay, the tongue is better fixed in the mouth and expression comes more easily.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A great novel from Africa,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

No prorogation for me. I guess one of the differences between art and politics is that politics can stop, at least for a while, but art, the living of it, never does.

The book I have for you this week is Things Fall Apart, by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. In case you don’t know much about him: he was born in 1930 in Eastern Nigeria, among the people known then as the Ibo, now the Igbo. He was brought up speaking Ibo and English and chose to write in English. Things Fall Apart was his first novel, coming out in 1958. Its success was immediate, and endures. The cover of the edition I’m sending you, which dates from 1986, states that the novel has sold two million copies. Well, that fact is long out of date: it has now sold over eight million copies. It is the first English-language classic to come out of Africa, and is read in schools and universities around the world. As it should be. Things Fall Apart is an absolutely superb novel. It seems simple enough, resting on short, descriptive scenes. But the overall picture it draws is breathtakingly vast and complex, nothing short of a snapshot of the encounter between African and British societies in the late 19th century and the ensuing wreckage of colonialism. This comment perhaps makes it sound as if Things Fall Apart were an overtly political novel, with the author’s grinding ax screeching in the reader’s ears. Such is not the case. Rather, Things Fall Apart, certainly in its first two-thirds, reads more like a work of anthropology. Achebe describes the way of life of the villagers of Umuofia, their religious beliefs and practices, their agricultural economy, their social interactions, and so on. Okonkwo is the protagonist of the story. The reader follows him through the seasons of his life, hearing about the events big and small that mark his life and make him who he is. Okonkwo is a proud man, generally fair in his dealings with his family and neighbours, and a successful farmer and, when need be, a fierce warrior. He is far from perfect, just as his society is far from ideal, but both muddle along, he shaped by it and it affected by him.

And then the white man comes, in the form of missionaries. They are not intrinsically bad, these newcomers. In fact, Mr. Brown, the first missionary, is a rather sympathetic character. He is a zealous Christian, for sure, but not a blind one. He wants to convert the African heathens among whom he lives, but he is not insensitive to their feelings. He makes genuine attempts at dialogue. Alas, Mr. Smith, his successor, is not so open-minded. As for the District Commissioner, who is there to provide the colonial administrative muscle behind the religious preaching, he is even less so. Incomprehension, the white man’s of the African man and the African man’s of the white man, wins the day—and things fall apart.

The marvel of the novel lies in its even-handedness. It is not that the African way of life is Edenesque until the arrival of the white man. Not at all, and the novel makes that clear. Some of the religious practices of the Africans are barbaric, such as their treatment of newborn twins, who are thought to be evil and are abandoned in the forest to die of exposure. Achebe makes plain the travails of life in Umuofia. And yet the villagers manage. Life may be harsh at times, but they know who they are and where they belong. They are a people and a civilization. Not very different, really, from the people and civilization of the white man. That is the point so deftly made by the novel, that the encounter between Africans and Europeans went so poorly not because one was inferior to the other, but because they failed to understand each other and, as a direct result, to respect each other. The villagers are patriarchal,  for example. Take Okonkwo and his three wives. An outrage. But were the Victorians any less patriarchal? The religion of the Umuofians is so much voodoo mumbo-jumbo—but is it really any different from the voodoo mumbo-jumbo of the white man? The villagers expect evil to befall the missionaries for flaunting the native gods, just as the missionaries expect evil to befall the villagers if they continue to flaunt the new God. And so on. The Umuofians are shown in their bigness and smallness, just as the white man is shown in his bigness and smallness. Why couldn’t they properly meet and gently, slowly syncretize? It wasn’t to be. Hence the heart-wrenching tragedy at the heart of the novel: things didn’t have to fall apart. Given better emissaries, given greater efforts to reach out, perhaps Africa wouldn’t have been so wrecked and Europe so tainted.

I have rarely read a novel that so portrays a foreign reality with such an acute mix of insight, understanding, and outrage. Things Fall Apart is a brilliant novel, Mr. Harper. I heartily recommend it to you.

I should mention that I am writing this letter in unusual circumstances. Normally I write to you in the quiet of my office at home. Not tonight. Tonight I’m sitting in the middle of the Mendel Art Gallery here in Saskatoon, on a raised platform, writing my lettter in public. I’m participating in a multi-disciplinary carnival-like event called Lugo, which is bringing together dancers, musicians, actors and others in a celebration of the arts. I’m also soliciting book suggestions. I better start writing them down before the pile falls off my desk. So here goes, as they are given to me by the crowd surrounding me, suggestions of books for your consideration from Canadian readers:

Billions and Billions, by Carl Sagan
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
Killing Hope, by William Blum
because i am a woman, by June Jordan
The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence
Stella, Queen of the Snow, by Marie-Louise Guay (with this said of it by the person who made the recommendation: “It will answer many of life’s pressing questions, and bring a smile to your face.”)
Two Solitudes, by Hugh MacLennan
The Red Tent, by Arita Ament
Expect Resistance, by crimethinc.org
Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce, by Joseph Boyden
The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill
Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela (I usually send you short books—which this one is not—but I highly recommend Mandela’s autobiography when you have more free time. Now, come to think of it, parliament not sitting and all that.)
The Holy Longing, by Fr. Ron Rolheiser
Staying Alive, a poetry anthology edited by Neil Astley
Your Whole Family is Made of Meat, by Ryan North (love the title)
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins
The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock
Money for Nothing, by PG Wodehouse
Che, author not given (I wonder if the person meant the movie by Steven Soderbergh?)
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho 
Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee (a great recommendation—I’ve already sent you a Coetzee, if you remember, Waiting for the Barbarians.)
Lion in the Streets, a play by Judith Thompson
The poetry of Emily Dickinson (which makes me think that I haven’t sent you poetry in ages.)
Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangaremba (I just looked it up on the internet—sounds really neat. Set in Rhodesia in the 1960s and 70s, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story.)
Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut
Born to be Good, by Dacher Kelther
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon
The Exorcist, by Peter Blatty
All the Names, by José Saramago
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell
Les Belles Sœurs, by Michel Tremblay
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
The Alphabet of Manliness, by Maddox
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff (the person who suggested it added, “This excellent book will teach him [that is, you] openness and how to value all people in our community and land. Be more like Pooh, less like Rabbit and Pigglet!”)
By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño (more on him later, in another letter. I’m thinking of sending you Amulet.)
Half of a Yellow Sun, by C. N. Adiche (another African novel)
Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson
Voltaire’s Bastards, by John Ralston Saul
The God of Small Things and Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, by Arundhati Roy
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay (“about the heartbreaking lengths it is sometimes necessary to go to in order to address the rule of tyrants.”)
Overqualified, by Joey Comeau
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
The Maintains, poetry by Clark Coolidge
War and Peace, by Tolstoy (about as long a novel as they get, and I’ve already sent you two Tolstoys, but you should get to W & P before you die.)
A Street Without a Name, author not given
Foxfire, by Joyce Carol Oates (“The book I re-read when I want to remember why I write.”)
Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method, poetry by Daniel Tysdal
Death in the Afternoon, by Ernest Hemingway
Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq
Dream Boy, by Jim Grimsley
L’Avalée des avalés, by Réjean Ducharme
One Native Life, by Richard Wagamese
Yesterday at the Hotel Clarendon, by Nicole Brossard
Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, by Mem Fox
Mid-Course Correction, by Ray C. Anderson
The End of the Story, by Lydia Davis
The Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada, by Allan Casey
The Mirror Has Two Faces, by C. S. Lewis (I find no book of that name by Lewis, only a 1996 American movie by and with Barbra Streisand, a remake of a 1958 French movie of the same name. I wonder what book the reader had in mind.)
Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse
Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh
The Art of Japanese Bondage, author unknown (!)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
Truth, by Terry Pratchett
A Woman in Berlin, anonymous
The Crackwalker, by Judith Thompson (which is playing here in Saskatoon from March 4-7 and 11-14—you are hereby invited.)
Pinnochio, by Carlo Collodi
A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry
Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger

That’s quite the reading list. And a reading list as it should be: multinational and of all genres, and fresh from the minds of the people of Saskatoon.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A life in books,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I haven’t sent you much non-fiction since the start of our little book club, but how could a book called Books not catch my attention as I was browsing at McNally Robinson last week? (As you’ve perhaps heard, McNally Robinson, a fine independent book chain, has just filed for bankruptcy protection. By the sounds of it, their main Winnipeg store and the one here in Saskatoon will survive, but their venture in suburban Toronto has cost them dearly. But the travails of independent bookselling is another story, although not, coincidentally, one unrelated to your latest gift.) Books is about a life in books. Its author is Larry McMurtry. If you think you’ve never heard of him, I bet you’re more familiar with his work than you realize. McMurtry, a disciplined writer, ten pages a morning, every day, no exception, for years, has published many books, as you’ll see if you flip to the second page of Books, where his works are listed in a long column. So far, McMurtry has to his credit thirty-six novels, one collection of short stories, and three collections of essays. But for Lonesome Dove, which I remember hearing about when it won McMurtry the Pulitzer Prize in 1986, none of the titles were familiar to me. Well, with the exception of those that were adapted to the screen. Remember Hud, with Paul Newman? It was based on McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By. His novel The Last Picture Show was also turned into a successful Hollywood movie, as was Terms of Endearment. More recently, McMurtry co-wrote the brilliant screen adaptation of Annie Proulx’s novella Brokeback Mountain.

So, a novelist who has done very well in Hollywood. But the book in your hands is called Books, not Movies. McMurtry, it turns out, has lived with and for and by books his whole life, writing them, reading them and selling them. He is, to use a term that comes up frequently in his memoir, a bookman. His personal library consists of approximately 28,000 volumes. His used bookstore, Booked Up, in Archer City, Texas, has over 300,000 books. He has worked in the used book trade for over fifty years, starting as a book scout, hunting for rare books, and then moving on to open his own used book store, first in Georgetown, a neighbourhood of Washington, D.C., and then in Texas. And throughout—the pretext for the scouting and the selling—he has read and reread thousands upon thousands of books. In one chapter, McMurtry makes mention of a “minor English literary figure” named James Lees-Milne (try saying that name ten times over), the author of several “not particularly good books on architecture, a few bad novels, several readable biographies, and twelve glorious volumes of diaries.” He comments: “I have read the whole twelve volumes several times and I am sure I will keep rereading them for the rest of my life.” I wonder if there’s anyone else on this planet who can claim to have read the twelve-volume diaries of James Lees-Milne several times. And it’s clear that McMurtry’s judgments on Lees-Milne’s other books, the not particularly good ones, the bad ones and the merely readable ones, are the result of having read every single one. Elsewhere, McMurtry, in discussing his interest in the world wars of the 20th century, talks about reading Winston Churchill’s massive history of World War II, all five million words of it. And so on, authors minor and major, works single and in multiple volumes—they’ve all been taken in by a mind voraciously open to the written word.

What kind of intellectual autobiography does such a mind yield? Is the reader, the average reader who’s never heard of, let alone read, James Lees-Milne, reduced to feeling ignorant or half-literate? The answer is no, as you’ll find out as soon as you start on Books. Because books, if read well, feed your humbleness, not your arrogance. Books are about life, and life is a humbling experience. Ask any old person.

Books is about McMurtry’s life with books, mostly the books he’s read and traded, and about the sub-culture—and wavering fortunes—of antiquarian book traders. The wisdom in it comes off naturally and easily. And the chapters are very short; some don’t even stretch to a full page, and very few are longer than three pages. I liked that right away. All those books read, yet the man writes these itsy-bitsy chapters. The tone is equally approachable. McMurtry was born on a ranch somewhere in Texas to parents who didn’t own a single book, and the feel of the man, as I sense it in this memoir, reminds me of the best of Prairie folk here in Saskatchewan, smart but modest.

A book asks you to measure yourself against it. The relationship is one of comparing and contrasting. Done lucidly, one emerges a little more knowledgeable about oneself and, sometimes, a little wiser. One thing I learnt from reading Books is that I’m not the bibliophile that Larry McMurtry is. He clearly loves not only the messages that books deliver, but their medium, that construction of ink, paper and cardboard, with its long history and technical lingo. I’m too much of the nomad, unwilling to weigh myself down, to attach myself in this way to books. McMurtry balks at e-books. I don’t. McMurtry loves owning old or rare books. I don’t. To me, a book is a sustained whisper and it matters not a jot whether that whisper is conveyed by an inexpensive Penguin paperback, or an incunabulum. The book that is an art object is something other than literary. It belongs in a museum rather than a library. Having said that, I’d love to visit McMurtry’s personal library and his used book store. And I love wandering about the stacks of the library at the University of Saskatchewan. Larry McMurtry and I certainly agree on this point: books, owned or borrowed, old or new, nourish and sustain the soul.

I hope you enjoy, in this new year of 2010, this celebration of book culture.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…