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 perception, 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 1985, 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…

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
If only we really were experts,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year,
Yann Martel

Letter:

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

Dear Mr. Harper,

R. K. Narayan is the mercifully shortened nom de plume of Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Iyer Narayanswamy. He was Indian and lived from 1906 to 2001. If you’ve never heard of Narayan, look at the commendations on the back of the book I’m sending you this week, the novel The Financial Expert, and you will see the kinds of writers with whom Narayan is classed: Tolstoy, Henry James, Chekhov, Turgenev, Conrad, Gogol, Jane Austen. One commentator makes mention of the Nobel Prize, which Narayan never obtained but would have well deserved. I remember reading an interview with Narayan in an Indian newspaper on my second visit to India and feeling a sense of privilege that I was in his country while he was still alive. R. K. Narayan was a gentle giant of English-language literature.

Like William Faulkner with his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County and Thomas Hardy with his semi-fictional Wessex region, Narayan invented a place, the town of Malgudi, and then spun fictional tales about it, but all so that he might speak about real life. His characters are ordinary enough and their lives move along in ways that are neither settled nor too jarring, yet the grand march of existence, its glory and its misery, rise up from the pages of his novels. Notice the language of The Financial Expert. Aside from the odd word or phrase—dhoti, sacred thread, betel leaves, a lakh—the English is nearly classical, and Narayan’s portrayal of India is neither folkloric nor exaggerated. He speaks not of India-the-peculiar, but of India-the-universal.

The Financial Expert tells the story of Margayya, the expert of the title, who lives on the edges of the banking world of Malgudi, helping peasants fill out forms and secure loans. His office is no more than a piece of lawn in the shade of a banyan tree and the tools of his trade are all contained in a little box. Margayya has large ambitions, though not, it seems, any way of fulfilling them. But Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth, for whom he prays and fasts for forty days, finds grace in him and Margayya manages to do well for himself. But at a price: he becomes wealthy with money, but poor in his relations with his wife and son and others. As you can imagine, this price will have to be paid.

Margayya’s fortunes are determined by turns of fate as incalculable as a win at bingo. For example, his first wave of wealth comes as a result of publishing a book. He is not its author. It is penned by one Dr. Pal, who, quite unexpectedly, gives him the manuscript, no strings attached. Later on, Margayya and his wife receive a letter saying that their estranged son, Balu, has died. The news proves to be false, the product of a madman who writes postcards to people he selects randomly to inform them of false calamities. I believe the arbitrariness of fate is the theme of The Financial Expert, and the title is therefore ironic: we are experts at nothing. We are rather at the mercy of the gods, Narayan is saying, and any sense of control that we might have is illusion. What do you think of this interpretation of the novel?

Christmas is upon us and then a New Year, and so I wish you and your family health and happiness and the serenity to accept what 2010 will bring.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Copenhagen—what a mess. It would be interesting to read The Financial Expert, published in 1952, long before climate change was detected, in the light of that disastrous, save-the-world conference.

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book for the hockey fan in you,
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’ve already read the book that accompanies this letter. I can’t imagine that someone before me hasn’t thought of offering it to you. You’re a big hockey fan and Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places, by Dave Bidini, is all about hockey. But I’d say it’s a cut above most hockey books because it’s written by someone who (a) has the game in his blood, and (b) knows how to write. The hockey knowledge is evident. The book is replete with anecdotes, stories and events from the history of hockey, featuring a good number of players that I’m sure will be familiar to you but were unknown to me. And the knowledge goes deeper than that. This is no academic or journalistic account. Bidini is hockey mad. As he relates in his book, he played as a teen, but gave up when the pressure got too much. Then as an adult he started to play again in a rec league in Toronto and hockey became a central part of his life. So this is a book both knowledgeable and personal. And then the man can write. Take the following line. Bidini and his wife have just left Hong Kong by train, heading for Beijing:

Just two hours out of town, all the glitter and sparkle of Hong Kong had given way to a country of stone and dust and the scrabblings of life, as neglected as the crumbs of an eraser that has rubbed out centuries of progress.

How’s that for an image that captures the difference between the dynamism of Hong Kong and the failures of communist China? Bidini can also be very funny, as in this case, a description of the special talent of Kareem, the world’s first Sudanese hockey player, who plays for the Al Ain Falcons of the United Arab Emirates:

Of all the Al Ain players, Kareem had the hardest slap shot, due in part to the fact that his wind-up started from behind his head. The only problem with Kareem’s shot was that he had no idea where it was going. When he wound-up in the offensive zone, the Falcons ducked and covered, as if he were flinging dinner plates at them. Bear [the coach] had to remind him: “Shoot at the goalie, Kareem, at the goalie.”

Tropic of Hockey is about one man’s love for the game and his quest for its soul. This quest leads him to places where you wouldn’t expect to see ice hockey. And as different as those places are, the spirit of the game, by Bidini’s reckoning, burns with the same intensity as it does in his rec league in Toronto. He finds in Harbin, northern China, in Dubai, in Miercurea Ciuc, Transylvania,  the refreshing purity of a game that is not mere entertainment but a way of meeting and being, hockey as culture rather than business, “the spirituality of sports, sports as life,” as he puts it at one point. Bidini contrasts this kind of hockey to what he feels is the packaged product put out by the NHL today.

Nothing loved can be reduced to mere entertainment, to mere anything. So just as I have an exalted view of literature and bristle at the notion of art as mere entertainment and cannot fathom anyone having a good, thinking life that doesn’t include reading, so Dave Bidini exalts, bristles and cannot fathom on the subject of hockey. Each one of us cares, defends and justifies what he or she loves. Put all those passions together, and you have a society, a culture, a nation. A last word, then, on Tropic of Hockey: it’s the most Canadian book I’ve sent you.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel on corruption,
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 afraid this is going to be a busy letter. The book first of all. The novel Property, by the American writer Valerie Martin, was fervently recommended to me. I finally came round to it a week ago and I’m glad I’ve done so. It’s an hypnotic read. From the very first paragraph, I was sucked into the morally corrupt life of Manon Gaudet, a woman of the American South from around the year 1810. Manon and her detestable husband own slaves, but it can also be said that slavery owns them. Property is about the insidious nature of injustice, how a system that is corrupt perverts not only its victims but also its victimizers, blind though the victimizers might be to the injustice. So Manon owns Sarah, a beautiful slave who is her husband’s mistress, but she cannot own Sarah and then blithely live her own life. I italicize those two owns, one a verb used to indicate the ownership of another human life, and the other an adjective to indicate the ownership of Manon’s life, because the first precludes the second, the verb precludes the adjective. Manon cannot own Sarah and then live an unsullied moral life. Her slaves obsess and corrupt her, as they do her husband and the entire white class of the antebellum South. Antebellum and postbellum, actually; the American South is still getting over the scars of slavery. The title of the novel is very apt. Sarah the slave is Manon’s property, but Manon is little more than the property of her husband because of the patriarchal society in which they live, and both are the property of the appalling system that was slavery.

The novel works because of the intelligent voice of its narrator. Manon is unremitting in her aversion to hypocrisy, her own and that of the people around her, but she never manages to improve herself. She is lucidly corrupt, her heart poisoned and her life bitter. It makes for a fascinating story, one that is contemporary, even eternal, because the nature of systems continues to be contagious, for better and for worse. An educational system can improve us, for example, while an economic system can corrupt us.

I was in Ottawa promoting my book of letters to you and while there I did a reading at a store called Patrick Gordon Framing, at 160 Elm Street. I was surprised to find when I got there that a show of paintings had been organized around the theme of our little book club. Over twenty-five artists have inspired themselves from the books I have sent you. It makes for a great show. I include an invitation to the opening. The show runs until December 19th. You can also find information on it at www.patrickgordonframing.ca.  

One piece in particular struck me. The artist Michèle Provost took the first line of the first book I sent you (The Death of Ivan Ilych), the second line of the second book (Animal Farm), the third from the third (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), the fourth from the fourth (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept), and so on, for the first sixty five books, and she strung these sentences together to create a work called A Right Honourable Summary. This random arrangement of words or sentences to create a text with a surprising new meaning was a game invented by the French Surrealists. They called it cadavre exquis, delicious corpse, the coinage coming from one of the first times they played the game. The result of a cadavre exquis delights by the mad juxtapositions that chance creates. Michèle Provost’s cadavre exquis is particularly successful. She was at my reading in Ottawa and she kindly gave me two copies of a beautiful, handmade audio book version of A Right Honourable Summary, one copy for you (number 1 of 12) and one for me (number 6 of 12). It comes with a booklet that has on its last pages tiny, colourful copies of all the book covers (one, two). To see all those covers lined up like that is not only visually arresting, it’s also a great aid in identifying the origin of the lines in the audio book. Lynda Cronin reads the text in a convincing manner, weaving with her voice a story that Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, Agatha Christie, Elizabeth Smart and all the other authors I have sent you could not have imagined.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback, one art gallery invitation, and one audio book package

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A time capsule,
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,

And sometimes books can be time capsules, capturing the intellectual and moral state of a particular era, its joys and anxieties, its tastes and trends. I would say that Douglas Coupland specializes in writing these sorts of books. Take his latest novel, Generation A, which I am offering you this week. From the very first pages it jumps out: the language, the preoccupations, the political and technological references, the humour—they’re all so now. Contrast this, say, to Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych. In that novel, if you remember, context is nothing. The setting, the names of the characters, their class, their dress, the games they play—all these are of minor concern to the reader. One could easily imagine the exact same story being told by an American writer of the 1950s (William Faulkner perhaps), a Japanese writer of the 1960s (Yukio Mishima) or an African writer of the 1970s (Wole Soyinka maybe). In each case, the peripheral details would be different, but the central drama would be the same. Great novels of this kind are often called timeless, because they escape the strictures of time, they don’t seem to age. In fact, timelessness is the most conventional attribute of literary masterpieces. If it’s old and great, then it must be timeless. But what’s wrong with being timely? Must all writers strive for soaring timelessness and leave behind the earthy humus of the local, the topical, the trendy, the here and now? Is the stuff of archaeology not worth our literary consideration?
 
Of course it is, and Douglas Coupland’s Generation A is scintillating proof. I must admit I read the novel enviously. Oh, to have written something so clever, funny, heartfelt and original. The story is set in the very near-future and is variously narrated by Zack, Samantha, Julien, Diana and Harj, who are respectively from the US, New Zealand, France, Canada and Sri Lanka. They are linked by the fact of each having been stung by a bee, an exceptional occurrence in a world where bees are thought to have disappeared. They are eventually brought together by a French scientist, Serge. And then—well, you will see. The narration is layered, there are passages that are very funny, others that are wise, and throughout the language crackles with vitality. It’s a story about reading and storytelling, the power of reading to strengthen the individual and of storytelling to solder the group.
 
Generation A is time specific. Context is everything. And here it’s a quality. In the future, if people are curious about what it was like to live in our times, in the early 21st century, they will do well to read Douglas Coupland.
 
Yours truly,
 
Yann Martel
 
encl: one inscribed hard cover book
 
Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A cautionary tale,
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 letters ago—in the 64th, to be precise, concerning Carole Mortimer’s novel The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss—I mentioned in passing that J.M. Coetzee was my favourite living writer. Then in the next letter, while discussing blurbs, his name came up again, since a commendation of his graces Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe. Natural then to send you a novel by this superlative writer. John Maxwell Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 (he’s now an Australian citizen). He’s been showered with honours, notably two Booker Prizes and the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, and with good reason: he’s an artist of the highest order, characterized by a style that is spare yet highly evocative and novels that are finely crafted, morally engaged and hypnotically compelling. To show him off to you, I’ve selected his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, published in 1980. The nameless Magistrate who is the story’s protagonist lives in a frontier town on the edges of an equally nameless Empire. Some unbarbaric barbarians—they’re mostly just peaceable nomads and fisherfolk who regularly barter with the townspeople—live just beyond. Relations between the barbarians and the citizens of the town are fine. Life is good and quiet. But then Colonel Joll, from the Third Bureau, arrives and informs the Magistrate that the barbarians are restless and a massive attack by them is imminent. It must be pre-empted. Two barbarians have recently been captured—a boy who is ill and his elderly uncle—allegedly for stealing cattle. They are promptly tortured—tortured—under Joll’s supervision. The uncle dies as a result, while the boy is kept alive only so that he can guide Joll and his acolytes into the desert to capture more barbarians, who are brought back to the town and also tortured. Eventually Joll returns to the capital to make his report. The Magistrate comes upon a barbarian girl begging in the streets. Left behind after her fellow prisoners were released, her ankles have been broken, her eyesight partially ruined, her father tortured and killed before her. He takes her in. But the Magistrate’s descent into moral (and physical) hell has just begun, because Colonel Joll returns, with a battalion of fresh troops….

I leave it to you to discover what happens next. But is there not something about this set-up that sounds familiar? The frontier town, the barbarians, the waiting for their expected invasion—that’s right: it’s very much like the premise of The Tartar Steppe. No coincidence there. Coetzee drew inspiration from Buzzati’s novel, hence his words of praise for the Italian novel: “A strange and haunting novel, an eccentric classic”. Of course, the novels are very different. Whereas The Tartar Steppe is a philosophical novel bathed in sunlight, silence and solitude, Waiting for the Barbarians is a social work, rooted in the body and crowded with people, politics and pain. Coetzee may have started his creative journey with Buzzati, but his destination is one very much his own.

Which leads us to the topic of where writers get their ideas. Like Coetzee, I too have been inspired by books. My novel Life of Pi, for example, was partly inspired by a review I read of the novella Max and the Cats, by the Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar. And then other books, on religion, on animal behaviour and zoo biology, on survival at sea, gave me further ideas and the facts upon which I could weave my story. It is also true that an important source of inspiration for a writer is his or her life. But there’s something grander afoot in fiction than mere autobiography, even with a writer whose life is so interesting a simple accounting of it reads like a novel. Fiction, art in general, is the forum of all possibilities, the agora where ideas of every kind assemble. And so the essential need for the thinking person to dip into art regularly, because in art all of life is discussed and displayed, from its blandest, most conventional manifestation to its most heinous to its most idealistic. The seed of wisdom is planted from contemplating this vast display not only of what life should be but of what life is. To shun art, then, is to shun living beyond the narrow confines of one’s own experience. To plunge into art, on the other hand, is to live multiple lives. Art is a microscope or a telescope, either way making other realities, other worlds, other choices clear to us. Art the pregnant dream from which realities are born.

The nature of inspiration and creativity is relevant to every endeavour. The premium put on creativity varies. In the arts, in the sciences, in commerce, creativity is highly valued, while in politics, I would venture, its value is lower. What a politician wants to claim is to have good ideas, not—necessarily—original ones. Some politicians may have the luck of putting forth ideas that are both good and original—Tommy Douglas’s advocacy of universal public health care is an obvious example of original public policy—but I believe the more common observation is that too much originality is a danger in politics. After all, politics, especially democratic politics, is the most social of activities. Politics is moved forward essentially by meetings and committees; in other words, by people putting their heads together and hammering out policies. The political ideas of the lone, original mind will often be quixotic, simplistic, harebrained or dangerous. I believe your own career shows the truth of what I’m saying, and I mean no disrespect in saying this. Throw your mind back to your early days in the Reform Party, and look at you now. Where has the originality of the Reform Party gone, all those new solutions and new approaches it came up with to solve Canada’s problems? They’ve been ditched and forgotten, that’s what. As Prime Minister, you have slowly been moving to the centre, espousing those trusted ideas that have been built over decades, that may not be original but are tried and true.

The value of a novel, then, is not that you will read it and smack your forehead and scribble down a new bill you intend to propose to the House. No. The originality of fiction addresses the individuality of its reader. How that reader then acts with others—in other words, becomes political—will involve a dilution of that originality, a regard for the conventions and sensibilities of others. And that’s all right. We have to get along with others. But the cost of an artless life is that in being fed no originality, the person’s sense of individuality is eroded. Which is not only sad, but dangerous, since the citizen whose precious individuality is not nourished is more subject to the claims of demagogues and tyrants.

I am straying from J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. It is a fine novel, moral but not in a way that is preachy. Hard to read it and not feel indignation at the wickedness of agents of the state who in the name of the law take the law in their own hands. It is the perfect cautionary tale for a politician.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book for book lovers,
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,

Here is a book that I hope you’ve already read. There’s safety in being published in book form. Who knows what might happen to the letters I sent you? I print an extra copy of each before mailing it to you, and the originals are I hope gathering in an archive box, but these physical traces are subject to the erosion of time or might simply be lost. As for the website which bears public witness to our book club, despite the easy access anyone has to it on a computer, it too is ephemeral. Though a website may appear on a limitless number of screens at the same moment, its underlying support is far more limited: just a virtual memory somewhere that, despite all the safeguards and backups, could be compromised and its contents destroyed. More simply, a website needs to be maintained, the subscription kept up, and so on. After you leave office, I’m not sure there will be a reason to keep www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca going.

Hence the satisfaction in seeing the letters—or at least the first fifty-five in the English Canada edition (sixty in the Quebec edition)—published as a book. Books last. They last first of all because they are cleverly constructed. I’m stating the obvious here, but a book’s cover serves not only as decoration, allowing its contents to be visually represented, but as protection. If you remember the edition of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge that I sent you, the thirty-sixth book, it was over forty years old, and that was a run-of-the-mill paperback with the thinnest of covers. Imagine the durability of a proper hard-cover book. Such books can last for hundreds and even thousands of years. But books last for another reason. Words are oral artefacts, originally going from the mouths of speakers into the ears of listeners, vanishing upon being heard like waves crashing upon a coastline. The amazing, civilization-making cleverness of books is that they preserve, like a refrigerator, the freshness of words so that words can go unspoken from the minds of writers into the minds of readers through the medium of sight. But the value of a book still remains with what it says, not with what it is. Of course, some books are valued for their own sake, Gutenberg bibles, for example, of which fewer than fifty copies exist. But most books are merely messengers, conveying a message to whomever wants to listen. And since millions of people love to read, millions of books are produced. And so What Is Stephen Harper Reading?, the book version, will last because it will find protection in all the homes and libraries that shelter it. 

I won’t say anything about the book except the following: though your name appears in it over and over, in the inscription and in the first line of each letter for starters, in fact the main subject is the books I discuss. What Is Stephen Harper Reading? is a book about books. Eventually, there will be a complete edition. When it comes out, how many letters it will contain—that all depends on you.

Lastly, during a radio interview I did a few days ago in Montreal while promoting our book, the host mentioned that the Quebec journalist Chantal Hebert had sent you a book called Fearful Symmetry, The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Founding Values, by the economist Brian Lee Crowley, and that you had written back to her, thanking her for the book and saying “…and I have read it”! Well, I don’t have to ask what she has that I don’t. I know the answer: I haven’t sent you a single book on economic or political theory, or, for that matter, much non-fiction of any sort. Good of you to have read Fearful Symmetry. I’m not familiar with it. I hope you liked it. But is there any space on your reading list for a novel, a play or a poem? Last week you sang poetry to the Canadian people. No one expected With a Little Help from My Friends from you. And look at the effect you had. People were amazed. You made the front page of newspaper after newspaper, and often with a big photo of you at the piano. It goes to show how art can amaze, connect and unify.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: two inscribed trade paperbacks, one in English, one in French

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Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel on the perils of waiting,
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’s not my habit to quote myself, but to introduce this week’s book, the novel The Tartar Steppe, by the Italian writer Dino Buzzati (1906-72), I will:

“A beautiful, masterly novel that shimmers like a mirage, bringing into sharp focus the rise and fall of our ambitions and the pitiless erosion of time. It is the story of one Giovanni Drogo—yet how many of us will be stricken to recognize something of ourselves in him?”

You’ll find these words on the back cover of the edition I’m sending you. The blurb is one way in which a writer can be a citizen of the arts. When giving a blurb, a writer lends his or her éclat to a book, so that the reader is guided not only by what the writer says, but by the esteem in which that writer is held by the reader. I’ve been the beneficiary of a good blurb: Margaret Atwood kindly read and liked my novel Life of Pi and her supportive words likely attracted the attention of a good number of readers. Sometimes the blurb will be by a journalist and its weight will depend on the prestige of the newspaper in which the journalist’s review appeared. This system of commendation can be very effective in helping a book meet its readers and publishers use it all the time. When you finish your book on hockey, your publisher will dream of getting Wayne Gretzky to read it and commend it. “If The Great One liked this book, I’m sure I will too,” every hockey fan will say, grabbing the book off the shelf.

For this British edition of The Tartar Steppe, the blurb system is in full operation. On the front cover, the Sunday Times (”A masterpiece”) and J. M. Coetzee (”A strange and haunting novel, an eccentric classic”) exhort the reader to pay attention, while on the back cover Alberto Manguel, Jorge Luis Borges and I, in a few more words, explain to a prospective reader why this book must be read.

And really, it must be read. The Tartar Steppe, published in 1940, is indeed a masterpiece, insufficiently known by the reading public. It tells the story of a young officer who is posted to a remote fort on the edges of an unnamed country. And there he waits for an invasion of barbarians that never comes, he waits for thirty years, he waits his entire life away, arriving at the fort as a young man full of prospects and leaving it old and broken. Waiting—and with it the dread of expectation—is a very 20th century concern. If Samuel Beckett had been writing in the 19th century, he would have written Acting for Godot. But as it is the 20th century paid the price of all those actions for God and for country—the mess of colonialism and greedy empire-building—and he wrote Waiting for Godot. Invoking the play (which I sent you a while ago, remember?) is not inappropriate. The Tartar Steppe and Waiting for Godot were written within ten years of each other, the novel in the late 1930s, the play in the late 1940s, and they speak of the same concern. But in the ten years between their respective compositions, the century shifted from the modern to the post-modern, from the acting to the waiting, from the hoping to the dreading, and this shift is reflected in the two works. The Tartar Steppe lies at the end of a traditional aesthetic sensibility that had run its course. Godot is the irreverent next step, steeped in caustic humour and bleakness and far more self-conscious. 

The Tartar Steppe is a sober and luminous work. The luminosity is literal: the fort is set amidst high mountains and is bathed in pure light and thin air. But the story also achieves a philosophical brightness as it follows one man’s endless waiting in a setting that is stripped of all excessive adornments—it’s a military fort, after all.  If you want a sense of the feel of the work, imagine a room in a modern art museum that is large and flooded with natural light and that features a single, large painting, a Rothko. You see what I mean? The novel is bleak, but beautifully bleak. I’ve often thought of Dino Buzzati as a cheerier, warmer Franz Kafka.

See what you think. Explore Fort Bastiani with Giovanni Drogo. Fall into the routine of a military life. Try to make the grade. Most importantly: keep your eyes open for the enemy!

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S.: I forgot to mention: The Tartar Steppe was one of the favourite novels of François Mitterrand. What a splendid blurb that would be, from the President of France.

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Can 130 million people be wrong?
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,

Since I was speaking about it last week, I thought I would send you an example of genre fiction, and what genre fiction has a more recognizable brand name than a Harlequin romance? A word about Harlequin. Their website informs me that they are a Canadian enterprise that publishes “over 120 titles a month in 29 languages in 107 international markets on six continents.” In 2007, Harlequin sold 130 million books. Since its founding, the company has sold a staggering, an unbelievable, 5.63 billion books. Those italics are Harlequin’s: they are clearly proud of their success, and so they should be. To have retailed as many books nearly as there are people on this planet is a unique achievement in publishing. You will get a hint of Harlequin’s depth of success when you look at the title page of the novel I’m sending you this week. Publishers usually mention where they have offices. To take a random example from my bookshelf, the hard cover edition I have of the novel Slow Man, by the Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, my favourite living writer, is the British edition, and it was published by Secker & Warburg. The title page informs me where they have offices: London. That’s it. The publishers of Carole Mortimer’s The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss, on the other hand, append a small atlas of cities: Toronto, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Sydney, Hamburg, Stockholm, Athens, Tokyo, Milan, Madrid, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest and Auckland. And their website informs me that this list is not up to date: Harlequin also has offices in Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and even in a place called Granges-Paccot (I looked it up: it’s in Switzerland).

Now, can that many people be wrong? What’s the appeal of The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss? 

Well, it’s not the writing. Take these three lines:

‘Lucky, lucky me,’ he drawled dryly.
‘You’re impossible,’ Andi told him impatiently.
He shrugged unrepentantly. ‘So I’m told.’

Oh, those adverbs. They clutter the prose like too many traffic lights on a road. But they make for easy, unthreatening prose, for prose that relieves the reader of having to think very hard. Elegance may be lost, but a clarity of sorts is gained. Faults can be found in other aspects of the writing too, as they can be found in the characterization and in the plot. And yet there are those numbers. 130 million. 5.63 billion.

I think the appeal of a Harlequin romance lies precisely in those traffic lights. A street with traffic lights is a safe street, a street in which the movement of vehicles is carefully regulated so that everyone can get home safe and sound. There’s something to be said for that kind of security. We don’t always want to be driving down adventurous roads that cross swamps, deserts and mountains.

The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss is the story of Linus Harrison, a handsome, muscular, driven multi-millionaire, and his beautiful, independent personal assistant, Andrea Buttonfield. There are obstacles in their way—including a snow storm in Scotland that would chill the hardiest Yukoner that strands Linus and Andi in a pub where there’s only one room with one bed available to them—but they will find perfect love. Reading the book, I was reminded of Indian cinema. The usual fare from Bollywood is equally silly, unrealistic and escapist, yet that is exactly what the average Indian viewer wants, an escape from the harsh realities of life into a glamorous world populated by rich, beautiful people where a happy ending is guaranteed. The function of genre fiction is to relax and confirm, not to stress and challenge. Genre fiction seeks to deliver one thing: emotional satisfaction.

Is that such a bad thing? I don’t think so. So read The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss and glimpse at the dream world of millions of people.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A fine example of a literary novel,
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,

An unabashedly literary novel is what I’m sending you this week. You might find the statement surprising. Haven’t all the novels I’ve sent you been literary, you might ask? They have. But the book you now have in your hands, Flaubert’s Parrot, by the English writer Julian Barnes (born in 1946) is more self-consciously literary than most of these other books (an exception jumps to my mind: the 27th book I sent you, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse). The attempt to lure the reader with an intriguing story and interesting characters, the writing style that seeks to be like a pane of glass, invisible so that the story appears to be seen and felt directly, as if the writer were not the intermediary, all these are less prominent in Barnes’s novel. Which is not to say that there aren’t stories and characters and clear writing in Flaubert’s Parrot. There are, of course. But their proportion is different. The author is not so self-effacing here, not so wholly dedicated to pleasing the reader.

The definition of a literary novel might be this: a literary novel is novel that makes the reader work. A non-literary or genre novel builds on conventions. So a murder mystery or a thriller or a romance novel will have characters whom the reader will quickly seize and plot developments that will create definite expectations, which the author will then play with, either shattering them (it’s not the doctor who committed the murder but the little old lady you didn’t think twice about) or confirming them (the boy will get the girl, don’t you worry). A literary novel relies on fewer conventions. The characters are more complex and layered, not so easily reduced to stereotypes, and the plot may hold many surprises. To read such a work is a more demanding experience, a train trip in which the reader isn’t coddled by comforts or told of the final destination.

The literary novel is a daring gamble for its author. The risk of spectacular failure is considerable. A novel that adheres to the conventions of a genre can feature terrible writing and characters as thin as cling wrap, yet still be thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, many novels that are artistically trite sell very well precisely because they’re enjoyable. A bad literary novel, on the other hand, has few redeeming qualities. It often commits the worst sins of a book: it is boring and it lacks credibility.

This is not the case with Flaubert’s Parrot. The work the reader has to put in is worth the effort. Why is that? Because the reader has to think. And this leads to a second definition: a literary novel is a novel that makes the reader think. This actually follows from the first definition; if a reader is working, so to speak, it is because that reader is thinking. And therein lies the strength of literary fiction, why the risk of failure is taken on: because thinking is a good and necessary activity. Whereas in our emotional lives we favour stability, seeking and staying with the familiar, keeping in touch with our parents, for example, long after they’ve stopped parenting us or settling down and living with the same person for years on end, establishing a routine that may last a whole adult life, such fixity is the enemy of intellect. In our intellectual lives, we seek change and evolution, we want to learn and “move with the times”. In the realm of ideas, comfort and excessive familiarity is a sign of stagnation, not of security. And so the constant thinking required, because new ideas only come from thinking.

All this to say that be prepared for a slower ride with Flaubert’s Parrot. It does not shoot forward like an express train. Regularly, I’ll bet, you’ll say to yourself, “That was well put,” or “That’s a word I haven’t seen in a while.” I also bet you’ll regularly stop reading, as if you were getting off at a station. You’ll stop because you’ll feel the need to think, to decide whether you agree with this or that point in the novel, or if you’ve understood the point at all. But if you get back on the train, you’ll find the journey worthwhile and you’ll be pleased with your final destination. What is that final destination? It’s not for me to say, but I was impressed with the verbal and formal play in Flaubert’s Parrot and I felt some of its knowledge and intellect rubbed off on me.

Dear, dear, I’m losing myself in abstractions. Concretely, Flaubert’s Parrot is about a retired widower doctor who is obsessed with the 19th century French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary and was one of the great stylists of the French language (don’t worry, you don’t need to have read anything by Flaubert to enjoy the book). There’s a lot about Flaubert in this novel. It’s not linear in its development and it’s full of opinions and observations, each of which the reader is expected to react to. This is the thinking I was referring to. It’s a peevish, proudly persnickety, highly intelligent novel, very much like Flaubert himself. And it’s thoroughly enjoyable, if you make the effort.

If you don’t make the effort, well then, you’ll just find it boring and you’ll want to hurry back to your received ideas. I rather hope you settle into this curious English novel that choo-choos along so nicely.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel about where we’re all heading,
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,

Just as a new life enters my life, I thought I’d look at how an old life ends. And so I am sending you this week the novel Everyman, by the American writer Philip Roth, who was born in 1933. Roth has been writing for a long time. His first book, a collection of six short stories, Goodbye, Columbus, was published in 1959. Roth was 26 years old. In the fifty years since, he has published another thirty or so books, most of them novels. And since much of his work has autobiographical elements, it’s not surprising that Roth should eventually turn to the subject of ageing and dying.

The child is ever expanding; as its body grows in size and strength, so does its mind and its ability to take in the surrounding world. The feeling, if you remember, is rich, wondrous and chaotic, an involvement with people, animals, objects, events, places, weather and nature that results in the most intense emotions, from soaring exhilaration to wrenching anguish, from overwhelming curiosity to stupefying boredom. Those years of emotional exploration mark us for life, directing us towards who we are and what we do in our mature years.

Then we grow old. Ageing is shrinking; the body grows smaller and weaker, and the mind follows, sometimes closely but oftentimes not. The lucid mind stands over its decaying body like a great tree whose soil and roots are being undercut by the bend of a river. The pains of the body accumulate. It’s a never ending battle, with full recovery an ever receding hope. The mind starts to go too, and though forgetting names and faces is not in itself painful, it brings on mental anguish. To make matters worse, old age brings on loneliness, as the relations of one’s working life are left behind, as friends drift away, as family go on with their own lives. The world has left and forgotten us, it seems. The knowledge that the inevitable conclusion of this physical, mental and social breakdown is one’s complete disappearance brings on inescapable gloom and acute dread. To let go of life, after a lifetime of living, is there a greater challenge?

Everyman relates the life of a nameless man who is not ordinary or generic in his life particulars—after all, he lives in a specific city, practices during his working life a particular job, has relations to family, friends and lovers that are unique to him—but is an everyman by the fact of his ageing body and approaching death. The novel is in many ways a medical story, following the trials and tribulations of Everyman’s body from a biological, corporeal perspective. Ailments and medical emergencies, hospitalizations, convalescences, nurses, old people—this is the universe of Everyman.

It’s a grim tale. The conclusion is forgone. In fact, the novel starts with Everyman’s funeral. Roth pulls the reader along, so that Everyman’s demise, like that of Ivan Ilych, is horrifying at the same time as it is compelling. I couldn’t read the novel without comparing my own imagined old age with that of Roth’s protagonist. Will my heart go like his? Or will it be my back, like that of Everyman’s friend, Millicent Kramer, who suffers unbearable pain as the result of her spine’s decomposition? What will my social relations be like? Will I be attended to, or left lonely and isolated? So many tragedies in life can be avoided, some by care and consideration, others by pure luck. I have lived a life remarkably spared of tragedy and unhappiness. But one’s death, the body that falls apart, the mind that goes, that tragedy is inescapable. It is our collective and individual future.

Having said that, there are ways of approaching death that can change its meaning, if not its pain. I’m of course speaking of a spiritual approach. If death is seen as a threshold, a step up whose peculiar build requires the leaving behind of one’s body, then death becomes not an ending but a beginning, a transformation. “Religious mumbo jumbo! Ignorant claptrap!” some will cry. But one’s death, as far as the ideas one has about its meaning, is no one else’s business. It’s a private affair. And just as children’s heads are filled with imaginative mumbo jumbo that is the very colour and texture of a happy childhood, so can religious mumbo jumbo be the colour and texture of a contented letting go at the end of life. In saying this, in arguing for the practical usefulness—as well as the deep joy (and the possible truthfulness)—of a transcendent view of life and death, I am straying from the narrative of Everyman. The novel is resolutely, unflinchingly secular. There is no redemption or grace in Roth’s novel, or none that overcomes the dread of death. The ending is grim and it comes grimly. It’s a tale that yields the only moral possible from such an earthbound perspective: carpe diem, seize the day, enjoy today for tomorrow you die.

If this is your first Philip Roth, you’ll be struck at the artless simplicity of it. You don’t write so many novels that have won so many awards without learning how to tell a good story well. Even if Everyman’s particulars don’t match yours—his sexual obsession with very young women, for example, struck me as harking to a certain kind of dated ageing male who came of age in the fifties and sixties—the psychological astuteness will nonetheless bring him close to you. You may dislike Everyman in his earlier years, feeling repelled by his arrogance, his stupidity, his selfishness, but his slow, grinding end will touch you, because in that he is like you, he is like me. Everyman is so finely calibrated emotionally and so perfectly crafted that it resembles the symbolic element on the cover of the edition I’m sending you: a watch.

My father Émile, who turned 68 a few days ago, sent me a poem he wrote. By coincidence, it too deals with the anguish of ageing and I will end this letter with it:

I am the oldest I have ever been.
I may even be as old as I’ll ever get.
So I want to be left alone on the shore of this river,
to see the tide roll in and out
and watch which boats of the past will pass by,
which one will stop and pick me up
and take me back there.
This is where I am now,
this is who I am now.
Leave me alone.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A reminder of childhood’s wonder,
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,

In honour of my son Theo, who is fifteen days old (and keeping me very busy), I am sending you this week two picture books, Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, both by the American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who was born in 1928. These are the sorts of books that are never forgotten. You read them—or more likely they are first read to you—and they stay with you the rest of your life. I’m not exaggerating. Try it yourself: mention at random to people around you, “I was sent a book called Where the Wild Things Are,” and you’ll be amazed at the number of seasoned adults who break into a smile and exclaim, “Oh, that’s a wonderful book!”

There’s a lovely saying: the child is the father of the man. It applies to all aspects of an adult’s personality, but I think it does so especially with the imagination. From what the child imagines in dreams and fantasies comes what the adult will hold up as ideals. Hence the importance of children’s literature. The fundamental role of children’s literature is to encourage children to use their imagination. Because small as children are physically, large is what they can imagine. Sadly, a relation of inverse proportion sets in for many of us: as we grow in size, our capacity to imagine seems to shrink. And so we have adults with the most leaden, literal thinking, who are beholden to the real and the factual, adults whose imagination has so shrunken that they can’t even remember, let alone imagine, what it was like to be a child, even though that was once their real and factual condition, of being a child, who knows no gravity of the mind but can float and leap to any place. If the expandable imagination of a child’s mind is not expanded, then it will shrink all the more, all the harder, when that child grows up. The consequence is more dire than simply an adult with a dull, narrow mind. Such an adult is also less useful to society because incapable of coming up with the new ideas and new solutions that society needs. A skill is a narrow focus of knowledge,  a single card in a deck. Creativity is the hand that plays the cards. Hence, once again, the importance of children’s literature.

We read (present tense) as adults because we read (past tense) as children, and we are fully alive adults in the present because in the past we were fully alive children. Books are a key link between those two states. So I encourage you not to rush through Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, short though they are. Let them have their slow, deep effect. In Where the Wild Things Are, ask yourself what Max’s state of mind is and why that should be his state of mind and what it might mean. Is Max’s relationship with the monsters what you would expect? In In the Night Kitchen, who do the cooks with their narrow moustaches remind you of? What then might it mean when Mickey escapes the batter and floats away from the oven? In other words, I would suggest that you not just read these books (and aloud, even better), but imagine them.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen are the first two books of a trilogy. If you enjoyed them, you can try to find the third book, Outside Over There. It’s a joyful hunt, the hunt for a book.

encl: one hardcover book and one trade paperback, both inscribed

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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,

This week I’m sending you the French and English language versions of the same novel, Bonheur d’occasion, by Gabrielle Roy, in English The Tin Flute, published in 1945. I imagine you’ll want to read it in English primarily, but the novel is so rooted in its language that it would be a pity if you didn’t delve from time to time into the original version. If you are at all inclined to do so, I’d suggest you have a look at sections of dialogue in French. Gabrielle Roy, like Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I sent you a while ago, uses two levels of language. When the author is speaking as the omniscient narrator, the French is formal, grammatically and syntactically correct, intemporal and universal. But when it’s her characters who are speaking, then a very particular language, place and time are evoked, the vernacular French of Saint Henri, a poor neighbourhood of Montreal, in 1940. It’s a French that exists nowhere else and it would be a pity if you didn’t get at least a taste of it.

The title in French literally means second-hand or used happiness. The title in English expresses the same idea, but using a tiny element of the novel: Daniel, one of the Lacasse children, is sickly and always clamours for a little tin flute. It would make him so happy, to be able to toot away on one. But he never gets one because the Lacasse are too beset by poverty. With both titles and in whatever language you read it, the message of the novel, the picture it draws, is the same: one of blighted lives, of happiness denied, of unremitting misery. Quebec has changed profoundly since 1945. A younger francophone Québécois generation might even react with disbelief that such a province as Roy portrays ever existed. The Quebec of Bonheur d’occasion is one deeply divided between the English and the French, a gulf that Hugh MacLennan captured with the title of his novel that came out the same year as Roy’s, Two Solitudes. The English were the elite, generally wealthy and powerful, living in exclusive neighbourhoods like Westmount, while the French were the masses, generally poor and powerless and living in inclusive neighbourhoods like Saint Henri. In the novel, English Quebeckers are hardly seen or heard. At most their large houses are eyed with envy and astonishment by poor Québécois who wander up the mountain into parts of the city to which they do not—and feel they never will—belong. Even the English language is barely heard, only here and there in little phrases. Otherwise, the Québécois live in total linguistic and social isolation. Their isolation extends beyond the linguistic. Though unstated in the novel, the Lacasse family are who they are and where they are in part because of their religion. They are Catholics and Catholics at that time, especially the poorer ones, had enormous families. La revanche des berceaux, it was called, the revenge of the cradle. The English might be richer, more powerful, but we will beat them with our numbers—that was the idea. And so the families with eleven, fifteen, nineteen children. Those numbers have insured that the Québécois have prevailed and beat back the forces of assimilation, but it also meant a degree of impoverishment, as large families struggled to feed so many mouths and clothe so many bodies.

The novel revolves around various members of the large Lacasse family, principally Florentine, the eldest daughter, Rose-Anna, her loving mother who always tries her best, and Azarius, her well-meaning but hapless husband. Only Florentine brings in a steady revenue from her job as a waitress. But it’s not much and the family is forever moving from one slum dwelling to a worse but cheaper one. Their lives are squalid and wretched. They are clothed in tatters and malnourished. They are the unhappy slaves of an economic system that doesn’t need them. All they have to keep them going is their dreams. Florentine seeks refuge in love, Azarius in lofty dreams of a better future that he’s incapable of bringing about, while little Yvonne hides in religion. All of them are utterly powerless and warped by their ravaging poverty. Their suffering does not make them angels; it merely confirms their humanity. Their lot is so bad that their ultimate friend turns out to be war. The opportunity to join the army and gain the pittance that an enlisted man earns is finally their only way of making a living, no matter if it means that they might be killed or have to kill.

There is one character in the novel who is absent: a priest. The trappings of religion, in the form of kitsch reproductions of sacred figures, adorn the walls of the Lacasse’s living room and the family’s exclamations and profanities are religious in nature, but an actual servant of the Lord never appears in the novel. That puzzles me. Blame for much of the misery in the novel, certainly the spiritual misery, can be assigned to the Catholic Church. Its message of accepting suffering in this world because of future rewards in a next world had the effect of engendering profound passivity in its followers. Furthermore, the Church’s rigid moral code meant that an unmarried woman who fell pregnant was doomed to have her reputation ruined and a child that would likely be deemed an orphan, shunned by society, despite having both a father and a mother. The Church then, as now in many ways, was anti-feminist and anti-modern, obscurantist and backward-looking. It fed its followers in Quebec rancid spiritual placebos while they rotted in material misery and stagnated intellectually. I wonder why Gabrielle Roy refrained from criticizing such an institution.

The quibble is minor. Bonheur d’occasion is fiction, but one solidly rooted in reality. It’s a masterly example of the novel as memory, as document. As a Québécois myself, I read it with a mixture of shame that conditions could have been so bad for my people just a few generations ago and consequent anger at the agents responsible for those conditions. You read this novel and right away you understand the forces behind that great leap into modernity that was la révolution tranquille, which transformed Quebec from Canada’s most backward province into its most progressive.

I will end this letter abruptly. My partner Alice’s waters have just broken and our first child, a boy, Theo, is on his way. A child is the best novel, with a great plot and endless character development. I must attend to it.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. And two more replies. Tony Clement, the Minister of Industry, sent me a complete answer to my querry about SSHRC’s funding [see Reply section of Book Number 51: Julius Caesar], while P. Monteith in your office thanked me in a much briefer way for the next book I sent you [see Reply section of Book Number 52: Burning Ice].

P.P.S. Please excuse the somewhat tattered condition of the French version of Bonheur d’occasion. I read it while I was in the Peruvian Amazon recently and the humidity got  to it.

encl: two inscribed paperback books

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

for Runaway:

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

for The Door:

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

for Camino:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Haunting, beautiful music,
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 called Alice Munro? I remember when I won the Booker Prize I got a phone call from Prime Minister Chrétien. I was living in Berlin at the time, he was calling from Ottawa, so the call required a little bit of organizing. I spoke with an aide, he took my phone number and we agreed on a time the next day. At the appointed time, the phone in my office rang, I answered and it was Jean Chrétien. Though I knew it would be him, it still came as a shock. I had the Prime Minister of Canada on the line! And he wanted to talk to me! We spoke for a few minutes. He congratulated me on my win. I replied I was happy to have won a third Booker for Canada. He said he found writing a book hard work. He was referring to his memoir, Straight from the Heart. Writing a book is hard work, I said, but well worth the effort. He agreed. We went on like this for a few minutes, two strangers chatting amiably. Then he said he had to go, I promptly thanked him for calling me, saying I was honoured, and I wished him a good day. He thanked me and wished me the same. I was touched that a man so busy and important should take a moment to speak to me. After all, what did he gain from it? It was a private phone call to one Canadian. At most, he might gain one vote. But that wasn’t the reason. He was Prime Minister of Canada, Prime Minister of all Canadians, and clearly he felt it was his duty to speak to a Canadian writer who had just received a high honour, even if he hadn’t read the book for which that writer was honoured.

And now Alice Munro has been honoured with the International Booker Prize, given out only once every two years to a writer for their outstanding achievement in fiction. After the Albanian writer Ismael Kadare in 2005, after the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe in 2007, our very own Alice Munro has won the 2009 International Booker Prize. Highly worthy of commendation, no?

In honour of Alice Munro, I’m sending you this week her 2004 collection of short stories, Runaway, both in print form and as an audiobook read by the actor Kymberly Dakin. There’s no particular reason why I chose to send you the audiobook. I just happened to see that it was available and what with it being summer and the travelling that summer often brings on, I thought it might be pleasant for you to pop the CDs, nine in all, into your car’s CD player and involve yourself in Munro’s intimate stories. In the second story of the collection, Chance, a curious coincidence will jump out at you. The protagonist, Juliet, mentions that she and a fellow teacher have gone to see a “revival of a movie”. What’s the movie? Hiroshima Mon Amour, the very movie I sent you last week. How likely is that? (Did you enjoy it?) Alice Munro is very well known and hugely admired, so I feel a little silly talking of her work, but in case you aren’t familiar with it, I will say the following. Much fiction—my own included—relies on the extraordinary, on characters unlikely to be met, and events unlikely to be shared, by the reader. Stories of this kind are like a trip abroad; we are refreshed by what is strange and exotic in them. This approach hasn’t been Munro’s. Her stories are about people who could be our neighbours and what happens to them might very well be familiar to us. Does this make these stories boring, uninteresting, banal? Under another writer’s pen, it might. But under Munro’s, it doesn’t. By force of telling details and psychological candour, the life of her characters become as interesting to us as our own lives are interesting to us. It’s not that Munro makes the ordinary extraordinary. She doesn’t. What she does is restore to the ordinary its vital, pulsing feel. Her stories are less about the great upheavals that can tear a life apart and more about the smaller ups and downs that define it. In a word, her stories are about texture. What I like about Alice Munro is that she makes me like my neighbours more because after reading a collection of her stories my neighbours all seem like they could be characters in her stories, and that’s an attaching quality in people, that they seem as rich as fiction.

Runaway, both book and audiobook, counts as Book Number 58. I’m leaving shortly on that expedition I was talking to you about in my letter that accompanied Book Number 52, Burning Ice: I’m off to trek the mountains and forests of Peru for three weeks to see the effects of climate change on the tropical environment. I’m not sure about mailing you a book from the Amazon, so I’ve decided to include Book Number 59 in this week’s package, a two-for-one deal that I’ve done once before. And what book would go more naturally with an Alice Munro than one by Margaret Atwood? The two names are so often paired, one would think they were Siamese twins. They are no doubt Canada’s best known writers on the international stage, along with Michael Ondaatje. And since we’re speaking of the prize, Atwood won Canada its second Booker (while Ondaatje won Canada its first).

I have selected for you Margaret Atwood’s latest collection of poetry, The Door. I haven’t sent you poetry in a while and Atwood is a versatile writer, as adept with poetry as she is with fiction. What’s great about a collection of poetry is how much ground it can cover in so few pages. A rediscovered dollhouse, the death of a much-loved cat, ageing parents, life under Emperor Caligula, war, old photographs, and many other subjects—each poem is its own world and the collection as a whole, a gallaxy. The poems in The Door are conversational in tone yet incisive, and they range emotionally from the sentimental to the political. I would especially recommend to you the poems “Owl and Pussycat, some years later”, which is about the life of the poet, and the marvellous title poem, “The Door”, which is about, well, about life, all of it, the living of it and the meaning of it, all seen through the metaphor of a swinging door and all in two pages. I would also recommend, as with all poetry, that you read each poem silently first, to get a sense of it, and then aloud, so that you get its full effect.

Sending you two writers from the same country makes me wonder if there is such a thing as a national literature. Is there something essentially Canadian about Munro and Atwood, essentially Russian about Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, essentially English about Austen and Dickens, and so on. Of course, the language and setting of a work gives something away. A story set in Germany told in German is likely the work of a German writer—but is it therefore a German story? If a Canadian writer sets a story in, say, India, as Rohinton Mistry did with A Fine Balance, is that story any less Canadian, somehow, than a story set in rural Ontario? You suggested that Michael Ignatieff’s Canadianness was somehow suspect because he spent so many years abroad. Does that loss of national identity apply to stories too? I think not, neither with people nor with stories. I too spent many years abroad and never felt any less Canadian for it. And I think the same can be said of a Canadian story. Let’s take as an example Josef Škvorecký. He writes in Czech mostly about Czech matters, but he’s been living in Canada for over forty years. Would we deny Škvorecký his Canadianness? If we do, by what standard? If it’s language, again, what claim do we have on the English and French languages? We share those with many other countries. This question of a national literature is a fascinating quagmire. If such a literature does exist, it’s clearly an ever-shifting, highly permeable body of work. And it engenders another question: does the country determine the nature of a writer’s work or does the writer determine the nature of the country? I think it could be argued both ways. In some cases, a writer—Kafka would be one example—clearly seems to emanate from a country and a culture. But others—Atwood and Munro, for instance—seem more universal, as if, given different circumstances but similar personalities, they might as well have come from England or France or the US. Who’s to know? Gosh, I wonder how many times I’ve contradicted myself in one paragraph. No matter. I asked the question about national literature without having any readymade answer.

Lastly this week, I’m sending you a music CD by a Canadian violinist named Oliver Schroer. It’s called Camino, after the Camino de Santiago de Compostella, named after the town in northwestern Spain which has been an important pilgrimage destination since the Middle Ages. People have walked to Santiago from all over Europe for centuries. I did it in 2001, right after finishing my last novel. I walked 1,600 kilometres in five weeks. It was a luminous experience. Schroer also explored the Camino and this CD is the result of that exploration. I offer it to you simply because the music is hautingly beautiful. Sadly, Schroer died of leukemia just last summer, which adds poignancy to his music.

A rather busy package. May you enjoy it all.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: two books, one audiobook and on CD, all inscribed

Reply:

Pending…

Inscription:

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,

For the first time I’m sending you an original screenplay and with it, naturally, the movie that was made from it. Hiroshima Mon Amour was written by Marguerite Duras (1914-1996), who is often associated with the Nouveau roman literary movement in France, and directed by Alain Resnais (born in 1922), who is often grouped with the French Nouvelle vague film movement. Nouveau roman, Nouvelle vague—that’s the adjective “new” twice. And indeed, Duras and Resnais and their cohorts in the 1950s and 60s were doing something new in their respective attempts to break from the conventions of the past to better address the needs of the present. Despite dating from half a century ago—the movie was released in 1959—the newness of Hiroshima Mon Amour hasn’t worn off.

You’ll see that right away. The movie seems to have all the traits of a staid classic. It’s shot in black-and-white, the style of the clothes worn by the characters would now be called vintage, the cars seen in the movie are now antiques, and so on. But right away the movie subverts expectations. The subject matter, for example. So many movies nowadays merely entertain, that is, amuse without challenging, titillating spectators but not actually upsetting them. Nothing like that with Hiroshima Mon Amour. The very title makes that clear. Hiroshima will always be best known for one thing: for having been the unhappy and devastated target of the world’s first atomic bomb. That title starter is followed by Mon Amour. My love? The-horrible-death-of-70,000-men-women-and-children-instantly-and-then-at-least-another-100,000-as-a-consequence-of-radiation-sickness My Love? Be forewarned: this is not a movie that goes particularly well with popcorn.

The mode of narration is another challenge. Despite the lack of any special effects, the movie is hardly an example of cinematic realism. Outwardly, it’s about a French actress shooting a movie on peace in Hiroshima who meets a Japanese architect with whom she has a brief love affair. But that’s like saying that Death in Venice is about an old fag who goes to Venice and dies. The trappings of plot in Hiroshima—as in Death in Venice—are secondary. What really determines the shape of the movie are the forces of pain, longing, memory and time. Duras’ screenplay and Resnais’ film are like opera: they’re all about emotion. The story is therefore minimal, the characters are known only as He and She, the sequence of events is unpredictable. Hiroshima is a reactive movie, in the same sense that emotions are reactive. And so it has the features of strong emotion: it is wilful, stubborn, awkward, strangely attractive. Next to it, the usual fluff we get in cinemas today, so formulaic and clichéd, comes off as reactionary.

Hiroshima Mon Amour is sober and radical. It’s a beautiful, intelligent and moving experience. I hope you rise to its challenge.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one paperback and one DVD, both inscribed

P.S. And still another reply. Though this one doesn’t mention the book it is meant to acknowledge. If I go by the date, May 22nd, it must be a thank you for my gift of The Gift, by Lewis Hyde [See Reply section of Book Number 55]. I get the sense that L.A. Lavell, another of your executive correspondence officers, didn’t spend much time on the book. Will you ever write to me?

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Good luck with your Mr. Hyde,
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 story can sometimes capture in an image what might otherwise float around unexpressed. You must have had that experience yourself, in which a book or article or movie said cogently what you had been thinking in a vaguer way. A perfect example of a story that brings this sort of clarity is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. First published in 1886, it was an instant success, read by everyone who read (including Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Gladstone), and it has become an enduring classic. The moral categories of good and evil have been known since the beginning of time, and each one of us comes to know them formally as a result of instruction by our parents and our teachers and intimately as a result of direct experience. But I suspect the way that most of us live with good and evil is that we claim to have given the keys to the house to good while we swear to have long ago thrown evil out. In other words, we think of ourselves as good, not perfect perhaps, but good enough, certainly better than our neighbours, and we use whatever rationalizations are necessary to maintain this self-image, while evil we consider as something essentially external. Other people are evil: criminals, bad cops, corrupt politicians, loitering youths, and so on. We find plenty of evil in the world, just not in ourselves.

The brilliance of Stevenson’s tale is in the way he portrays the forces of good and evil: he incarnates them as two full-blooded characters in the body of one duplicitous person. Because as I’m sure you know, even if you’ve never read the short novel before, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are not two people but one. Each is an embodiment of one of the moral extremes battling within the same person, different not only in character but in appearance. Tall, handsome Dr. Jekyll, of impeccable reputation, is the good incarnation of this tortured person, while the shrunken, heartless Mr. Hyde, of unremitting ill-repute, is the evil incarnation. But they are in dialogue. That’s the genius of the tale. Living within the same soul, the two are aware of each other and in ceaseless conflict. And we know which one is destined to win. If Dr. Jekyll won, if good went on being good, that would be matter for an inspiring sermon, but not for a ripping yarn. We need Mr. Hyde to win the day—but only briefly, don’t worry—to feel the frisson that is horror fiction’s specialty.

The novel is told in ten chapters. The first eight are effective but conventional. Strange, terrible events take place, the telling is partial and puzzling, suspense keeps us reading—it has all the trappings of a fine Gothic horror story. Then, in chapter nine, we learn from a minor character, a fellow doctor friend of Dr. Jekyll’s, that the evil Mr. Hyde, a brute and a murderer, is none other than a transmogrified Dr. Jekyll. That would have been a stunning revelation to a reader who knew nothing beforehand of the story. But the reason The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde rises above the standard horror story is to be found in chapter ten, the last and longest, told in the racked voice of Dr. Jekyll himself. In that chapter lies the greatness of the novel. To speak of good and evil as they usually are, with a smile of self-satisfaction and a censorious finger pointing out, is tiresome. None of that here. In the chapter “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case”, we have a man openly acknowledging and discussing his evil side and what he seeks to do with it. His idea is to give body to his evil side so that the good one might be more purely good, untroubled by the siren call of evil. Mr. Hyde is created then to make Dr. Jekyll better. But oh, the temptation of evil! Dr. Jekyll looks on in fascinated horror at the outrages his alter-ego commits. Slowly the fascination consumes him. While at first he alchemically switches back to Dr. Jekyll with ease, in time the efficacy of the potion that allows to do so wears out. The dominant Dr. Jekyll begins to lose ground to Mr. Hyde until the natural being of the man is as Mr. Hyde. To have this battle told from the inside, in the very voice of the tortured double combatant, is gripping reading, one that magnifies to an appalling degree the struggles each one of us, if we are morally lucid, must go through. This is the reason for the ongoing appeal of the story. We are all Dr. Jekylls and the moral question put to each of us is the same: what will you do with the Mr. Hyde lurking in you?

By my reading of the original tale, the evil that torments Jekyll is quite clearly a sexual one, the Victorian repression of a homosexual urge. See what you think, if you see the hints pointing at the same conclusion. But the tale, like any great story, can be read in a way that mirrors each reader’s personality. You, a politician, for example, must feel every day the inner tensions between the public good you desire to bring about and the evil that you must commit to do so. To have those opposite options clothed in the vivid, contrasting frames of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde should help you in your struggle to be a Prime Minister Jekyll.

A last observation: rarely has a story been so well served by its title. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the words roll off the tongue with such ease, the counterpoint of the titles Dr and Mr pleasing and the names highly unusual and yet easy to remember. Curiously, the reader is never given an explanation as to how Mr. Hyde gets his name. Dr. Jekyll takes his potion in his laboratory, turns into another being, steps in front of a mirror, and “I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.” Clearly, Stevenson knew the names worked. Medicine is held to be a profession that does good, yet the second syllable of the good doctor’s name rhymes with “kill”. As for Mr. Hyde, he is what Jekyll wants to “hide”. It all works so well that anyone who has read the story remembers it fully just by recalling the title.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

P.S. I have received yet another reply from S. Russell, your executive correspondence officer, this time for the gift of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. [See the Reply section for Book Number 51.] That’s two letters in short order, after a silence of two years. I can see why in the case of Julius Caesar. In the letter that accompanied the play, I spoke about my concerns over new guidelines for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Periodical Fund. That’s political stuff, the very fodder of a correspondence officer in a prime minister’s office. But a response to my gift of Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Chester Brown’s Louis Riel came as a surprise. But I guess anything to do with Riel is political, still, and merits a response from you, however indirect. I wonder if I might receive a reply from you directly one day. There’s quite a choice of books you can write to me about, that’s for sure.

Reply:

Pending…

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A gift to be shared, like all gifts,
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 strengths of non-fiction is its ability to focus. Whereas fiction can be as broad as the humanities, non-fiction tends to specialize, like a science. Writers of fiction commonly hear from their editors that they must “show, not tell”. They must do so because fiction creates new, unfamiliar worlds that must be felt and not only described. Non-fiction, on the other hand, relies on a world already in existence, our own, with its true history and real historical figures. Of course, that history and those figures must be made to breathe with life on the page; good writing is always essential. Nonetheless, that basis in the factual world frees non-fiction writers from the cumbersome task of wholly inventing characters and situations and gives them far more liberty to straight-out tell. What is gained is an ability to cover a single topic deeply. What is lost is broad appeal. With non-fiction, the reader must be more actively interested in the subject covered. For example, a history of feudal Japan will likely attract fewer readers than a novel about feudal Japan. Such was the case, at least, with James Clavell’s novel Shogun and I don’t think it’s unusual.

The result of this specialization is that the world of non-fiction is more fragmented. A novel is more like another novel than a work of non-fiction is like another work of non-fiction. Proof of that is in the names we give to these categories: we know what fiction is, so we call it that, and under the label we comfortably place the plays, poems, novels and short stories of the world. But what about those books that aren’t fiction? Well, we’re not so sure what they are, so we define them by what they are not: they are non-fiction. The result of this lack of convention, with great non-fiction, is a high degree of originality.

A sterling example of how original non-fiction can be is the book I am sending you this week. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde looks at the meaning and consequence of a gift, that is, of an object or service that is given for nothing, freely, without expectation of a concrete or immediate return. With that single notion in mind, Hyde evokes an array of peoples, places and practices and makes a coherent whole of what would be a novelistic mess. You’ll see for yourself. The Puritans in America, Irish and Bengali folklore, the Trobriand Islanders off New Guinea, the Maori of New Zealand, the potlatch of the Pacific Coast First Nations, Alcoholics Anonymous, tales of Buddha, the Ford Motor Company, the fate of unexpected sums of money in an urban ghetto of Chicago, Martin Luther, John Calvin, the lives of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, to mention just a few references that I remember—all are woven together as Hyde lays out his thesis on the differences between the exchange of gifts and the exchange of commodities. The currencies involved in these trades are radically different. In the first, sentiments are exchanged; in the second, money. The first creates attachment; the second, detachment. The first creates a community; the second, liberty. The first builds capital that does not circulate; the second loses its value if it does not keep moving. These ideas are examined in the light of the many anthropological and sociological examples in the book.

Art is at the heart of The Gift. Hyde sees every aspect of art as a gift: creativity is received as a gift by the artist, art is made as a gift and then, rather awkwardly in our current economic system, art is traded as a gift. That certainly rings true with me. I have never thought of my creativity in monetary terms. I write now as I did when I started, for nothing. And yet the artist must live. How then to quantify the value of one’s art? How do we correlate a poem’s worth with a monetary value? I use the word again: it’s awkward. If Hyde favours the spirit of gift-giving over that of commercial exchange, it’s not because he’s a doctrinaire idealist. He’s not. But it’s clear what he thinks: we’ve forgotten the spirit of the gift in our commodity-driven society and the cost of that has been the parching of our souls.

The Gift is a refreshment to the dried-up soul. For Lewis Hyde, the spirit of the gift goes far beyond Christmas and birthdays. It’s actually a philosophy. And it’s hard not to adhere to it after reading hundreds of pages on gift-making and gift-giving in all corners of the world. Perhaps we have forgotten a little how good it feels to give freely, how what is given to us must be passed on, so that the gift can live on, swimming about human communities like a fish, always alive so long as it keeps moving. Perhaps that’s why the things we value the most are often those that we were given. Perhaps that is our more natural mode of exchange. At the very least, after reading this book you’ll never think of the word “gift” in the same way. 

One last point, made in the spirit of Hyde’s book. I have now sent you fifty-five books of all types, and there will be more to come, as long as you are Prime Minister. I imagine these books are lying on a shelf somewhere in your offices. But they won’t be there forever. One day you will leave office and you’ll take with you the extensive paper trail that a prime minister creates. That trail will be placed in hundreds of cardboard boxes that will end up at the National Archives of Canada, where in time they will be opened and the contents parsed by scholars. I would feel sad if that were the fate of the books I have given you. Novels and poems and plays are not meant to live in cardboard boxes. Like all gifts, they should be shared. So may I suggest that you share what I have shared with you. One by one, or all together, as you wish, give the books away, with only two conditions: first, that they not be kept permanently by each recipient but rather passed on in a timely fashion, after they’ve been read, and, second, that they never be sold. That would keep the gift-giving spirit of our book club alive.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

P.S. Could you please thank S. Russell on my behalf for his or her reply for the last books I sent you, the Mishima and the Chester Brown. [See the Reply section for Books Numbers 53 and 54.]

Reply:

May 22nd, 2009

Dear Mr. Martel,

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your recent correspondence.

Thank you for writing to share your views with the Prime Minister. You may be assured that your comments have been carefully noted. For more information on the Government’s initiatives, you may wish to visit the Prime Minister’s Web site, at www.pm.gc.ca.

Your sincerely,

L.A. Lavell

Executive Correspondence Officer

Inscription:

for Louis Riel:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A graphic novel on a key episode
in Canadian history,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

for The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A graphic novel of a different kind,
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,

When I started sending you books, I said they would be books “known to expand stillness”. A book is a marvellous tool—in fact, a unique tool—to increase one’s depth of reflection, to help one think and feel. It takes a long time and great effort to write a good book, whether of fiction or non-fiction. It’s not only the preliminary research; there’s also the weeks and months of thinking. When asked how long it took them to write a book, I’ve heard writers say, “My whole life.” I know what they mean by that. Their entire being went into the writing of that book, and the few years it actually took to get it down on the page were only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It’s not surprising that such a lengthy process, akin to the maturing of a good wine, should yield a rich product worthy of careful consideration.

But the stillness that books can induce does not mean they are peaceable. Stillness is not the same thing as tranquility. You might have noticed that a few weeks ago with Julius Caesar. There’s hardly any peace and tranquility in that play, yet it is thought-provoking nonetheless, isn’t it?

That stillness out of turmoil continues with the two books I am sending you this week. I’m sure you are familiar with the tragic saga of Louis Riel. The English hated him, the French loved him. Of course, I don’t mean the English and French of Europe when I say that. I mean the people from that nation that materialized north of the United States. The English and Irish and Scottish of Ontario were newly calling themselves Canadians, while the French-speaking Métis of the Red River Settlement were not. In one man, the tensions and resentments of a new nation were symbolized. It was a complicated mess whose effects are felt to this day. Would the Parti Québécois have been elected in 1976 had Louis Riel and Red River Métis been treated more fairly by Ottawa? Or would that have led Ontarians to elect an “Ontario Party” advocating union withthe United States? What is clear—and you must surely know this from your own personal experience in politics—is that once prejudice and bad faith are entrenched among a people, it’s very hard to get them to get along.

Louis Riel, by the Canadian graphic artist Chester Brown, is a serious work that tells a serious story in a thoughtful and evocative manner. The drawings are compelling and the storytelling is both gripping and subtle. Louis Riel comes across as he likely was: a strange and charismatic man, religiously crazy at times but also genuinely concerned about the fate of his Métis people.

The description “strange and charismatic” could also be applied to the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). If Riel was religiously crazy, then Mishima was aesthetically crazy. You might have heard about how Mishima died. He’s as well known for his death as he is for his writings. The life of an author should not normally be conflated with his work, but a healthy writer who, at the age of forty-five and at the height of his fame, commits suicide by ritual disembowelment and beheading—what is popularly called harakiri—after taking over a military base and exhorting the army of his country to overthrow the government, cannot but attract attention for reasons other than his books. In this case, life and work are intimately linked. Mishima’s end had less to do with politics and restoring Japan to a supposed former glory than withpersonal notions he had about deathand beauty. He was obsessed by death and beauty. The characters in his novel The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea—Fusako, the mother; Noboru, her son; and Ryuji, the sailor—demonstrate this. They are exquisitely realized. One gets a sense of them not only in their physical being but in their inner makeup too. All are, in their different ways, beautiful. And yet their story is riven by violence and death. I won’t say anything more.  

I’ll confess that when I first read The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea in my early twenties, I hated it because I loved it. It and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger  are the only masterpieces I’ve read with the breathless feeling that I possibly could have written them myself. Those two stories were in me, I felt, but a Japanese writer and Norwegian writer got to them before I could.

I should explain why I am sending you two books this week. I’m off on a holiday and don’t want to worry about books being lost in the mail. So these are your April books, Louis Riel for April 13th and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea for April 27th.

How curious and unrelated they seem. I doubt Mishima had ever heard of Louis Riel, and there’s nothing in Louis Riel to make me think that Chester Brown is an admirer of Mishima. But I’ve always liked that about books, how they can be so different from each other and yet rest together without strife on a bookshelf. The hope of literature, the hope of stillness, is that the peace with which the most varied books can lie side by side will transform their readers, so that they too will be able to live side by side with people very different from themselves.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback and one inscribed paperback

Reply:

April 29, 2009

Dear Mr. Martel,

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 Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima and a copy of Louis Riel, A Comic-Strip Biography by Chester Brown.

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

Yours truly,

S. Russell

Executive Correspondence Officer

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book on a hot topic,
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 had never heard of Cape Farewell, a British NGO, until an e-mail from them popped into my inbox. They were inviting me, thanks to funding by the Musagetes Foundation here in Canada, on a trip they were organizing to Peru. To explain their organization and its objectives, they offered to send me a book and a DVD. I was intrigued and so accepted. What did I have to lose? A few days later, said book and DVD arrived in the mail. I read the book, watched the DVD, checked out their website (www.capefarewell.com) and promptly wrote to Cape Farewell to accept their invitation.

Many people were first introduced to climate change by An Inconvenient Truth, the movie based on the touring presentation by Al Gore. Cape Farewell’s mission is to move beyond that initial awareness and orchestrate a cultural response to climate change. To do that, they organize expeditions to the frontiers of climate change, those hot spots (literally) where the change is most apparent. Scientists are there too, doing their research, and so artists can see both climate change’s theatre and some of its actors. The artists are then invited to respond, to become actors themselves. The DVD Art from a Changing Arctic documents the first three Cape Farewell expeditions to Svalbard, while Burning Ice records some of the responses by the artists.

It’s a varied book, as you’ll see. There is visual art, both photographic, pictorial and sculptural, there are essays, both scientific, giving a good recap about climate change, and personal, relating the reactions of individuals to that change. Burning Ice came out in 2006 and it’s already out of date. In one essay, a scientist states that by 2050 there will be no more summer ice in the Arctic. Scientists are now predicting such a disappearance by 2013. Only three years on and matters have already gotten worse. It’s easy to fall into pessimism when contemplating climate change. “Such a global calamity—what can I do?” The great quality of Burning Ice is that it shows what can be done: one can respond. Of course, a painting, a photograph, a string of words won’t save the planet. But it’s the beginning of coming to grips with the issue. Climate change on its own is an impersonal force, deeply disempowering. Art inspired by climate change, because the making of art is personally involving, a whole-person activity, is empowering, both for the maker and the spectator.

As I flipped through the pages of Burning Ice, gazing at the artwork, reading the essays, I marvelled and I was distressed: an odd mixture, but a step up from simply feeling distress. Whether the art that Cape Farewell generates, to be seen in books and exhibitions, turns out to be elegiac, a farewell to our planet, or the beginning of real change in the way we live, will only be seen in years to come. But one thing is certain: our response to climate change cannot be purely political. Politicians have been dragging their feet—you among them—because of the power of the carbon-fuel industrial complex. It is citizens who must move first, and art is an ideal way to help them do that. Art wrestles with its subject matter on a level that the individual, the man, woman, teenager and child on the street, can engage with and react to. Once citizens are involved in the vital issue of climate change, politicians will have to follow their lead.

You might as well get ahead of the wave. I hope you are both moved and alarmed by Burning Ice.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl.: one inscribed trade paperback and one DVD

Reply:

June 24, 2009

Dear Mr. Martel:

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence of March 30, which provided a copy of the book Burning Ice: Art & Climate Change.

Thank you for providing this material to the Prime Minister. Your courtesy in bringing this information to his attention is appreciated.

Yours sincerely,

P. Monteith

Executive Correspondence Officer

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
S.O.S. (Save Our Shakespeare),
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,

Yesterday was the Ides of March, and so Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. There is nothing sacred in or about Shakespeare, but one can lose and find oneself in his work the way one can lose and find oneself in the Bible. Both are full worlds, one secular, the other religious, and both have spawned generations of readers and scholars who can quote chapter and verse from any given book or play. If one were on a desert island with only the Bible or the complete works of Shakespeare, one would do all right. If one had both, one would do well.

There is everything in Shakespeare (including dullness in the history plays). The English language and the nature of drama were still on the anvil in the smithy when Shakespeare was around, which was between the years 1564 and 1616, and the formative beatings of his hammer mark to this day the English language, theatre, and our view of the world. To give you just two small examples: in Act I, towards the end of Scene II, Cassius asks Casca if Cicero had anything to say about Caesar fainting. Cicero did, but in Greek. Casca deadpans, “It was Greek to me.” Later, in Act III, Scene I, Caesar is making clear that his will is firm and that he is not easily put off his course. He is, he says, “constant as the northern star.” These are but two of the many expressions that Shakespeare brought to the language he was working in. He brought more than that, of course. His plays, besides being vivid and dramatic, overflow with insights into the human condition. The adjective “Shakespearean” is a broad one. If that single man was a spring, we now all live in his delta.

Julius Caesar is a play about politics, more specifically about power. The potential power of one individual, the power of tradition, the power of principles, the power of persuasion, the power of the masses—all these powers clash in the play, to deadly effect. Shakespeare take no sides. His play is a tragedy, but it is not only Caesar’s tragedy. It is also the tragedy of Brutus and Cassius, of Portia and Calpurnia, of Cinna the Poet, of Rome itself.

Since Julius Caesar is about power and politics, we might as well talk about power and politics. Let me discuss concerns I have with two decisions your government recently announced.

My first concern is about the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. New money allocated to the Council is apparently to be spent exclusively on ”business-related degrees.” Don’t you feel that there’s a measure of contradiction between the libertarian, small-government ideals of your party and telling an arm’s-length body how to spend its money? Aren’t you making government bigger and more intrusive by doing so? But that’s an aside. More troubling is the denaturing of SSHRC’s role. I’ve never understood why public universities, funded by the taxpayer, should necessarily have business departments. Is making money really an academic discipline? Don’t get me wrong; there’s nothing shameful about money, or the making of it, but we’re losing sight of the purpose of a university if we think it’s the place to churn out MBAs. A university is the repository and crucible of a society, the place where it studies itself. It is the brain of a society. It is not the wallet. Businesses come and go. Shakespeare doesn’t. A university builds minds and souls. A business employs. The world would be a better place if rather than having business types infiltrating universities, we had Shakespeare types infiltrating businesses. I imagine this line of argument is falling on your deaf ear. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood. To paraphrase Antony speaking of Brutus, you are an honourable man and you must know what you’re doing.

My second concern is the announcement by the Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore that funding from the new Canadian Periodical Fund might be restricted to those magazines that have a circulation greater than five thousand. That will pretty well kill off every single arts and literary magazine in Canada. “Good thing,” you might be thinking. “Elitist little rags, who needs them?” Well, we all need them, because good things start small. I’ll give you just one example: my own. I was first published by The Malahat Review, which comes out of Victoria, B.C. Their early support, when I was in my twenties, galvanized me. It made me want to write more and to write better. It’s because I was published in the Malahat that I won my first literary award, that I met my literary agent, that I came to the attention of Toronto publishers. The Malahat is where I was born as a writer. If it goes, so does the next generation of writers and poets. But perhaps I’ve misunderstood. You are an honourable man and you must know what you’re doing.

Turning SSHRC into an MBA funding agency and eliminating arts and literary magazines are incomprehensible measures to me. The sums involved are so small relatively, yet the purposes they serve so important. Is it really your aim to transform Canada into a post-literate society? As it is, many young people are post-historical and post-religious. If literacy is the next pillar to go, what will be left of our identity? But perhaps I’ve misunderstood. You are an honourable man and you must know what you’re doing.

In Act III, Scene 3 of Caesar, you will meet Cinna the poet. He is torn to pieces by the rabble, who mistake him for another Cinna, one of  the conspirators. That is not the Canadian way. Here in Canada, at this time, it is the Canadian government that is attacking Cinna the poet. But perhaps I’ve misunderstood. You are an honourable man and you must know what you’re doing.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback book

Reply:

1)

May 1, 2009

Dear Mr. Martel,

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence regarding the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Periodical Fund. I would also like to thank you for the enclosure of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.

Please be assured that your comments have been given careful consideration. I have taken the liberty of forwarding copies of your correspondence to the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, and the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, so that they may be made aware of your concerns.

Once again, thank you for writing the Prime Minister.

Yours sincerely,

S. Russell

Executive Correspondence Officer

2)

June 16, 2009

Dear Mr. Martel,

The Office of the Prime Minister forwarded to me a copy of your letter on May 5, 2009, regarding the Budget 2009 decision to allocate the temporary increase of Canada Graduate Scholarships (CGS) awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to students pursuing business-related degrees. I regret the delay in replying to you.

The Government of Canada recognizes that talented, skilled and creative people are the most critical element of a successful national economy, and has committed to strenghtening Canada’s People Advantage in our Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage. Our government has not only maintained, but increased the level of ongoing federal support for graduate students in Canada. In Budget 2007, we expanded the CGS program to support 5,000 students annually across all areas of study. Of these recipients, 2,600 are supported by SSHRC, 1,600 through the Natural Sciences and Englineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and 800 through the Canadian Institutes for Health Reserch (CIHR).

Budget 2009 announced a further, temporary increase in the number of CGS awards that will be granted in 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 as part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan. This increased funding will help students deepen their skills through further study at a time when they face a weakening labour market. Of the 2,500 additional scholarships made available through Budget 2009, 500 will be awarded by SSHRC to students pursuing business-related degrees.

The S&T Strategy addresses the need to foster more advanced business training in Canada as a means to improve innovation and the overall health of the economy. Our focus on business-related studies will provide additional support and encouragement to students pursuing advanced training in an area critical to Canada’s future economic success.

This government recognizes the important contribution of all social sciences and humanities disciplines to a vibrant economy and society. Research in the social sciences and humanities advances knowledge and builds understanding about individual groups and societies. Knowledge and understanding informs discussion on critical social, cultural, economic, technological, and wellness issues. They also provide communities, businesses and governments with the foundation for a vibrant and healthy democracy. SSHRC will continue to award Canada Graduate Scholarships across the full range of social sciences and humanities disciplines through the ongoing CGS program. Over the next three years, SSHRC will award an expected 5,700 Canada Graduate Scholarships, and 5,200 of these—more than 90 percent—will be available in all areas of the social sciences and humanities.

The additional awards will be granted in keeping with SSHRC’s mandate to support excellence in research and research training in the social sciences and humanities. They will help to ensure that top graduate students in business-related fields of study contribute to enhancing Canada’s prosperity.

Thank you for writing and please accept my best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Clement

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Our fiftieth book,
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 gentle yet probing questioning, the lightness of touch, the accuracy of statement, the keen moral awareness, the constant intelligence—finally, it’s only Jane Austen’s irony that is missing from this excellent look at her life by Carol Shields, which is fitting since a fair-minded biography isn’t the most suitable place for broad irony. Otherwise, without any attempt at imitation or pastiche, this book is so much in the spirit of its subject, so intimately concerned with the meaning of being a writer, that one can nearly imagine that one is reading Carol Shields: A Life, by Jane Austen. Not that Carol Shields intrudes on the text in an unseemly way. Not at all. Aside from the brief prologue, the personal pronoun I to designate the biographer never appears. This book is entirely a biography of Jane Austen. But the spirit of the two, of the English novelist who lived between 1775 and 1817 and of the Canadian novelist who lived between 1935 and 2003, are so kindred that the book exudes a feeling of friendship rather than of analysis.

The illusion of complicity is helped by the fact that not very much is known about Jane Austen, despite her being the author of six novels that sit with full rights in the library of great English literature. She wrote Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion in unremitting rural obscurity. She became a published writer only six years before her death and the four novels that came out during her lifetime were published anonymously, the author being described only as “a Lady”. And even when it became widely known after her death that the lady in question had been one Jane Austen, resident of the village of Chawton, in Hampshire, posterity didn’t find out much more about her. Jane Austen never met another published writer, was never interviewed by a journalist and never moved in a literary circle beyond the completely personal one of her family, who were her first and most loyal readers. What we might have found out about her through her letters is partial, since many were destroyed by her sister Cassandra. In other words, Jane Austen lived among people who hardly took note of her, and I mean that literally: except for some few family members and friends, very little was written about Jane Austen during her lifetime that might have allowed us to become acquainted with her. A biography of such an elusive person will therefore have more the character of a spiritual quest than of a factual account. Therein lies the excellence of Shields’s biography. It is not cluttered by facts. It is rather a meditation on the writerly existence of Jane Austen—and who better to do that than a writer who can be viewed as a modern incarnation of her? Carol Shields had a similar interest in the female perspective and was as comfortable as Jane Austen in exploring the domestic and the intimate, plumbing its depths until the universal was revealed. The intuitive rightness of her biography amply makes up for the dearth of hard facts. 

The eleventh book I sent you was a Jane Austen novel, though a minor one because unfinished, The Watsons, if you remember. If that’s the only Austen you’ve read, you don’t have to worry that you will be left in the dark by this biography. It’s called Jane Austen: A Life, after all, and not Jane Austen: Her Books. Of course, her books are discussed, but only to the extent that they shed light on their author. The reader doesn’t have to have an intimate knowledge of them to appreciate what Shields is discussing.

This book is a real pleasure to read, I must emphasize that. It is intelligent in a most engaging way, not only making Jane Austen better known to us, but also bringing the reader in on the alchemical process of writing. Jane Austen, unlimited by her tightly circumscribed life, composed novels that still speak to readers today, whose lives, especially that of her female readers, have changed vastly. Carol Shields, for her part, unlimited by the poverty of source material, composed a biography that speaks to everyone, male or female, devoted Austen reader or neophyte. I hope you will enjoy it, this, the fiftieth book that we have shared.

I was in Bath recently, where Jane Austen lived for a few years. She was miserable while there, but it’s a lovely town nonetheless. I took two pictures for you (first photo, second photo), which I include with this letter.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback book and two photos

Reply:

Pending…

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,

The famous Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea is one of those works of literature that most everyone has heard of, even those who haven’t read it. Despite its brevity—127 pages in the well-spaced edition I am sending you—it’s had a lasting effect on English literature, as has Hemingway’s work in general. I’d say that his short stories, gathered in the collections In Our Time, Men without Women and Winner Take Nothing, among others, are his greatest achievement—and above all, the story Big Two-Hearted River—but his novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are more widely read.

The greatness of Hemingway lies not so much in what he said as how he said it. He took the English language and wrote it in a way that no one had written it before. If you compare Hemingway, who was born in 1899, and Henry James, who died in 1916, that overlap of seventeen years seems astonishing, so contrasting are their styles. With James, the portrayal of truth, verisimilitude, realism, whatever you want to call it, is achieved by a baroque abundance of language. Hemingway’s style is the exact opposite. He stripped the language of ornamentation, prescribing adjectives and adverbs to his prose the way a careful doctor would prescribe pills to a hypochondriac. The result was prose of revolutionary terseness, with a cadence, vigour and elemental simplicity that bring to mind a much older text: the Bible.

That combination is not fortuitous. Hemingway was well versed in biblical language and imagery and The Old Man and the Sea can be read as a Christian allegory, though I wouldn’t call it a religious work, certainly not in the way the book I sent you two weeks ago, Gilead, is. Rather, Hemingway uses Christ’s passage on earth in a secular way to explore the meaning of human suffering. “Grace under pressure” was the  formulation Hemingway offered when he was asked what he meant by “guts” in describing the grit shown by many of his characters. Another way of putting that would be the achieving of victory through defeat, which matches more deeply, I think, the Christ-like odyssey of Santiago, the old man of the title. For concerning Christ, that was the Apostle Paul’s momentous insight (some would call it God’s gift): the possibility of triumph, of salvation, in the very midst of ruination. It’s a message, a belief, that transforms the human experience entirely. Career failures, family disasters, accidents, disease, old age—these human experiences that might otherwise be tragically final instead become threshold events. 

As I was thinking about Santiago and his epic encounter with the great marlin, I wondered whether there was any political dimension to his story. I came to the conclusion that there isn’t. In politics, victory comes through victory and defeat only brings defeat. The message of Hemingway’s poor Cuban fisherman is purely personal, addressing the individual in each one of us and not the roles we might take on. Despite its vast exterior setting, The Old Man and the Sea is an intimate work of the soul. And so I wish upon you what I wish upon all of us: that our return from the high seas be as dignified as Santiago’s.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
An Obama pick,
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,

Well, with a budget like that, you might as well be a socialist. Remarkable how much your government has vowed to spend. Your days as a radical Reformer, determined to shrink the government like a wool sweater in a hot water wash, must be from a former life. I wonder what your friends at the National Citizens Coalition think? (Why is there no apostrophe in the name of that organization? I checked their website and that’s how they spell it. Are they so committed to free enterprise and fearful of social commitment that they won’t put the Citizens in the possessive case?)

I gather Michael Ignatieff was amused to hear echoes of his own statements in the recent Speech from the Throne (I enclose a Globe and Mail article). Don’t worry, you’re not the only one echoing him. President Obama (I do like the ring of that), in explaining why he was closing down the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and the CIA’s secret overseas prisons and repealing other dubious counterterrorism measures taken by George W. Bush, used words that could have been Mr. Ignatieff’s. How our liberal democratic ideals must be reflected in our actions, how we cannot lightly sacrifice rights for the sake of excessive security expediency, how we will triumph over our enemies by keeping faith with our ideals, not by abandoning them, and so on—it’s all entirely in the spirit of the 47th book in our library, The Lesser Evil. Clearly Mr. Ignatieff’s views are shared by many, influenced by and feeding into a current of thought that is now becoming widely accepted, so you do well to open yourself to it.

Speaking of President Obama, it’s because of him that I’m sending you the novel Gilead, by the American writer Marilynne Robinson. It’s one of his favourite novels. I discovered this fact in an article in the New York Times, which I also include in this letter. It turns out Barack Obama is a reader, a big reader. And the books he has read and cherished have not only been practical texts that someone interested in governance would likely favour. No, he also likes poetry, fiction, philosophy: the Bible, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Melville, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, the poets Elizabeth Alexander and Derek Walcott, the philosophers Reinhold Niebuhr and St. Augustine, and many more. They’ve formed his oratory, his thinking, his very being. He’s a man-built-by-words and he has impressed the whole world.

I would sincerely recommend that you read Gilead before you meet President Obama on February 19th. For two people who are meeting for the first time, there’s nothing like talking about a book that both have read to create common ground and a sense of intimacy, of knowing the other in a small but important way. After all, to like the same book implies a similar emotional response to it, a shared recognition of the world reflected in it. This is assuming, of course, that you like the book.

That shouldn’t be too hard. There is much to like in Gilead. It’s a slow, honest novel, suffused with wonder and amazement (those two words come up often in the book), and surprisingly religious, practically devotional. There are no chapters, just entries divided by a blank line, as if it were a diary. The narration is leisurely and episodic, giving the impression of a ramble, but it’s actually a carefully constructed novel, building in power as it goes along. There is no facile irony, no seeking to please by the easy recourse of humour. Instead, the tone is sober, gentle, intelligent. The story is told by John Ames, an aged preacher who is ill with a heart condition that will kill him soon enough. He has a seven-year-old son come to him late in life as a result of an autumnal marriage to a much younger, much loved woman. He wants his son to know something of his father, and of his father’s father, and of his father’s father’s father—all of them named John Ames and all of them preachers—so he writes a long letter for his son to read when he is of age. The style is on the surface effortless, a plain, poetic speech with much about God and God’s people and the meaning of it all, with a few references to baseball. Very American, then, a novel one could imagine Ralph Waldo Emerson having written if Emerson had written fiction. Gilead is a graceful work, suffused with grace, and it has the luminous feel of the profound. It’s a novel that aspires to be a church, quiet, sparely furnished, whitely lit, filled with Presence and steeped in the essential. If there’s a novel that should give you a sense of stillness, it is this one.

I hope you like it. And if you don’t, remember nonetheless that it is one of keys that will let you into the mind of the current President of the United States.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback and two printouts of newspaper articles

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book for a leader by a leader,
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,

Okay, back to work, for you and for me. I’m rewriting my next book, for the third and last time I hope, and a new session of Parliament is opening soon. We both face a busy winter.

I believe you said in an interview not long ago that you hadn’t read much of Michael Ignatieff’s work. It’s obvious that you should, isn’t it? After all, you will be facing him every day in the House of Commons this year—he may even take your job—so it would be to your advantage to get to know his mind. The man has an impressive c.v., I must say. Degrees from the University of Toronto, Oxford, Harvard; teaching positions at Cambridge, Hautes Études in Paris, Harvard; a career in broadcasting and journalism; sixteen books to his credit (including three novels)—I can’t think of an aspiring Canadian prime minister with a resumé to match.  There have been prime ministers who were well educated and prime ministers who have written books, but none to this extent. Does that mean he would make a peerless prime minister? Of course not. Leadership can’t be reduced to academic credentials or books on a shelf. Personality, vision, instinct, people skills, practical knowledge, toughness, resilience, rhetorical flair, charisma, luck—there is much that goes into the making of a political leader besides grey matter. 

Having said that, a formidable intellect can only help, especially if it has been tested in practical ways, as Mr. Ignatieff’s has. There’s been little of the proverbial ivory tower in the years before he was elected to Parliament. His concern for human rights and democracy are real, not theoretical. He has travelled to many troubled spots on this planet to try to answer that essential question: how best can a society govern itself? Should Mr. Ignatieff ever move into 24 Sussex Drive, the gain for Canadians will no doubt be public policy goals that are sound and enlightened. Will he be able to bring these goals about? Will he know when to listen, when to compromise, when to act decisively? Many a politician has come to power with set ideas on how to fix things, only to find reality either more complex or more resistant than they had anticipated. We’ll find out in the coming months how Michael Ignatieff fares.

In the meantime, to help you not only in dealing with the new Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition but also as an aid in setting policy, I am sending you The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, a more recent book by your fellow parliamentarian, published in 2004. The cover seems uninspiring. It was chosen for a good reason: it’s a photograph of a staircase at Auschwitz. Up and down those stairs went people who were in the grip of political ethics gone terribly wrong. As I said, there’s nothing abstract about Mr. Ignatieff’s concerns. He looks at real-life political dilemmas and seeks to find out what went wrong and how those wrongs might be made right.

The Lesser Evil is a study on liberal democracies and terrorism. How do people who value freedom and dignity handle those who commit senseless violence against them? What is the right balance between the competing demands of rights and security? What can a democratic society allow itself to do and still call itself democratic? These are some of the questions that Mr. Ignatieff tries to answer. He looks at nations as diverse as Russia, the United Kingdom, the U.S., Germany, Italy, Spain, Sri Lanka, Chile, Argentina, Israel and Palestine, in their current state but also historically, to see how they have dealt with assaults by terrorists. He also makes literary references, to Dostoyevsky and Conrad, to Euripides and Homer. Throughout, the approach is open, fair and critical, the analysis is rigorous and insightful, the conclusions are wise. Last but not least, the style is engaging. Mr. Ignatieff has a fine pen. My favourite line in the book is this one, on page 121: “Liberal states cannot be protected by herbivores.”

Mr. Ignatieff is a passionate yet subtle defender of liberal democracies and he finds that generally the tools they already have at their disposal will do in times of terrorist threat. Indeed, he argues that overreaction to a threat can do more long-term harm to a liberal democracy than the threat itself. The U.S. Patriot Act and Canada’s Bill C-36 are two examples Mr. Ignatieff gives of well-meaning but redundant and misguided attempts to deal with terrorism. When the regular tools won’t do, he acknowledges that the choices faced by liberal democracies are difficult. He makes the case that when a society that values freedom and human dignity is confronted with a threat to its existence, it must move beyond rigid moral perfectionism or outright utilitarian necessity and—carefully, mindfully, vigilantly—follow a path of lesser evil, that is, allow itself to commit some infringements of the part in order to save the whole. It is a position that seeks to reconcile the realism necessary to fight terrorism with the idealism of our democratic values. To work one’s way through such treacherous ground, to get down to details and talk about torture and preemptive military action, to give just two examples, requires a mind that is tough, sharp and brave. I’m glad to say that Mr. Ignatieff has such a mind.  

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Hey Jude,
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,

Christmas crept up on me unnoticed this winter. Suddenly it was December 25th and I realized that I had committed that common, life-eating error: I had stopped paying heed to the flow of time. This lapse was reflected in the last book I sent you. Though original and imaginative, Borges’s Fictions does not obviously fit with the original and imaginative books I sent you last Christmas (our second Christmas, speaking of the flow of time). Those, if you remember, were three children’s books: The Brothers Lionheart, Imagine a Day, and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. They were suitably festive. Did you and your family enjoy them? Did they make you smile and laugh? This week I am sending you a book that I hope will genuinely please you, that you will unwrap, so to speak, and react to with surprise and delight. A real Christmas book, in other words.

I gather you are a Beatles fan. Here then is a selection of poems and lyrics by Paul McCartney. The songs he penned as a Beatle jumped out at me. I found it impossible to read “The Fool on the Hill” or “Eleanor Rigby” or “Lady Madonna” or “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” or “Lovely Rita” or “Rocky Raccoon” or “When I’m Sixty-Four”, among others, in the hushed, even voice of normal prose. Instead, I sang along in my head, pausing at the right moments for the band to play its part. I’m not very familiar with McCartney’s later career with the Wings or as a solo artist, so those songs lay more quietly on the page for me, as did the poems. I could generally tell the lyrics from the poems because the former had more repetitions and something seemed lacking in them to give them independent literary life. It was in looking in the index that I would see that they were, most often, the words from a Wings song.

A song’s lyrics, I realized, are inseparable from its melody. The melody supplies the lift, suspending one’s disbelief and cynicism or giving one permission to entertain the forbidden, while the lyrics supply the in, inviting one to compare one’s experience of life with what is being said in the song, or, even better, inviting one to sing along. The possibility of listening intelligibly and of singing along are essential to a song’s appeal, because both involve the direct, personal participation of the listener. This participation, the extent to which one can mesh one’s life and dreams with a song, explains why something so short—most of the Beatles’ early songs are less than two minutes long—can go so deep so quickly. That’s the beguiling illusion of a great song: it speaks to each of us individually, and with a magnetic voice, and so we listen intently, instantly drawn into an inner dream world. Who hasn’t been moved to the core by a song, eyes closed and body shuddering with emotion? In that state, we address feelings we might be too shy to deal with in plain speech—raw, hungering lust, for example—or ones that cut deep but are so mundane we are embarrassed to talk about them: loneliness, yearning, heartbreak.

A good song is a hard trick to pull off. Classical musicians scoff at the crudeness of pop melodies, while more literary poets roll their eyes at the banality of pop lyrics, but there is a measure of envy in this resentment. What violinist or poet would not want a stadium full of rapt listeners? At any rate, Paul McCartney, with appealing lyrics and mesmerizing melodies, within the amazing creative synergy that was the Beatles, magisterially assisted by producer George Martin, pulled off that trick so well that every generation since the mid-sixties has fallen in love with his songs. But you already know that.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed hard cover book

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book you may or may not like,
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 first read the short story collection Fictions, by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), twenty years ago and I remember not liking it much. But Borges is a very famous writer from a continent with a rich literary tradition. No doubt my lack of appreciation indicated a lack in me, due to immaturity. Twenty years on, I would surely recognize its genius and I would join the legions of readers who hold Borges to be one of the great pens of the twentieth century.

Well, that change of opinion didn’t take place. Upon rereading Fictions I was as unimpressed this time around as I remember being two decades ago.

These stories are intellectual games, literary forms of chess. They start simply enough, one pawn moving forward, so to speak, from fanciful premises—often about alternate worlds or fictitious books—that are then rigorously and organically developed by Borges till they reach a pitch of complexity that would please Bobby Fischer. Actually, the comparison to chess is not entirely right. Chess pieces, while moving around with great freedom, have fixed roles, established by a custom that is centuries old. Pawns move just so, as do rooks and knights and queens. With Borges, the chess pieces are played any which way, the rooks moving diagonally, the pawns laterally and so on. The result is stories that are surprising and inventive, but whose ideas can’t be taken seriously because they aren’t taken seriously by the author himself, who plays around with them as if ideas didn’t really matter. And so the flashy but fraudulent erudition of Fictions. Let me give you one small example, taken at random. On page 68 of the story The Library of Babel, which is about a universe shaped like an immense, infinite library, appears the following line concerning a particular book in that library:

He showed his find to a traveling decipherer, who told him that the lines were written in Portuguese; others said it was Yiddish. Within the century experts had determined what the language actually was: a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic.

A Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic? That’s intellectually droll, in a nerdy way. There’s a pleasure of the mind in seeing those languages unexpectedly juxtaposed. One mentally jumps around the map of the world. It’s also, of course, linguistic nonsense. Samoyed and Lithuanian are from different language families—the first Uralic, the second Baltic—and so are unlikely ever to merge into a dialect, and even less so of Guarani, which is an indigenous language of South America. As for the inflections from classical Arabic, they involve yet another impossible leap over cultural and historical barriers. Do you see how this approach, if pursued relentlessly, makes a mockery of ideas? If ideas are mixed around like this for show and amusement, then they are ultimately reduced to show and amusement. And pursue this approach Borges does, line after line, page after page. His book is full of scholarly mumbo jumbo that is ironic, magical, nonsensical. One of the games involved in Fictions is: do you get the references? If you do, you feel intelligent; if you don’t, no worries, it’s probably an invention, because much of the erudition in the book is invented. The only story that I found genuinely intellectually engaging, that is, making a serious, thought-provoking point, was Three Versions of Judas, in which the character and theological implications of Judas are discussed. That story made me pause and think. Beyond the flash, there I found depth.

Borges is often described as a writer’s writer. What this is supposed to mean is that writers will find in him all the finest qualities of the craft. I’m not sure I agree. By my reckoning, a great book increases one’s involvement with the world. One seemingly turns away from the world when one reads a book, but only to see the world all the better once one has finished the book. Books, then, increase one’s visual acuity of the world. With Borges, the more I read, the more the world was increasingly small and distant.

There’s one characteristic that I noticed this time around that I hadn’t the first time, and that is the extraordinary number of male names dropped into the narratives, most of them writers. The fictional world of Borges is nearly exclusively male unisexual. Women barely exist. The only female writers mentioned in Fictions are Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie and Gertrude Stein, the last two mentioned in A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain to make a negative point. In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, there is a Baroness de Bacourt and a Mme Henri Bachelier (note how Mme Bachelier’s name is entirely concealed by her husband’s). There may be a few others that I missed. Otherwise, the reader gets male friends and male writers and male characters into the multiple dozens. This is not merely a statistical feminist point. It hints rather at Borges’s relationship to the world. The absence of women in his stories is matched by the absence of any intimate relations in them. Only in the last story, The South, is there some warmth, some genuine pain to be felt between the characters. There is a failure in Borges to engage with the complexities of life, the complexities of conjugal or parental life, or, indeed, of any other emotional engagement. We have here a solitary male living entirely in his head, someone who refused to join the fray but instead hid in his books and spun one fantasy after another. And so my same, puzzled conclusion this time round after reading Borges: this is juvenile stuff.

Now why am I sending you a book that I don’t like? For a good reason: because one should read widely, including books that one does not like. By so doing one avoids the possible pitfall of autodidacts, who risk shaping their reading to suit their limitations, thereby increasing those limitations. The advantage of structured learning, at the various schools available at all ages of one’s life, is that one must measure one’s intellect against systems of ideas that have been developed over centuries. One’s mind is thus confronted with unsuspected new ideas.

Which is to say that one learns, one is shaped, as much by the books that one has liked as by those that one has disliked.

And there is also, of course, the possibility that you may love Borges. You may find his stories rich, deep, original and entertaining. You may think that I should try him again in another twenty years. Maybe then I’ll be ready for Borges.

In the meantime, I wish you and your family a Merry Christmas.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel of fortunes made and lost,
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 curious aspects of the life and work of Pearl Buck is the speed with which she rose to fame and then sank into comparative obscurity. Her first book was published in 1930. Eight years later, at the remarkably young age of forty-six, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, only the third American so rewarded, and this, principally on the basis of the three novels that form the trilogy The House of Earth: The Good Earth (1931), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, Sons (1932), and A House Divided (1935). It is The Good Earth I am offering you this week.

Yet after this stellar start, despite continuing to produce quantities of books and fighting for many a good cause, Buck faded from the forefront of literature so that when she died in 1973 she was nearly a forgotten figure. The reasons for this are, I think, easy enough to discern. She wrote too many books—over eighty—and while a very able writer, she was no great experimenter. She didn’t renew the novel or its language the way Faulkner and Hemingway did, fellow Americans who are still widely read and studied. Nor can her books—or at least the ones I’m familiar with—be stamped with the label “universal”, which sometimes helps an author gain literary immortality. No, the books that made her name were remarkably local, even rooted. Pearl Buck was one of the first writers to bring to life for Western readers that country-civilization called China. It’s a country she knew well for having spent a good part of her life there as the daughter of Christian missionaries and then as a missionary and teacher herself. Despite the hardships she endured there at times, China was a country she loved. She saw its people as just that, people, and she observed them with great sympathy and mixed with them and, eventually, wrote about them. She was the writer-as-bridge, and many people chose to cross the bridge she built.

You will see why when you read The Good Earth. From the first line—”It was Wang Lung’s marriage day”—you slip into the skin of a Chinese peasant from pre-Communist times and you begin to live his life as he sees it and feels it. It’s a harsh story, blighted by poverty and famine, and harsher still for the women in it, but it’s also entirely engrossing. The Good Earth is the sort of novel you’ll be itching to get back to whenever you have to put it down. After reading it, you’ll feel that you know what it might mean to be Chinese at a certain time and in a certain part of China. Therein lies the passing nature of Buck’s work. China has changed radically since The Good Earth was published. What was new and revelatory then is now hoary and out of date. The main appeal of Buck’s work today is in the power of her stories rather than their currency.

Still, The Good Earth remains an excellent introduction to old China and a vivid parable on the fragility of fortune, how things gained can be lost, how what is built can easily be destroyed. This lesson will not be lost on you considering the political turmoil you are now going through. The fate of a politician is so terribly uncertain. Pearl Buck is a staple of every used bookstore. She is still widely read. Her name evokes fond memories. Whereas politicians, when they go, when they disappear from the stage, kicking and screaming sometimes, they really go, they vanish into oblivion so that quickly people scratch their heads, trying to remember when exactly they were in power and what they accomplished.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A short novel on a healthy addiction,
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 can’t think of a more delightful introduction to the republic of letters than Alan Bennett’s short novel The Uncommon Reader. One day at the bottom of the Palace garden, parked next to the kitchen garbage bins, alerted by her corgis, the Queen discovers the City of Westminster’s travelling library. She pops in to apologize for the barking dogs and, once there, impelled by a sense of duty rather than any real interest, she takes out a book. This simple act marks the beginning of Her Majesty’s downfall, in a way. The irony in the story is as light as whipped cream, the humour as appealing as candy, the characterization as crisp as potato chips, but at the heart of it there’s something highly nutritious to be digested: the effect that books can have on a life.

Upon finishing the book, you will think you know HM better, you will feel closer to her, you will like her. This is in part because of Bennett’s skill in bringing his royal character to life. But it also has to do with the nature of books. In the republic of letters, all readers are equal. Unlike other retail outlets, bookstores don’t really come in categories, be it luxury or low-end. A bookstore is a bookstore. Some specialize, but the restriction there has only to do with kinds of books—say modern languages or art—and not with classes of readers. Everyone is welcome in bookstores and all types rub shoulders in them, the wealthy and the poor, the highly educated and the self-taught, the old and the young, the adventurous and the conventional, and others still. You might even bump into the Queen.

Before I forget, one of our very own great Canadian writers, Alice Munro, makes a cameo appearance in The Uncommon Reader, on page 67.

Since I’m on the topic of bookstores, I thought I’d include a few snapshots of some that I’ve visited recently.

The Bookseller Crow on the Hill is in Crystal Palace, a neighbourhood in the south of London where I’ve been staying recently. I’m standing next to John, the genial owner, and I’m holding in my hand the very book you now own, which I bought from John. The next two photos I took inside the Crow. It’s not a very big place in terms of square footage, but stand in front on any shelf—New Titles, Fiction, History, Philosophy, Poetry, Travel—and the mental space represented is as vast as the universe.

The fourth photo is of a small, venerable used bookstore on Milton Street in Montreal called The Word. It has served generations of students. I popped in to buy a novel by the English writer Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom Bennett mentions in his book and whom I’d never read. I found A Family and a Fortune, published in 1939. It cost me $3.95.

The last photo is of La Librairie du Square, a French bookstore also in Montreal. It was my father who taped the red poster you see on the glass door. It announces an event organized by PEN, Amnesty International and l’UNEQ to do with freedom of expression and imprisoned writers.

Independent bookstores are a vanishing breed, especially in North America. The ones who suffer the most from this disappearance are not necessarily readers, but neighbourhoods. After all, a large Chapters or Indigo or Barnes & Noble will hold more books than any reader could possibly read in a lifetime. But large chain stores tend to be fewer in number and are often accessible only by car. The Bookseller Crow, on the other hand, is in a row of small stores that includes a clothes stores, a cafe, a pet store that specializes in fish, a shoe store, a real estate agent, a hairdresser, a newsagent, a bakery, a betting agency, a number of restaurants, and so on. The Word and La Librairie du Square are on streets along which thousands of people walk every day. Whenever an independent bookstore disappears, shareholders somewhere may be richer, but a neighbourhood is for sure poorer.

I’m sorry for writing such a busy letter, but there’s one last matter I’d like to mention. A few weeks ago, on October 20th to be exact, I came upon an article in the New York Times on a man in Colombia who for the last decade has been travelling around his war-ravaged corner of the country with two donkeys—named Alfa and Beto—loaded with books. He stops in every remote pueblo to read to children and to lend books out. He started his Biblioburro, as he calls it, after “he witnessed the transformative power of reading among his pupils, who were born into conflict even more intense than when he was a child.” Ten years on, Luis Soriano says of his enterprise, “This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom. Now it is an institution.”

The City of Westminster’s travelling library and the Biblioburro, the Bookseller Crow on the Hill and The Word—the rich life of the mind that these institutions offer makes joyful equals of us all, from monarchs to poor peasant children.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback, five colour photographs, and one print-out of a New York Times article.

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Again, but made modern,
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,

Gilgamesh again. But a very different Gilgamesh. The version I sent you two weeks ago took liberties, but the better to serve the original Sumerian classic. One senses that Stephen Mitchell took the broken clay tablets, fitted the pieces together and then adeptly filled in where the cracks made it hard to read. Our guide on that breathless trip across five thousand years to the banks of the Euphrates remained egoless and anonymous. Of Mitchell, we sensed nothing; in fact, we didn’t even think to enquire about him.

With Gilgamesh as interpreted by the Canadian poet Derrek Hines, the time travel is in the opposite direction. It’s Mesopotamia that’s yanked into the present day, every speck of archaeological dust blown off. This version is all about liberties, and the clay tablets have been thrown out. Take the opening lines. In the Mitchell version, they go:

Surpassing all kings, powerful and tall
beyond all others, violent, splendid,
a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader,
hero in the front lines, beloved by his soldiers—
fortress they called him, protector of the people,
raging flood that destroys all defences—
two-thirds divine and one-third human…

With Hines, we get:

Here is Gilgamesh, king of Uruk:
two-thirds divine, a mummy’s boy,
zeppelin ego, cock like a trip-hammer,
and solid chrome, no-prisoners arrogance.

Get the picture? You don’t want to read the versions in the wrong order. With the Mitchell, the scope, the vastness, the timelessness of an ancient epic is felt. With the Hines, you might wonder where the epic went. What’s all this riffing? Well, that’s it, the riffing is the point. Remember Ishtar’s anger when Gilgamesh rejects her, how she goes to her father, the god Anu, wanting to borrow the Bull of Heaven so that she can unleash it on Uruk? This is what Hines makes of it, Ishtar speaking:

‘I’ll have the Bull of Heaven or I’ll unzip Hell,
and free the un-dead to suck frost into the living.’

Then, on a pulse, an actor’s mood change—
she, pouting: ‘Darling Anu,
you know how I’m insulted;
I want, want the Bull of Heaven
to revenge my honour.’

She lifts a perfect foot to stamp,
and the tiles of Heaven’s floor in rivalry
shift like a Rubik cube to receive it.

It’s Gilgamesh meets Naomi Campbell. Besides the Rubik cube, there are a great many other un-Mesopotamian references in the text: atomic blasts, Brueghel, buildings in New York, CAT-scans, event horizons, express trains, Marlene Dietrich, oxygen masks, paparazzi, Swiss bank accounts, X-rays, the Wizard of Oz, and so on. This joy in the anachronistic bears witness to the very different approach that Hines takes.

All things are met and understood through one mind, the one we have. Timelessness, transcendence, the evanescence of the ego—these are true, but they are not what we experience. They were neither felt by Gilgamesh, nor are they felt by us. We are not all one. We are just one, each on our own. You, me, him, her, six billion times over. Each one of us has a blip note of mortality. It’s only when the blips are put together that we seem to hear a symphony throbbing down through time. Mitchell’s version of Gilgamesh plays on that symphony. He makes the epic new, but it works because we know it’s old. Hines wants none of this hand-me-down worth. He’s a modern; this blip here and now will speak freshly for that old, fifty-century-old blip. With Hines you get the singularity of the living poet expressing himself in his own right, drawing attention to himself, saying “This is me, this is our language, this is our condition—whaddya think?”

I think it’s very good. A harder read than the Mitchell, for sure. At times, the poetic pithiness requires work to unpack. Then in the next stanza, a startling image makes perfect sense. Which is why I would recommend that you read the Hines more than once. It’s only sixty pages, and well-spaced at that. The more familiar you are with it, the more it will make sense, and soon enough you will have furnished a beautiful room in your mind. It’s a rich, exciting text, with some stabbingly brilliant lines. Take this, part of Gilgamesh’s lament upon Enkidu’s death:

The complaisant dead inch away,
dislocating the shared vanishing point
of our perspective,
and we struggle to repaint the picture.

A last example. Gilgamesh, after getting “snake-drunk” and losing the herb of eternal life, returns to Uruk to die. He has this to say:

We are made and broken on a miracle
we look on and cannot see—as though
we had sold out instinct to thought
blinding us to what the world is,
the heart’s gate to eternity.

That is a truth very old and, here, totally modern.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
The oldest story in the world, to celebrate your second minority,
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,

Congratulations on your electoral win. You must be pleased with your increased minority. What your continued tenure as prime minister means, among other things, is that our book club has survived. We can now really settle into this business of discussing books. Since we have more time, why don’t we go back in time. Why don’t we start where book talk probably started, along the banks of the river Euphrates. What has become known as the standard version of the epic of Gilgamesh was set down between the years 1300 and 1000 BCE in cuneiform on twelve clay tablets in Babylonian, a dialect of the Akkadian language. But earlier written fragments in Sumerian about the heartbroken king of Uruk date from around 2000 BCE, and the historical Gilgamesh, well, he died in about 2750 BCE, just a couple of centuries shy of five thousand years ago.

Gilgamesh predates Homer and predates the Bible. It is the cultural soil out of which these later texts emerged, which is why some elements in the epic will sound familiar to you. Before the biblical Flood there was the Great Flood in Gilgamesh. Before Noah’s Ark, there was the ship Utnapishtim built, crowded with animals. In Gilgamesh, there is an odyssey before the Odyssey and there is one who overcame mortality before Jesus of Nazareth overcame it. The theme of a terrible flood also finds itself echoed in the Hindu story of Matsya the fish, Vishnu’s first avatar, and the theme of fear will perhaps remind you of the Bhagavad-Gita, which I sent you last year. Remember Arjuna’s fear before the battle? It is not dissimilar to Gilgamesh’s fear before death. The inexorableness of fate might remind you of classical Greek thinking, just as the petulance of the Sumerian gods is much like that of the Greek gods. Gilgamesh is the mother of all stories. We, as literary animals, start with Gilgamesh.

That might make you think that reading the epic will be like staring into a display window of crude stone sculptures in an archaeology museum. Not so, I promise you, certainly not in the version of Gilgamesh that I’m sending you, by the American translator Stephen Mitchell. He’s done away with scholarly encrustations and dull fidelity to disjointed fragments (though, if you care, there is a good introduction and lots of notes). Mitchell has sought to be faithful to the spirit of the original, more mindful of the needs of the English reader than the sensibility of the archaeologist.

The result is exhilarating. The prose is simple, vigorous and stately, the action thrillingly dramatic. I encourage you to read the epic aloud. It’s an easy oral read, you will see. Your tongue will not trip, your mind will not stumble. Like the beating of a drum, the cadence of the beats and the repetition of some passages will hold you in thrall.

The mind can be immortal, living forever through ideas. An idea can leap from mind to mind, going down through the generations, forever keeping ahead of death. The mind of Plato, for example, is still with us, long dead though he is. But the heart? The heart is inescapably mortal. Every heart dies. Of Plato’s heart, its share of things felt, we know nothing. Gilgamesh is the story of one man’s heart and its breaking in the face of death. The emotional immediacy is palpable. Gilgamesh, king of great-walled Uruk, won’t seem alien to you because that aggrieved voice pleading directly in your ear isn’t from over four thousand years ago—it’s the pulsing of your own perishable heart. Our only hope is that we might live as authentically as Gilgamesh and find a friend as loving and loyal as Enkidu.

There are some lovely lines. Keep an eye out for “A gust of wind passed,” and “A gentle rain fell onto the mountains.” They glow within their context. And there is a snake that does Gilgamesh a bad turn. That too will be biblically familiar to you. This snake, though, does not proffer; it takes. But the result is the same: unhappy Gilgamesh must accept his fate as a mortal.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
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,

Meet Alex. He’s the nightmare of both citizens and governments, the first because they are afraid of him and the second because they don’t know what to do with him. Alex, you see, is a-lex, outside the law, from the Latin. He and his friends mug people, loot stores and invade homes, liberally dishing out extreme violence and routinely indulging in gang rape. And to think he’s only fifteen. When he’s caught, he rots in a juvenile home for a while until he’s let out—and then what? Well, why stop when you’re having such a good time? He gets back to the fun of “ultra-violence”. Welcome to the world of A Clockwork Orange, a brilliant short novel by the English writer Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), published in 1962.

“What’s it going to be then, eh?” That slightly bullying question appears at the beginning of each of the novel’s three sections. It is asked not only of one or another of the story’s characters; it is asked of us. What’s it going to be with Alex then, eh? What are we to do with him? A Clockwork Orange, despite the great violence in it, in fact, because of it, is a morally preoccupied work.

When Alex is caught after his latest bout of thuggish mayhem, the authorities try a different approach. They try conditioning. If a dog can be conditioned to salivate upon hearing a bell tinkling, why can’t a boy be conditioned to reject violence? Alex is subjected to the Ludovico Method, in which he is given injections that make him feel deathly nauseous at the same time as he is being shown extremely violent films. He thus learns to become sickened by violence, literally. Unfortunately, because of the soundtrack of some of the reels he is forced to watch, Alex is also accidentally conditioned to feel revulsion upon hearing classical music. This aggrieves him greatly because our Alex, despite his brutal tendencies, is a music lover (sounds historically familiar, doesn’t it?).

A minor matter, the Minister of the Interior feels. Our main problem is solved. Now, when our boy sees violence, when he merely entertains thoughts of violence, he falls over helplessly, clutching his stomach and retching. If he also keels over when he hears Beethoven, so what? That’s just a little collateral damage.

But if goodness is elected not by free choice but as a self-defence mechanism against nausea, is it morally valid goodness? “Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed on him?” the prison chaplain asks at one point. Burgess’s answer is unequivocal: he chooses goodness as a free choice. And the reason why this answer is correct is given in the novel’s key words, coming from Alex, dropped nearly casually in the middle of a long sentence:

I was still puzzling out all this and wondering whether I should refuse to be strapped down to this chair tomorrow and start a real bit of dratsing with them all, because I had my rights, when another chelloveck came in to see me.

I had my rights. Indeed, Alex does have his rights, as we all do. Ignore those rights, and the essential is lost: “When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

A group of intellectuals opposed to the government decides to make use of Alex. They lock him in a room next to which they play loud classical music. Alex takes the only exit they’ve left him, an open window. The room is in an apartment block, several floors up. Alex plummets to the sidewalk—and straight into the hearts of citizens indignant at the brainwashing he’s been subjected to. An election is in the offing and the Government is nervous about its prospects. At the hospital where he is recovering from his serious injuries, Alex’s conditioning is hastily reversed. Alex is very happy about this. In the last scene of the penultimate chapter of the novel, we find him lying back, listening with renewed delight to Beethoven’s Ninth. “I was cured all right,” he says.

That line, if it were the last line of the book, would be fiercely ironic. Good that the boy’s ears have been restored, but so has his moral compass. Its fine, trembling needle can now, once again, point as freely towards good as it can towards bad. Does that mean we citizens should start to tremble too? No worries, says Burgess in the last chapter of the book, Chapter 21. Alex’s ordeal has eaten up over two years of his life. He’s now eighteen and has matured. The joys of rape and pillage just aren’t what they used to be. Alex is now more in the mood to find himself a nice girl, settle down and start a family. The novel ends with a softer, mellower Alex pining for a mate.

A weak ending, I’d say. Burgess successfully makes the case for the imperative of freedom at the level of the individual when making moral choices. But what are we to do at the level of a society? What choices does a society have in the face of citizens who are a-lex? Each of us must be free to be fully ourselves, granted, but how should a society balance the freedom of the individual with the safety of the group? Burgess avoids this difficult question by having Alex suddenly discover the peaceable joys of family life. To a social problem Burgess gives only an unpredictable individual solution. What if Alex had decided to continue with his life of violence?

The American edition of A Clockwork Orange was originally published without the last chapter. This editorial cut, which Burgess opposed, does throw the construction of the novel off balance. Nonetheless,  Alex’s uncertain claim at the end of Chapter 20 that he is cured is, I think, an ending more consistent with the material that has come earlier. It is this truncated version that Stanley Kubrick used to make his celebrated movie. He too clearly preferred a conclusion that wasn’t so facilely optimistic.

What I’ve said so far may make you think that A Clockwork Orange is a blandly pious work, reducible to a few moral bromides. That’s not the case. Just as a hockey game can’t be reduced to its score, so a work of art can’t be reduced to a summary. What makes A Clockwork Orange incompressible is its language. Alex and his friends speak a most peculiar English. Here’s a sample, taken at random:

I did not quite kopat what he was getting at govoreeting about calculations, seeing that getting better from feeling bolnoy is like your own affair and nothing to do with calculations. He sat down, all nice and droogy, on the bed’s edge…

A mixture of English slang and words derived from Russian, delivered in cadences that sometimes sound Biblical, at other times Elizabethan, it is this language, Nadsat, that makes A Clockwork Orange an enduring work of literature. It is the juice in the orange. The context makes the meaning of most Nadsat words clear, and the occasional befuddlement is not unpleasant, but I include a Nadsat glossary for your reading convenience (App-Cra, Cre-Gra, Gra-Lom, Lov-Ooz, Ora-Raz, Roo-Snu, Sob-Yec, Zam-Zvo).

Canadians go to the polls tomorrow. I offer you A Clockwork Orange the day before for a good reason. There’s an element in the novel that is eerily familiar. The government under which Alex lives is democratically elected, yet it has recourse to policies that undermine the foundations of democracy. We have seen these kinds of policies for eight years now in the United States, a country morally bankrupted by its current president. You claim to have a solution for what to do with Alex. The experts disagree with you, as do the courts and the people; certainly the people in Quebec are resisting your ideas. But you think you know better.

Are you sure, Mr. Harper, that what you have up your sleeve aren’t so many Ludovico Methods?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Have you seen Kubrick’s classic adaptation? It’s one of those rare cases where the movie is as good as the book. I’ll try to find a DVD copy. When I do, I’ll send it along.

encl: one inscribed paperback and a Nadsat glossary

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Words take you places.
Best wishes,
Lloyd Jones
September 21
Brisbane, Australia

Sent to you by
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,

Campaigning must be gruelling, especially when you are head of a party. You work and travel constantly, you speak to people morning, noon and evening, you must always be on your guard, and all of it is very personal. The worst, I imagine, is the complete loss of privacy. Any time you might want for yourself must be sacrificed to the demands of public life.

An excellent way to climb back into yourself is to read a book. I suspect that reading is such a satisfying experience because it is at one and the same time a dialogue—between your mind and an external source of words—and an entirely private experience. When you are reading, your guard needn’t be up. You can be entirely yourself. Even better: you are totally free. You can read slowly or quickly, you can reread a section or skip it, why, you can even throw the book down and pick up another—it’s all up to you. The freedom goes even further: what you experience while reading is also entirely your own affair. You can let yourself be engrossed by what you are reading, or you can let your mind wander. You can be a receptive reader, or, if you want, an obstreperous one. The freedom, I repeat, is total. When else do we have such a feeling? Is it not the case that in most every other activity, personal or social, we are hemmed in by rules and regulations, by the intrusions and expectations of others?

Reading is one of the best ways to bring on that essential condition for the thinking person, one that I mentioned at the start of our exchange: stillness. All the noise and confusion of the outer world falls away, is blocked off, when one is reading and one becomes still. Which is to say, one enters into dialogue with oneself, asking questions, coming up with replies, feeling and assessing facts and emotions. That is why reading is so fortifying, because in setting us free it allows us to re-centre ourselves, it allows the mind’s eye to look at itself in a mirror and take stock.

What better book to bear witness to this process than Mister Pip, by the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones. Your mind will travel far with this novel. For starters, the story takes place on the Pacific island of Bougainville, part of Papua-New Guinea. But it also takes place, in a way, in Victorian England. There’s a quieting appeal right there, isn’t there? Who hasn’t dreamed of spending time on an island in the Pacific, surrounded by blue sea and tropical greenery? And who doesn’t like visiting Europe?

Mister Pip is a novel about a novel. The name Pip might be familiar to you. It’s the name of the main character in Great Expectations, the novel by Charles Dickens. This is no coincidence. Great Expectations is a character in Jones’s novel, one might say. It is certainly the catalyst to much of the action in it.

On Bougainville, a white man, Mr. Watts, lives in a village of black people who accept him because he is married to one of them, Grace, who has gone crazy, but of whom Mr. Watts takes loving care. A rebellion shuts down the local mine and results in the evacuation of all the whites who work there. Only Mr. Watts stays on. He and the villagers are cut off from the rest of the world by a blockade. Mr. Watts agrees to become the school teacher. But he knows precious little. Chemistry is just a word, and history little more than a list of famous names. One thing he does know and love, though, is Charles Dickens’s great novel. He reads it to the children. They are enchanted. They fall in love with Pip. But their parents and even more so the government troops that routinely descend upon the village to terrorize its inhabitants are suspicious of this Mr. Pip. Where is he hiding? Produce him or else, they warn.

Lloyd Jones’s novel is about how literature can create a new world. It is about how the world can be read like a novel, and a novel like the world. If that sounds twee, be warned that there is also shocking meanness and violence in Mister Pip.

Does the violence make the fable-like element pale in comparison? Does “reality” come through and displace the “fiction”? Not at all. You will see. The novel argues that the imagination, whether religious or artistic, is what makes the world bearable.

I am also sending you Great Expectations. It’s not necessary to have read it to understand Mister Pip, but it is such an enjoyable masterpiece that I thought I’d throw it in as an extra pleasure.

I had the pleasure of meeting Lloyd Jones just last week at the Brisbane Literary Festival. He kindly agreed to autograph your copy of his novel.

May you enjoy both Mister Pip and Great Expectations. Better still: may they bring you stillness.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: two inscribed paperbacks

Reply:

Pending…

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Ayn Rand wanted us to be selfish,
but democracy asks us to be generous.
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

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

Dear Mr. Harper,

You’ve called an election. Appropriate then to send you Ayn (rhymes with Pine) Rand, whose books are highly political. It’s very easy to dislike Ayn Rand, not only the writer, but even the person behind the writing, and many readers and intellectuals do indeed dislike her, intensely. However, more than a quarter century after her death (she lived from 1905 to 1982), Ayn Rand still has her dogged followers, a cult nearly, and her books continue to sell in great numbers. There is clearly something both attractive and off-putting about her writing. Her brief novel Anthem, just 123 pages, is a useful work to discuss in the context of an election. You will see in what follows that I fall on the side of those who dislike Ayn Rand.

Anthem, first published in 1938, is a dystopia with a utopian heart, a portrayal of a future where everything has gone wrong but where the reader is shown how things can be made right. The novel starts well. The language is simple, the writing understated, the cadence engaging. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the main character, whose name is Equality 7-2521. (Ayn Rand gives her characters names that clearly indicate the notions, the ideals, she wishes to debunk.) Equality 7-2521 does not live in good times. He has no significant freedoms. He has chosen neither where to live nor what to do for a living. He has no family and no real friends. In that, he is like every other man he knows, living a life of rigid conformity that is socially useful but grinding. The reader accepts this premise willingly because of a clever and effective linguistic device on Ayn Rand’s part: the complete absence of singular personal pronouns. Equality 7-2521 does not speak as an “I”, nor is anything ever his with a “my” or a “mine”. Such individualistic concepts are banned from his society and he is a “we”, as is everyone else, and all are at the service of the collectivity. As Equality 7-2521 says:

We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike. Over the portals of the Palace of the World Council, there are words cut in the marble, which we repeat to ourselves whenever we are tempted:

“We are one in all and all in one.
There are no men but only the great WE,
One, indivisible and forever.”

Union 5-3992 and International 4-8818, fellow street sweepers, manage to endure such conformity, but:

There are Fraternity 2-5503, a quiet boy with wise, kind eyes, who cry suddenly, without reason, in the midst of day or night, and their body shakes with sobs they cannot explain. There are Solidarity 9-6347, who are a bright youth, without fear in the day; but they scream in their sleep, and they scream: “Help us! Help us! Help us!” into the night, in a voice which chills our bones…

As for Fraternity 9-3452, Democracy 4-6998, Unanimity 7-3304, International 1-5537, Solidarity 8-1164, Alliance 6-7349, Similarity 5-0306, and especially Collective 0-0009 (they are a nasty one), they are the oppressive system’s prime defenders, and they will collide with Equality 7-2521, who is pushed irresistibly to think on his own and pursue his ideas, no matter where they lead him.

There are women. They live separately. Only once a year, for a single night during the “Time of Mating”, do men and women come together, in pairs matched by the “Council of Eugenics”. It is not then, but earlier, on the City’s limits one work day, that Equality 7-2521 meets Liberty 5-3000. He falls in love with her, committing “the great Transgression of Preference”. He calls her—they call them—”The Golden One”.

This love of his, combined with his independent thinking, eventually forces Equality 7-2521 to flee the City for the Uncharted Forest. The Golden One joins him there. Far from dying in the forest, as he had expected, they find pastoral relief from the oppression of their urban lives. Better yet, they come upon an abandoned house in mountains beyond the forest and they find happiness. They find it because of books left in that house, relics from the ancient times before the “Great Rebirth”. Equality 7-2521 begins to read and he comes upon a word, a concept, a philosophy, that gives expression to all the confused mental yearning he has been going through, the word “I”.

That discovery—it is revealed on page 108 in the edition I am sending you, fifteen pages before the end of the book, the very beginning of chapter 11, starting with the words “I am. I think. I will.”—is where Anthem goes to pot. The point of Ayn Rand’s fiction, as I’m sure you will have seized, is a critique of collectivism, typified at its most terrible by the horrors of communism under Stalin in Russia, the country of Rand’s birth (she became an American citizen in 1931). And there, the reader, certainly this reader, is with her. Bloodthirsty dictatorships are repulsive to every sane human being. But Ayn Rand makes two mistakes in her allegory of life in the Soviet Union. First, she sees only the worst in collectivism, throwing out wholesale the good with the bad. To her, the Gulag and socialized healthcare, for example, were instances of one and the same evil. Second, in rejecting Stalin and his damnable system, she goes to an absurd opposite libertarian extreme. Rand posited that humanity would be happiest if we lived as autarkic individuals, beholden to no one, unbounded, unfettered, free, free, free. The virtue of selfishness, that’s what Ayn Rand is all about. It’s even the title of one of her books. No wonder Rand appeals mostly to two disparate groups of readers: adolescents in the throes of carving out their individuality, and right-wing American capitalists bent on making and keeping too much money.

Back to the novel. Equality 7-2521, on page 108, has bust free thanks to the word “I”. What follows is an orgy of I-ism, of me, me, me, mine, mine, mine:

My hands…My spirit…My sky…My forest…This earth of mine…

You know you’re in trouble when someone claims to own the sky. As much as Equality 7-2521 was appealing when he was oppressed, once he is free he becomes annoying, pretentious, repelling. While his strange speech in the City—we this, we that—came off as noble and incantatory, his free speech in the mountains is dull and pompous. The struggling hero whom we cheered on has become just another self-righteous, domineering male who thinks he knows everything. We sympathized with his plight, but now we shudder at his solution:

I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. … Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me. … I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. … And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

This god, this one word:

“I.”

You are a religious man, Mr. Harper. You will know that the essence of every religion, of every god, is precisely the opposite of what Ayn Rand is speechifying about: God is about the abandonment of the self, not its exaltation. But that is an aside, a minor point. The main problem with Rand’s libertarianism, this über-Nietzschean cult of the heroic individual standing on a mountaintop, is that it makes not only society unworkable, but even simple relations. An example jumps out in Rand’s own novel. Equality 7-2521, now drunk with his own uniqueness, has naturally tired of his name. He says to the Golden One:

“I have read of a man who lived many thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books, his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and he brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name was Prometheus.”

Prometheus, the nice guy formerly known as Equality 7-2521, goes on:

“And I have read of a goddess who was the mother of the earth and of all the gods. Her name was Gaea. Let this be your name, my Golden One, for you are to be the mother of a new kind of gods.”

What if Golden One rather fancied herself as a Lynette or a Bobbie-Jean? Who is this Prometheus to tell her what her name should be? And what if she doesn’t want to be the mother of a screaming gaggle of kids? What if one child will do, and a girl if possible, thank you very much?

But, headstrong as Liberty 5-3000 seemed to be in the City, as Gaea she is passive and submissive, doing as she is told, because nothing and no one should get in the way of Ayn Rand’s romantic Superman, especially not his woman.

And what does Prometheus intend to do with his newfound freedom? He’ll raid the City for “chosen friends” and conquer the world!

Here, on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build our new land and our fort. … And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.

Well, what does he want, does he want to be free and unfettered or a bustling capital?

The novel ends, with trumpeting triumphalism, as follows:

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. … The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.

The sacred word:

EGO

Just the kind of neighbour we all want, the loud, overbearing oaf with the poor, mousy wife who has the word EGO carved over his door.

That is the paradox and failure of Ayn Rand’s vision. Her response to the excesses of collectivism is an excessive and simplistic egoism. The more realistic challenge in life is to be oneself amidst others, to heed one’s own needs and at the same time satisfy the demands of one’s community. It is not easy. Life, and not only politics, is the art of compromise.

That push and pull between the needs of the individual and the needs of the collectivity is at the heart of an election. If every voter votes strictly according to self-interest, then the collectivity, the nation, will be riven by discord and divisions and will risk falling apart. But if the collective We is overfed, then its constituent elements are starved. Every politician, and you first and foremost, Mr. Harper, must balance personal interest with what is good for the nation. If you divide and conquer too much, if you heed too little, then the country will suffer, as will your reputation in history. Enlightened statesmanship is required by all, both voters and politicians. But that’s a risky sell, isn’t it, trying to peddle a better future to voters worried about their immediate present? The best is demanded of all of us. I can only hope we will get it.

Since we have an election on our hands, let me make my personal appeal. Don’t worry, it won’t cost anything. I won’t bay about arts funding or the centrality of art in our lives or even, more cravenly, about the profitability of the arts industry in Canada (what was the sum I read recently, $47 billion in 2007 alone, more than the profits from the mining industry? Not that I buy that argument. The essential is inherently profitable, existentially. The individual who is artless is poor, no matter how much money he or she may have). No, I only want to give you for free an idea, the following:

What if a reading list were established for prospective prime ministers of Canada, to ensure that they have sufficient imaginative depth to be at the helm of our country? After all, we expect a prime minister to have a fair knowledge of the history and geography of Canada, to know something about economics and public administration, about current events and foreign affairs, the financial assets of a prime minister are accountable to us, so why shouldn’t his or her imaginative assets also be accountable?

Because that has been the whole point of our literary duet, hasn’t it? If you haven’t read, now or earlier, any of the books I have suggested, or books like them, if you haven’t read The Death of Ivan Ilych or any other Russian novel, if you haven’t read Miss Julia or any other Scandinavian play, if you haven’t read Metamorphosis or any other German-language novel, if you haven’t read Waiting for Godot or To the Lighthouse or any other experimental play or novel, if you haven’t read Artists and Models or any other erotica, if you haven’t read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or The Educated Imagination or any other philosophical inquiry, if you haven’t read Under Milk Wood or any other poetic prose, if you haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God or Drown or any other American novel, if you haven’t read The Cellist of Sarajevo or The Island Means Minago or The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi or any other Canadian novel, poem or play—then what is your mind made of? What materials went into the building of the dreams you have for our country? What is the colour, the pattern, the rhyme and reason of your imagination? These are not questions one is usually entitled to ask, but once someone has power over me, then, yes, I do have the right to probe your imagination, because your dreams may become my nightmares.

This Prime Minister’s Reading List could be administered by the Speaker of the House of Commons, an impartial figure, perhaps benefiting from recommendations not only from Members of Parliament but from all Canadian citizens. It would be a hard list to set up, that’s for sure. How to represent concisely all that the written word has done, here and abroad, in English and French and other languages? The Prime Minister’s Reading List couldn’t be too long; we wouldn’t want you sitting around reading novels your whole mandate. And it would be subject to regular updates, of course, to reflect changing times and tastes. How to implement the list would be another challenge. Would it be a yearly reading list, or just one at the beginning of each term? And how to check that you’ve actually read the books and not had an assistant summarize them for you? Would you have to write an exam, pen an essay, face a committee, answer questions during a Question Period exclusively devoted to the matter?

“I have no time for this nonsense,” you might feel like shouting. But as I said to you in my very first letter, there is a space next to every bed where a book can be lying in wait. And I ask you again: what is your mind made of?

So, would that be an idea, to set up a Prime Minister’s Reading List? What is your position on this vital issue?

I await your answer.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A cookbook of sorts,
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,

So, more cuts in arts funding. In my last letter I mentioned only the PromArt program, not having got wind yet of the other cuts. Nearly $45 million in all. That will bite, that will hurt, that will kill. With less art in the future, I wonder what you think there will be more of? What does $45 million buy that has more worth than a people’s cultural expression, than a people’s sense of who they are?

This calls for a special book. How we administer ourselves—the people we elect, the laws they enact—finds itself reflected in art. Politics is also culture. A Modest Proposal, by the Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), is a good example of an artistic reflection upon politics. It is a piece of satire, admirable for its humorous ferocity and brevity. At a mere eight pages, it is the shortest work I’ve ever sent you.

The key paragraph, enunciating Swift’s suggested solution to Ireland’s poverty, the modest proposal in question, goes like this:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout. 

The question is simple and pertinent, Mr. Harper: are you preparing a ragout?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

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,

The work now in your hands is the quintessential used book. The cover looks old, both in style and in condition. A number, a price, has been written directly on the cover: 4.50. Someone put a line of tape along the spine to keep the cover from falling off. There’s the dash of a black marker along the bottom of the book, the telltale sign of a used book. The pages inside are yellowed with age along their outside edges. You’ll notice a further yellow mark along the left side of the first pages; it looks like the book was accidentally soaked once and a watermark has remained. The book unmistakably shows its venerable age. The edition now yours, a first paperback printing, was published forty-one years ago, in 1967. I was four years old, you were nine. Not bad for an assemblage of flimsy elements: cheap paper and thin cardboard.

The book has lasted this long for two reasons: it is good, and so it has been treated well. Inexpensive in price, it has glowed with value in the eyes of all who owned it, and so they handled it with care. As I mentioned to you in an earlier letter, the used book is economically odd: despite age and lack of rarity, it does not depreciate with age. In fact, it is the contrary: if you take good care of this book, in a few years, because it is a first paperback printing, it will go up in value.

That undiminishing richness is of course due to a paperback’s inner wealth, all those little black markings. They inhabit a book the way a soul inhabits a body. Books, like people, can’t be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.

That cultural glory, the used paperback, is perfectly represented here by Flannery O’Connor. Neither new nor aged, but rather enduring, she is the typical glittering treasure to be found in a used bookstore. Imagine: for $4.50 I got you her collection of short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge. The discrepancy between price and value is laughably out of whack. What it really says is this: The object you are now holding is of such worth that to give it any price is ridiculous, so here, to emphasize the nonsense of the notion, we’ll charge you $4.50.

Flannery O’Connor was American. She was born in 1925 in Georgia and she died there in 1964 of lupus. She was only thirty-nine years old. She was religious, devoutly Catholic to be exact, but her faith was not a set of blinkers. Rather, it charged the world with God’s grace and made apparent to her the gap between the sacred and the human. By my reckoning, what O’Connor wrote about, over and over, was the Fall. Her stories are about the ruination of Paradise, about the cost of listening to snakes and reaching for apples. They are moral stories, but there’s nothing pat about them. By virtue of good writing, fine dark humour, rich characterization and compelling narrative, they sift through life without reducing it.

And so their effect. Each story feels, has the weight, of a small novel. And with no dull literariness, I assure you. You’ll see for yourself. Start on any one of them and a character will quickly reach out from the page, grab you by the arm and pull you along. These stories are engrossing. After each, you will feel that you have lived longer, that you have a greater experience of life, that you are wiser. They are dark stories. In every one, either a son hates his mother or a mother despairs over her useless sons, or it might be a grandfather or a father who is despairing. And the end result, besides highly entertaining, is invariably tragic. Hence the wisdom given off. It’s nearly a mathematical equation: reader + story of folly = wiser reader.

I especially recommend to you the stories “Greenleaf”, “A View of the Woods” and “The Lame Shall Enter First”.

I have another matter I would like to raise with you. The cancellation of PromArt was recently announced. The program, administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs, helps cover some of the travel costs of Canadian artists and cultural groups going abroad to promote their work. The grants to individuals are small, often between $750 and $1500 dollars. The budget of the entire program is only $4.7 million. That’s about 14 cents a year per Canadian. For that small sum, Canada shows its best, most enduring quality to the nations of the earth. To remind you of what I’m sure you already know, a country cannot be reduced to the corporations it happens to shelter. Businesses come and go, following their own commercial logic. No one feels deep, patriotic feelings for a corporation, certainly not its shareholders. They will vote where the money leads them. So while Canadians can feel proud about such global players as Bombardier and Alcan and hosts of others, we should not pin our identity to them. Canada is a people, not a business. We shine because of our cultural achievements, not our mercantile wealth. So to cut an international arts promotion program is to vow our country to cultural anonymity. It means foreigners will have no impressions of Canada, and so no affection.

The PromArt program is a vital part of our foreign policy. I ask you to reconsider the decision to shut it down. The value-added worth of this modest program is akin to, well, the value-added worth of a paperback.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback.

Reply:

Pending…

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,

Your latest book will be late this week. I’m sorry about that. The delay is not due to the long weekend. Like most self-employed workers, I’m willing to work on weekends and during holidays because if I don’t do the job, no one will do it for me. The problem lies elsewhere. The book that accompanies this letter, Under Milk Wood, by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), is such a lyrical work that it demands not only to be read but to be heard. So I thought I’d send you an audio version in addition to the text. There is a famous performance recorded in New York with Dylan Thomas himself reading several of the parts, done hardly two months before his death, and my family owns an LP of that recording, but I’m not willing to part with it, and even if I were, I doubt you have a record player at hand. The more recent performance that I’ve found for you, on CD, is a BBC production and it’s been slow to arrive in the mail. Hence the delay.

A word about audiobooks. Have you ever listened to one? I went on a road trip to the Yukon a few years ago and brought some along to give them a try. I thought I’d dislike having a voice insistently whispering me a story while Canada’s majestic northern landscape surged before my eyes. A three-minute pop song I can handle—but a twelve-hour story? I thought it would drive me crazy. I was wrong. Be forewarned: audiobooks are totally addictive. The origin of language is oral, not written. We spoke before we wrote, as children but also as a species. It’s in being spoken that words achieve their full power. If the written word is the recipe, then the spoken word is the dish prepared, the voice adding tone, accent, emphasis, emotion. As I’m sure you will agree, the quality of oratory in Canadian and American public life has deteriorated in the last few years. Barack Obama is where he is, on the cusp of the US presidency, in part, I believe, because of his skill in making his words lofty, inspirational and convincing. His ability is unusual. Most public speakers nowadays are plodding. Actors are the great exception. Their public speaking is superb because it is the very basis of their trade. And it’s actors who read the stories on audiobooks. The combination of a writer’s carefully chosen words and an actor’s carefully calibrated delivery makes for a package that is spellbinding. Time and again on my trip to the Yukon I wouldn’t get out of the car until a chapter had ended. And then the next morning I couldn’t wait to get on with the next. As soon as one story was done, I hastened to start another. Every time I go on a car trip now, I stop by the public library to pick up a selection of audiobooks.

There’s talk of an election this fall. That means a lot of travelling for you. I suggest you pack a few audiobooks for those long bus and airplane trips you will have to endure. My only advice is to avoid abridged versions. Otherwise, select as you please. Murder mysteries are particularly effective—as is poetry.

Which brings us back to Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas is no doubt one of the world’s most famous poets. He had a rare quality among modern bards: a persona. His aura as a hard-drinking, hard living writer—one who died young, to boot; always a boon to one’s immortality—has helped his poetry, which is of genuine quality, achieve a cult status. His poems are endlessly anthologized. You’ve no doubt heard of “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”.

Under Milk Wood is a radio play. That might make you think it’s a tight, fast-paced affair in which a few distinctive voices are aided by clear sound effects. Not at all. There’s no plot to speak of, just a day in the life of a Welsh village named Llareggub. Read that name backwards and you’ll get an idea of what Dylan Thomas thought there was to do in Welsh villages. But life is still good, and that’s what Under Milk Wood is at heart, a celebration of life. With an astounding sixty-nine different voices, it’s symphonic in effect. What carries the whole piece, its melody so to speak, is Dylan Thomas’s gift for language. His words describe, imitate, bubble, scintillate, run, stop, amuse, surprise, enchant. This is verbal beauty at its purest.

Beauty—the word is much bandied about. But like many words that we use all the time—good, fair, just, for example—if we look a little closer, we find that behind the cliché lies a philosophical odyssey that goes as far back as human thinking. Clearly, beauty moves us, motivates us, shames us, shapes us. I won’t in this letter even try to define what beauty is. Best to leave you to think on it, or to look it up. If you are serious in your curiosity, you’ll find yourself following a strand of Western philosophy that goes as far back as Pythagoras (who associated beauty with symmetry), and of course all of visual art concerns itself in one way or another with beauty. There’s much there for the mind that wants to study, a lifetime’s worth of material.

I’ll limit myself to a much narrower focus, and that is the question of beauty and the prose writer. A writer has many tools to tell a story: characterization, plot and description are some of the obvious ones. Tell a gripping story with full-blooded characters in a convincing setting and you’ve told a good story. Depending on the writer, one element may prevail more than another. So John Grisham or Stephen King will have much plot to show, with some description, but the characters may be there mainly to serve a narrative purpose. A writer like John Banville, on the other hand (do you know him? Irish, an extraordinary stylist), will tend to be less driven by plot, but will have characters and descriptions that are startling in their richness. And so on. Every writer, depending on his or her strengths and interests, will bring some different ratio of ingredients to the making up of a story.

One notion that is constant in all writers, though, is that of beauty. Every writer, in some way, aspires to literary beauty. That might mean a beautiful plot device, elegant in its simplicity. Or it might mean an ability to paint with words, to create such vivid portraits of people or settings that readers feel that they are “seeing” what the writer is describing. More commonly, the writer of serious ambition aspires to beautiful writing; that is, to writing that by dint of apt vocabulary, happy syntax and pleasing cadence will make the reader marvel. I promise you, if one day you are glad-handing and you end up shaking the hand of a writer and you’re at a lost for words, if you say, “You’re a beautiful writer”, you will please that writer. They will know exactly what you mean, that you’re not talking about their shoes or their tie or their complexion, but that you’re talking about how they lay their words on the page, and they will glow, they will beam, they will nearly wilt under your praise.

But—there’s always a but—one has to be careful about beauty. In all walks of life. In our overly visual society, we tend to be too easily won over by beauty, whether it be in a person, in a product or even in a book. A beautifully written book, like a beautiful person, may not have much to say. The beauty of substance often loses out to the beauty of appearance. A good writer knows that beautiful writing can’t substitute for having something to say. The best beauty is that in which beauty of form is held up by beauty of content.

Beauty, in another words, can be a mask hiding a vacuum, hiding falsehood, even hiding ugliness.

No danger here, with Under Milk Wood. The lyricism of the language rests solidly on Dylan Thomas’s gut knowledge that life is good, however bad it may be at times. It is said that Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood in reaction to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I doubt that’s factually true. It sounds too conveniently perfect. But opposing a radiant symphonic poem against the darkness of a mass killing of civilians does hark to a spiritual truth: that beauty can be a road back to goodness.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one paperback and one audio CD, both inscribed.

Reply:

Pending…

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,

Oh, the mess that the heart wreaks. The pity of it all when so much was possible. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye is unbelievably short—a mere 160 pages—considering all that it carries of pain, sadness, anger, cruelty, dashed hopes, of descriptions, characters, events, of all that makes a novel great. Once again, like many of the books I have sent you, you might be inclined to think at first, “This story won’t speak to me.” After all, a story set in Lorain, Ohio in the early 1940s, mostly told from the point of view of children; a cast of characters who are poor and whose blackness makes them not just a skin colour removed from you and me but a world removed; a perspective that is innately feminist—there is much in this story that starts where you and I have never been.

And yet it will speak to you. Read, read beyond the first few pages, plunge into the story the way you might dive into a chilly lake—and you will find that it’s warmer than you expected, that in fact you’re quite comfortable in its waters. You will find that the characters—Claudia, Frieda, Pecola—are not so unfamiliar, because you were once a child yourself, and you will find that the cruelty, the racism, the inequality are not so alien either, because we’ve all experienced the nastiness of the human heart, either in being the one lashed or the one lashing out.

The making of art, as I may have mentioned to you before, involves a lot of work. Because of that, it is implicitly constructive. One doesn’t work so hard merely to destroy. One rather hopes to build. No matter how much cruelty and sadness a story may hold, its effect is always the opposite. So a glad tale is taken gladly, and a cruel tale is taken ironically, with feelings of pity and terror, pushing one to reject cruelty. Art then is implicitly liberal; it encourages us towards openness and generosity, it seeks to unlock doors. I suspect this will be the effect of The Bluest Eye on you, with its many lives blighted by poverty, stiffled by racism, dashed by random cruelty. You will feel more keenly the suffering of others, no matter how different you thought they were from you at first.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This armchair trip to the Islamic Republic of Iran,
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,

In the mid-1990s, I travelled to Iran with a young woman. In the two months we were there, we met maybe twenty Western travellers, all of them with transit visas and all speedily making their way along the central corridor that passes through Iran from the border of Turkey to the border of Pakistan. We were specifically interested in Iran, not in getting from Europe to Asia, so we had managed to get tourist visas. We wandered all over the country, visiting not only Teheran, Esfahan and Shiraz, cities you will have heard of, but others, too: Tabriz, Rasht, Mashhad, Gorgan, Yazd, Kerman, Bandar Abbas, Bam, Ahvaz, Khorramabad, Sanandaj. (Sorry for the long list of names; they may mean nothing to you, but each one opens up a volume of memories in me.) We also visited Zoroastrian fire temples in the desert. We climbed an ancient ziggurat. We took ferries to islands. We rested in oases.

I’ve often found that, excluding war zones, a foreign place is never so dangerous as when you are far away from it. The closer you get to it, the more the distortions caused by fear and misunderstanding dissipate, so that, to take the case at hand, the image we had of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that terrifying place that brought the world full-on religious fanaticism, with oppressed women going about dressed from head to toe in black and people flagellating themselves in public and fountains spewing blood-red water, disappeared once we entered the country and was replaced by this or that friendly individual standing in front of us, eyeing us with curiosity, wanting to be kind but uncertain of his or her English.

If Iran was challenging, it was in the way it challenged our expectations. For example, in all our time there, talking freely to men and women of all social classes, from the rural poor to the urban middle class, from the devout to the secular, we never met, not once, a person who complained about living in an Islamic republic. A government has to be a mirror into which its people can look and recognize themselves. Well, the Iranians we met recognized themselves in their Islamic democracy. The only complaint we heard, and often, was about the state of the economy. Iranians complained about lacking money, not lacking freedom.

There wasn’t much to do in Iran in the way of leisure then. It was, by Western standards, and probably still is, an arid society, with little space or money given over to cinemas, concert halls, sports complexes and the like. And there were no bars or discos, of course. Iran was a sober place, both literally and metaphorically. So Iranians did the only thing they could easily: they socialized. As a result, they are a people with the most graceful and sophisticated social skills I’ve ever seen, a people who, when they meet you, really meet you, turning their full attention to you. The Iranians we met were open, curious, generous, extraordinarily hospitable and endlessly chatty.

And the horrors of fundamentalism? The people who brought us Salman Rushdie’s fatwa? The oppression of women? That’s all true, too. But what place is above censure? People in Iran are like people anywhere: they want to be happy and live in peace, with a modicum of material well-being. The rules of their society, their values—the means by which they hope to become happy—are different from Canada’s, but what of that? They have their problems, we have ours. Let them muddle through theirs, as we hope to muddle through ours. Progress can’t be jump-started; it must arise organically from within a society, it cannot be imposed from without.

Such eye-opening travel as I had the luck of doing isn’t a possibility for everyone. Work, family and inclination may prevent one from ever visiting this or that foreign place. Which is where books come in. The armchair traveller can be as well-informed as the backpacker roughing it, so long as he or she reads the right books. Travel, whether directly with one’s feet or vicariously through a book, humanizes a place. A people emerge in their individual particularity, miles away from caricature or calumny.

And so Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. It’s a graphic novel, the second I’ve sent you after Maus, by Art Spiegelman. It’s charming, witty, sad and illuminating. The point of view is that of a ten-year-old girl named Marjane. She’s like all ten-year-olds the world over, living in her own half-imaginary universe—only it’s 1979 and she lives in Iran. A revolution is afoot, one that will be welcomed at first by her middle-class family because it will bring down the odiously corrupt and brutal regime of the Shah, but later will be hated because of the excesses that followed. It’s a story that has the ring of truth to it because it’s the story of an individual telling it as she saw it.

I invite you to read Persepolis and get a hint of the Iran I visited some years ago. If you enjoy it, you should know that there’s a Persepolis 2, which continues Marjane’s story, and there’s also a movie.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

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,

So far, if there is one thing that your administration has done that will stand the test of time, it is the formal apology to the victims of the Canadian Government’s Native residential school system. Policies come and go, are changed and forgotten, but an apology stands. An apology changes the course of history. It is the first step in true healing and reconciliation. I congratulate you on this important symbolic gesture.

Since your mind was recently on Canada’s original inhabitants—and since National Aboriginal Day was just two days ago—it’s appropriate that I should send you Tomson Highway’s play The Rez Sisters. It too is of historical importance. Of the author, there’s an unusually long bio at the start of the book, a full four pages, so you can read there about the life of Tomson Highway, at least until 1988, when the play was published.

What is not mentioned in the bio is the synergy that developed in the Aboriginal cultural world in Toronto in the mid-1980s. Suddenly then—the time was right—some Natives came together and did what they had hardly done until then: they spoke. The production company Native Earth Performing Arts was founded in 1982 to give voice to Aboriginal theatre, dance and music. Before that, with the exception of Inuit prints and sculptures and Maria Campbell’s memoir Half-Breed, the Canadian cultural scene was practically bare of Native expression. That would change with Native Earth. Along with Tomson Highway, the company fostered the careers of such writers as Daniel David Moses and Drew Hayden Taylor.

When The Rez Sisters opened in November 1986, the cast had to go out into the streets and beg passers-by to come in and see the play. Well, those first people liked what they saw and word-of-mouth did the rest. The Rez Sisters became a hit. It drew large audiences, toured the country, was produced at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival.

Like your last book, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the force of The Rez Sisters lies with its characters. Seven women—Pelajia Patchnose, Philomena Moosetail, Marie-Adele Starblanket, Annie Cook, Emily Dictionary, Veronique St. Pierre and Zhaboonigan Peterson—live on the Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve, on Manitoulin Island. Life there is as life is everywhere, with its ups and downs. But then comes momentous news: THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD is being organized in Toronto. And do you know what kind of a jackpot THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD would have? Something BIG. The dreams that winning that jackpot might fulfil is at the heart of the play. It’s a comedy, the kind that makes you laugh while also delivering a fair load of sadness. Stereotypes are set up and then mocked, but it’s not an overtly political play, hence its universal resonance. We may not be Native women on a reserve, we may not be bingo aficionados, but we all have dreams and worries.

There is a last character in the play who must be mentioned. Nanabush, in his various incarnations, is as important in Native mythology as Christ is in the Christian world. But there’s a playful element to Nanabush that is absent in our portrayal of Christ. In The Rez Sisters, he appears in the guise of a seagull or a nighthawk. He dances and prances and pesters. Marie-Adele, who has cancer, and Zhaboonigan, who was brutally raped, are the only ones who explicitly interact with him. He is the angel of death, but also the spirit of life. He hovers over much of the play.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
An incandescent novel,
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,

Some voices are barely heard. They are left to speak among themselves, worlds within worlds. Then someone listens, gives them artistic expression, and now the loss is lesser, because those voices have become eternal. Such is the achievement of the American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) with her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God. You will notice the language right away. There are two voices in the novel. One is the narrative voice that frames the story. It is lyrical, metaphor-laden and formal. Take the first two paragraphs of the novel:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

The other voice is that of the characters, and it’s something else. They speak in the African-American vernacular, and you’ll hardly believe that English can do such things. A random example:

“Well, all right, Tea Cake, Ah wants tuh go wid you real bad, but,—oh, Tea Cake, don’t make no false pretense wid me!”
“Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah’m lyin’. Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom.”

It’s not cute, it’s not folkloric, it’s not patronizing. The effect is rather of a renewal of language. You read—you hear—as if you were hearing for the first time. And what you will hear is the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman whose voyage of self-discovery, with its hard-earned lessons, is told through her three marriages.

The most significant element in the life of Zora Neale Hurston—even greater than that she was a woman—was that she was black. It is inconveivable that her writing—consisting of four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and more than fifty shorter pieces—would have been the same had she been white. She was black in a white society that for two hundred years had held blacks in slavery. She was black in a society that was, at best, racial in its thinking, and, at worst, racist. I imagine that every day of her life there was some glance, some exchange, some limitation that reminded Hurston of the colour of her skin and what that was held to mean

Now, it’s hard, when you are perpetually made aware of one single element of your identity, be it the colour of your skin, the shape of your body, your sexual orientation, your ethnic heritage, whatever, not to linger and dwell on that element, not to become twisted and bitter as a result. Yet the miracle of Hurston’s art is that it manages not to linger and dwell, not to be twisted and bitter. Their Eyes Were Watching God is not a diatribe about racist America, though examples of racism are easily found in it. It is instead an incandescent novel about a character whose full humanity and destiny is explored—and she happens to be black.

I suspect that if you read the first chapter of Their Eyes Were Watching God, you’ll read the other nineteen. You will read about Janie and Tea Cake, about love and muck, about happiness and disaster. And the worth of that—other than that you will have been entertained—is that for the duration of a story you will have entered the being of an African-American woman. You will have heard voices that you might otherwise never have heard.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. One of the joys of buying secondhand books is the unexpected treasures they sometimes contain. Case in point: a colour photo slipped out of your copy of Their Eyes when I opened it. A group shot. Nothing written on the back. Nine people camping: five women, three men, and one girl in a lifejacket. Though no doubt casually taken, note what an excellent photo it happens to be, how the way the people are arranged is aesthetically pleasing, the eye moving in an easy circle from the seated woman on the left to the girl on the right, how the group is slightly off-centre so that the feel of the shot is unstudied, how the peripheral elements are unobstrusive yet revealing. It struck me that the group is shaped in the form of an eye. We think we’re looking at them, but, in fact, they are an eye looking out at us, winking. Perhaps that’s why they’re smiling, amused at the trick they’re playing on us, the viewer being viewed. I wonder what the story of these people is. Clearly they’re a family. Was this their book? Who among them read it? What stories do they have, what voices?

encl: one inscribed paperback and one colour photo

Response:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Music, both beautiful and discordant,
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,

Tolstoy again. Sixty weeks back I sent you The Death of Ivan Ilych, if you remember. This week it’s The Kreutzer Sonata, published three years later, in 1889. A very different book. As much as Ilych is an artistic gem, the realism seemingly effortless, the characters fully incarnate yet universal, the emotions finely expressed, the lyricism simple and profound, the portrayal of life and its fleetingness dead on, so to speak—in sum, as much as Ilych is perfect, The Kreutzer Sonata is imperfect. For example, the setting—a long train ride in which two passengers converse—comes off poorly because nearly the entire novella is taken up by the endless discourse of the main character, Pozdnyshev. Our nameless narrator just sits there, stunned into listening and memorizing the 75-page tirade directed at him. It’s as clunky a device as one of Plato’s dialogues—without the wisdom, for the most part. The Kreutzer Sonata is a long rant about love, sex and marriage, with side swipes at doctors and children, leading up to a vivid portrayal of insane jealousy, all of it told by an unconvicted murderer. Imagine that, a man telling you on a train, “I killed my wife. Let me tell you about it, since we’ve got all night.” I guess I wouldn’t interrupt him, either.

Imperfect art, then. So why the interest? Because it’s still Tolstoy. Simple people lead simple lives. Complex people lead complex lives. The difference between the two has to do with one’s openness to life. Whether determined by misfortune—a congenital deficiency, a stunting upbringing, a lack of opportunity, a timid disposition—or determined by will— by the use and abuse of religion or ideology, for example—there are many ways in which life, one’s portion of it, can be regulated and made acceptably simple. Tolstoy was unregulated. He lived in a manner unbridled and unblinkered. He took it all in. He was supremely complex. And so there was much of life in his long life, life good and bad, wise and unwise, happy and unhappy. Thus the interest of his writings, because of their extraordinary existential breadth. If the earth could gather itself up, could bring together everything upon it, all men, women and children, every plant and animal, every mountain and valley, every plain and ocean, and twist itself into a fine point, and at that fine point grasp a pen, and with that pen begin to write, it would write like Tolstoy. Tolstoy, like Shakespeare, like Dante, like all great artists, is life itself speaking.

But whereas Ilych elicits consonance in the reader, The Kreutzer Sonata elicits dissonance. In it, love between men and women does not really exist but is merely a euphemism for lust. Marriage is covenanted prostitution, a cage in which lust unhappily fulfills itself. Men are depraved, women hate sex, children are a burden, doctors are a fraud. The only solution is complete sexual abstinence, and if that means the end of the human species, all the better. Because otherwise men and women will always be unhappy with each other, and some men may be driven to killing their wives. It’s a bleak, excessively scouring view of the relations between the sexes, a reflection of Tolstoy’s frustration at the social constrictions of his times, no doubt, but nonetheless going too far, wrong-headed, objectionable. And so its effect, the scandal upon its publication, and the reaction it has to this day. Tolstoy does indeed go too far in The Kreutzer Sonata, but in it are nonetheless expressed all the elements—the hypocrisy and the outrage, the guilt and the anger—that were at the core of that greatest revolution of the twentieth century: feminism.

As an aside, this second book by Tolstoy was a last-minute choice. There’s such a world of books out there to share with you that I thought one book per author as introduction was enough. After that, if you were interested, you could look up for yourself any given author’s other books.

Only I wanted a book this week that touched on music. (I’ve forgotten to explain the title of Tolstoy’s novella. Pozdnyshev’s wife is an amateur pianist. The couple meets an accomplished amateur violinist by the name of Trukhashevsky, a man. The wife and he become, in all innocence, friends because of their mutual fondness for music. They decide to play Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, for piano and violin, together. In the wings, her husband grows angrier.) Why a book on music? Because serious music, at least as represented by new and classical music, is fast disappearing from our Canadian lives. I have belatedly learned of the latest proof of this: the CBC Radio Orchestra is to be disbanded. Already our public radio’s fare of music has been paltrified. There was once, Mr. Harper, a show called Two New Hours on CBC, hosted by Larry Lake. It played Canadian new music. It’s last slot, surely the least desirable for any show, was on Sundays between 10 pm and midnight, too late for the early birds, too early for the night owls. Airing at that time, no surprise that few people managed to listen to it. When I did, though, I was grateful. New music is a strange offering. It is, as far as I can tell, music that has broken free. Free of rules, forms, traditions, expectations. Frontier music. New world music. Anarchy as music. Which might explain the screechy violins, the pianos gone crazy, the weird electronic stuff.

I have intense memories of listening to Two New Hours and doing nothing but that. Because really, it’s impossible to read while your radio is sounding like two tractors mating. I suppose I’m more jaded when it comes to writing—jaded, jealous, bored, whatever. But I listened to Two New Hours out of pure curiosity. And I was surprised, moved and proud that there were creators out there responding to our world in such fresh and serious ways. Because it was clear to me: this was serious stuff, strange as it sounded. This was music that, under whatever guise, was the voice of a single person trying to communicate with me. And I listened, thrilled at the newness of it. That is, I listened until the show was cancelled.

And now the CBC Radio Orchestra, the last radio orchestra in North America, is to be similarly cancelled. No more, “That was _____, played by the CBC Radio Orchstra, conducted by Mario Bernardi,” as I heard for years. Who will play us our Bach and Mozart now, our R. Murray Schafer and Christos Hatzis?

It amazes me that at a time when Canada is riding the commodities wave to unprecedented wealth, with most levels of government experiencing budgetary surpluses, that we are ridding ourselves of a piddly little orchestra. If this is how we are when in fortune, how will we be when in misfortune? How much culture exactly can we do without before we have become lifeless, corporate drones?

I believe that both in good and bad times we need beautiful music.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A bottle with ten genies in it,
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 book that accompanies this letter was heartily recommended to me by a bookseller. I’d never heard of it or of its author. I thought to myself, Well, why not? An obscure book that moved at least one reader. That makes it as valid as a book that moved a million. A little later, I mentioned my choice to a friend and she said, “Oh, he just won the Pulitzer Prize two days ago.”

So much for the obscurity of Junot Díaz. I’m sending you Drown, his first book, a collection of short stories. It came out in 1996. It took Díaz eleven years to write his second book, the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for which he won, just a month ago, the Pulitzer.

That’s one of the good things about literary prizes. They bring attention to books or authors that might otherwise be missed by readers. The life of the literary writer is mostly invisible, like the movement of lava under the surface of the earth. Poems, short stories and novels are published, they are reviewed here and there, sales are modest, the world forgets, the writer writes on. It sounds dull, it’s generally financially impoverishing, but hidden from view is the intoxication of being creative, the wrestling with words, the heaven of good writing days, the hell of bad ones, with at the end of it the sense that one has proven King Lear wrong, that something can come of nothing. A book is a bottle with a genie inside it. Rub it, open it, and the genie will come out to enchant you. Imagine being the one who put the genie in the bottle. Yes, it’s terribly exciting work.

However, the world is strewn with such bottles, and many don’t get much rubbing. Sometimes that’s right, sometimes it’s unfair. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the writer continues to labour.

Then, one day, you are told that five readers liked your book. And they’re the right readers, because they’re on the jury of a prize. In fact, they’ve decided to give you the prize. Suddenly the clouds of the book world part and you hear a booming voice say, “This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” You’re ceremoniously hauled out of obscurity. It’s not an unpleasant experience, far from it. I’m grateful for every nod I’ve ever received.

But if I won, doesn’t it mean that someone lost? That’s the less appealing part of it, the feeling that you’ve become a racehorse, that you are competing, that there are winners and losers. History may decree that it is so, but it’s not how it feels on the inside. On the inside, you’re alone in your shop with your bottle and your genie.

Back to Junot Díaz. Drown is a collection of ten short stories, ranging in length from six to thirty-nine pages. These are the first short stories I’ve sent you. You’ll find the experience quite different from reading novels. You’ll be changing gears more often, so to speak. Díaz is a Dominican-American and his stories cover what it means to have a hyphen in one’s identity, the potential for it to be a gulf, a dream, a strain, a loss. The English is peppered with Spanish, the tone is oral and informal, the characters profane and touching. It’s a world of kids left to themselves, where there’s no money and no father, no jobs and no prospects, only streets and harried mothers, drugs and fickle relations.

Now how will these stories expand your stillness, you might ask, the stillness with which life is properly examined? The answer might be found in the following quote from the story “Boyfriend”, about a couple breaking up. The man comes by a few times to pick his stuff up:

She let him fuck her every time, maybe hoping that it would make him stay but you know, once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving. I would listen to them going at it and I would be like, Damn, ain’t nothing more shabby than those farewell fucks.

The toughness is surface. Beneath it is hurt and questioning. People are people, just trying to get by and
make sense of things. No matter the language or the posing, the yearning for stillness is the same.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book from two pillars of society,
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 is an unusual book I am sending you, for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s fresh off the press. I bought it the day it was published. None of that pleasing, comforting wornness to it, like an old friend coming for a visit. Instead, a shiny, spine-cracking, new-smelling newness. And it’s a children’s book, not something I’d normally send to an adult.

What won me over to this book was its theme and the profession of its authors. Read All About It! is about the appeal and the importance of reading. Tyrone Brown, the protagonist, a student at Good Day Elementary School, is good at math, good at science, good at sports, but he doesn’t like reading. When Miss Libro brings the kids to the school library to read to them, Tyrone is soooooo bored. He’d rather daydream. But one day, when Miss Libro is reading from a book about an astronaut, he pays attention—and he’s taken in. Suddenly his world changes. It becomes populated by ghosts and dragons and historical figures like Benjamin Franklin (this is an American book) and, most endearingly, by a pig. Tyrone comes to realize that books are a fantastic way to dream. I won’t tell you the rest of the story. You’ll have to read all about it yourself.

The authors, Laura Bush and Jenna Bush, a mother-daughter team, are teachers and, according to their bios on the backflap, “passionate about reading”.

A word about teachers. I love teachers. I always have. If I were not a writer, I’d be a teacher. I cannot think of a more important profession. It has always struck me as odd that lawyers and doctors should have such high standing—reflected not only in their salaries but in their social prominence—when, in the course of a normal, happy, healthy life, one should only exceptionally have to consult either. But teachers—we’ve all met and needed teachers. Teachers shaped us. They came into our dark minds and lit a light. They taught us both explicitly and by example. To teach is a magnificent verb, a social verb, implying someone else, whereas the verbs to earn, to buy, to want are lonely and hollow.

I could name so many of the teachers who marked my life. In fact, I will. Miss Preston and Mrs. Robinson were two of my early homeroom teachers. Mr. Grant taught me biology. Mr. Harvey taught me Latin. Mr. McNamara and Sister Reid taught me mathematics. Mr. Lawson and Mr. Davidson taught me English. Mr. Van Husen and Mr. Archer taught me history. The amazing Mr. Saunders taught me geography. And so on. Three decades have gone by, and still I remember these people. Where would I be without them, what frustrated, angry soul would I be? There is only so much parents can do to form us. After that, our fate lies with teachers.

And when we are no longer full-time students, there are all the informal teachers we meet as adults, the men, women and children who know better and who show us how to do better, how to be better.

Pity, then, that we live in a society that so little values teachers and schools. We have, alas, Mr. Harper, fallen upon times in which the common thinking seems to be that societies should be run as if they were corporations, with profitability as the guiding imperative. In this corporatist view of society, those who do not generate dollars are deemed undesirable. So it is that rich societies become unkind to the poor. I see this mean attitude in my own beloved province of Saskatchewan, where the new government is waging, as I’ve heard it put, a “war on the poor”, and this, at a time of unprecedented prosperity. As if the poor will just disappear if ignored enough. As if there will be no broader consequence to the poor becoming poorer. As if the poor aren’t citizens too. As if some of the poor aren’t helpless children.

Well, in this race in which they are left behind, the poor are joined by students. Because investing in the education of a six-year-old, with a return that will be seen only in fifteen years or so, once that student has got a job and has started paying taxes, is not an investment worth making if one is looking to make quick money. And so we fund our schools minimally, burdening university students with levels of debt that neutralize their ability to be wealth-generating citizens. How can you buy a car, a house, appliances, how can you contribute to the economy, if you’re crushed by a massive debt? The corporatist agenda is thus defeated by its own ideology.

Teachers are at the forefront of resisting this negative trend. With whatever means they are given, until they burn out, as they too commonly do, they continue their effort to produce intelligent, knowledgeable, caring citizens. Teachers are pillars of society.

Most teachers are women, certainly at the elementary school level, just as most readers are women. Laura Bush and Jenna Bush, teachers and readers both, are in that way typical. One is left wondering: while wives and daughters are teaching and reading, what are husbands and fathers doing? In our society, does the left hand know what the right hand is doing?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed hard cover book

Reply:

Pending…

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,

Your classic this week is a somewhat harder read than most of the other books I have sent you. Many books are direct and frontal in their approach; immediately upon starting them, a reader senses what the author wants to talk about. To take an example from the books on your shelf, we are immediately familiar with the setting of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, even if we’ve never lived on a farm, and we see right away his allegorical intent. We appreciate that a real event, the tragedy of Soviet Russia under Stalin, is going to be examined by means of a fable set on an imaginary farm. Armed with that understanding, animated by certain expectations, we read on.

Books such as these, the majority of books I’d say, create a subtle interplay of familiarity and strangeness. The familiar brings the reader onboard, and then the strange takes that reader somewhere new. The two elements are necessary. A book that proves to be entirely familiar is boring. Even the most formulaic of genre fiction attempts to convey some feeling of uncertainty and then, only at the very end, reassures the reader that everything is as he or she would wish it to be, the boy getting the girl or the detective catching the murderer. Conversely, a book can’t be entirely strange, otherwise the reader would have no entry point, would flounder and give up.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, will have you floundering a bit. Please don’t give up. For me, it starts working, it takes you in, on about the twentieth page (that is, on page 29 of the edition I’m sending you). Before that, you’ll be puzzled, perhaps even vaguely annoyed. So many characters coming and going, no clear plot in sight, tangents and digressions aplenty—where is the clarity and pace of good old Victorian literature? What is Woolf up to?

Well, it’s anyone’s guess—good literature is forever open to interpretation—but by my reckoning Woolf is exploring at least two things here:

1) She is exploring the mind, how consciousness interacts with reality. Woolf’s experience of it, one that I’m sure will be familiar to you, is of intent buffeted by intrusion, like a salmon swimming upstream. Her characters think, but their thinking is constantly interrupted by events that are either external in their origin—other characters coming up—or internal, the mind distracting itself from its own thinking. I’m sure you’ve heard of the term “stream of consciousness”.  Woolf’s narrative technique is like that. What she is exploring in To the Lighthouse isn’t so much an ordered series of events—although those are present in the novel—as the mind filtering those events.

2) She is exploring time, the effect and experience of it, which explains why the novel is given its cadence not by the regular, objective tick-tock of a clock, but instead by the subjective reactions of the characters to time, which goes by slowly when the characters are engrossed, and then seems to leap forward years in a blink. Isn’t that how time is for all of us, both crawling and leaping, like a frog’s progress. Those two animal images might help you as you read the book. Try to recognize the salmon and the frog in To the Lighthouse.

Woolf’s prose is dense, detailed and repetitive, but in a mesmerizing way. Not surprisingly, another of Woolf’s novels is called The Waves. Her novel is like that, lulling and mysterious.

It’s always nice to know a little about the author of a book. Virginia Woolf was English. She was born in 1882 and she died in 1941 by suicide. She was mad at times and mad most of the time; that is, she was periodically plagued by mental illness and she was always angry at the limitations placed upon women. Virginia Woolf was a bold, experimental writer and a feminist figurehead of great importance.

One indication both of Woolf’s literary approach and of her character is her fondness for the semi-colon. The period is final and unsubtle, might be termed masculine. The comma, on the other hand, is feminine as some men might want women to be, indefinite and subservient. Woolf instead favours the punctuation mark that most resembles where she wanted to be as a writer and as a woman, a mark like a sluice gate, one that is more open than the period but more in control than the comma, a feminist punctuation mark. Woolf famously wrote an essay called A Room of One’s Own, in which she describes the difficulties of being a female writer in a field dominated by men. Well, her prose is like that, full of thoughts that are related but wouldn’t fit in the oppressive big room of a single sentence; they rather inhabit the many smaller rooms of a sentence punctuated by semi-colons.

I invite you to enter slowly, mindfully, taking your time, the many rooms of Virginia Woolf’s prose.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This collection of great poems to celebrate
the first anniversary of our book club,
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,

We are celebrating a birthday, you and I. The book that accompanies this letter is the twenty-sixth that you have received from me. Since I have been sending you these literary gifts every two weeks, that means that our cozy book group is celebrating its first anniversary. How have we done? It’s been a most interesting odyssey, taking more of my time than I expected, but the pleasure has kept me keen and motivated. The result, so far, is a folder with copies of twenty-six letters for me and a shelf with twenty-eight slim books for you (a discrepancy owing to the fact that I sent you three books for Christmas). If we look over your new, growing library, we see:

13 novels
3 collections of poetry
3 plays
4 books of non-fiction
4 children’s books, and
1 graphic novel,

written (or, in one case, edited) by:
1 Russian
5 Britons
7 Canadians (including 1 Québécois)
1 Indian
4 French
1 Colombian
2 Swedes
3 Americans
1 German
1 Czech
1 Italian, and
1 Irish,

of whom:
16 were men
9 were women, with
2 books authored by both sexes, and
1 book authored by writers of unknown sex (though my guess is that the Bhagavad Gita was written by men)

Too many novels, too many men, not enough poetry, why haven’t I sent you a Margaret Atwood or an Alice Munro yet—at the rate of a book every two weeks, it’s hard to be representative and impossible to please everyone. But we’re getting there. Glenn Gould once said, “The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.” There is time yet.

It seemed appropriate on this anniversary occasion to offer you a book entitled Birthday Letters. It has the celebratory word in the title, even if the tone of the book does not exactly evoke a cake with a small, lit candle on it.

The facts are as follows. In 1956, a twenty-six-year-old Englishman named X married a twenty-three-year-old American woman named Y. They had two children. Their relationship proved fraught with tensions, made worse by X’s affair with a woman named Z, and in 1962 X and Y separated. In 1963, Y, mentally unstable since her teenage years, committed suicide by gassing herself. Six years later, in 1969, Z, who by then had a child with X, a little girl nicknamed Shura, also killed herself, unpardonably taking Shura with her. Two last facts: first, by virtue of being still married to Y when she died, X became her testamentary executor, and, second, X was constant throughout his life in his infidelities.

The amount of pain contained within these anonymous facts—the torment, the heartache, the sorrow, the shame, the regret—is barely conceivable. What life would not be overwhelmed, utterly destroyed, by such pain? And would that pain not be made worse if it were displayed for the whole world to see and comment upon?

X was Ted Hughes, Y was Sylvia Plath and Z was Assia Wevill, and their collective pain, the terrible mess that was their lives, would have been lost and forgotten had not the first two been superb and well-known poets who gave expression to that pain. Further notoriety was added by the fact that sides could easily be taken with this tragedy. Why does tragedy so often make us take sides? I guess because strong emotions move us, and we move to one side or another, so to speak, as if fleeing a car that is out of control, and it takes the passage of time, the examination of memory, for us to look back with calm sorrow, standing steadily, no longer so inclined to move and take sides. At any rate, it doesn’t take a lawyer to detect conflict of interest in Hughes being the literary executor of Plath, her pained posthumous collections of poetry and her pained journals being edited by the very man who caused a good deal of her pain, some say editing her works with an eye to improving his reputation. That he furthermore destroyed the last volume of her journal, the one chronicling the last months of their relationship, only makes the charge against him more credible. And what to think of his incessant promiscuity? Who could imagine that shame and regret would so little curb libido?

Sides were taken, vociferously. Hughes was scorned and hated until his death by feminists and Plath-lovers, and I doubt the controversy of their relationship will ever slip from public interest. What stands in Hughes’s defence? That question has an easy answer. His poetry.

That the author of Birthday Letters might be portrayed as a callous philanderer, arrogant and remorseless, is irrelevant in the face of the magnificence of his poetry. It reminds one of the fact that great art is, in its essence, not moral but testimonial, bearing witness to life as it is honestly lived, in its glorious heights as well as in its turpitudinous depths.

Great poetry tends to shut up the novelist in me. It takes so many words to make a novel, reams and reams of sentences and paragraphs, and then I read a single great poem, not even two pages long, and all my prose feels like verbiage. You will see what I mean when you read these poems. They are narrative poems, the tone intimate, usually an “I” speaking to a “you”, the language quicksilver, extraordinarily concise, simple words arranged in an original and forceful way, and the result, poem after poem, is not only a clear image but an unforgettable impression. Take “Sam”, or “Your Paris”, or “You Hated Spain”, or “Chaucer”, or “Flounders”, or “The Literary Life”, or “The Badlands”, or “Epiphany”, or “The Table”. Or just this short one:

Caryatids (1)

What were those caryatids bearing?
It was the first poem of yours I had seen.
It was the only poem you ever wrote
That I disliked through the eyes of a stranger.
It seemed thin and brittle, the lines cold.
Like the theorem of a trap, a deadfall—set.
I saw that. And the trap unsprung, empty.
I felt no interest. No stirring
Of omen. In those days I coerced
Oracular assurance
In my favour out of every sign.
So missed everything
In the white, blindfolded, rigid faces
Of those women. I felt their frailty, yes:
Friable, burnt aluminum.
Fragile, like the mantle of a gas-lamp.
But made nothing
Of that massive, starless, mid-fall, falling
Heaven of granite
stopped, as if in a snapshot,
By their hair.

Ted Hughes was perhaps, if one is in the sanctimonious mood to judge, a bastard, but the bastard was also an amazing bard, his poetry dazzling. And the evidence from Birthday Letters is clear: X really did love Y, so if art can redeem, here is redemption.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This play to defeat silence,
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’s about time I sent you the work of a writer from English Canada’s twin solitude. It’s a play again, the second in a row, the third in all. And for the second time—Le Petit Prince was the first—I am sending you a book in French. Mind you, the French of Larry Tremblay’s The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is a bit peculiar. Not that it’s joual, or any other variation of Quebec French; that wouldn’t be peculiar, it would be expected from a Québécois play. Rather, if you glance at the text, you will think it’s just English, plain and simple. Well, it’s not. Tremblay’s play is a play written in French—that is, thought, felt, ordered, and expressed by a French mind—only using English words.

What’s the point of that? Is this a bit of stand-up comedy, some party trick drawn out into a play? It’s not. The cover of the book will tell you as much. Do you recognize the man on it? It’s Jean-Louis Millette, the great actor who died just a few years ago, far too soon. His arms are raised, his face expresses anguish, the background is black: this play is no joke, says the cover. The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is indeed a serious work of art, premiered and reprised by a master.

Is the point of writing a play that is French in its nature but English in its appearance political? The answer to that question might be yes, but a tenuous yes, in that any work of art can be taken to have political implications. In this case, to read the play politically I think diminishes its scope. Larry Tremblay’s play is both far too personal—it’s the monologue of a man opening up his heart about a private matter—and far too universal to be reduced to a political tract about the survival of the French language in Quebec.

I think Tremblay means to signal the political neutrality of his play when Gaston Talbot, the man who is opening up his heart, says of himself:

once upon a time a boy named Gaston Talbot
born in Chicoutimi
in the beautiful province of Quebec
in the great country of Canada
had a dream…

In describing both entities, and with adjectives of equal banality—if not cliché in the case of Quebec, officially “La Belle Province”—my guess is that Tremblay sought to place his play’s linguistic dualism beyond a merely political interpretation. The dream mentioned, by the way, is not a political dream, but a dream about Gaston Talbot’s mother, whose love he seeks.

So what has Gaston Talbot from Chicoutimi got to say, and why is he saying it in French rendered in English?

I would suggest that The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is a play about suffering and redemption, about what we have to do to get back to ourselves. Gaston Talbot is an adult French-speaking man struck with aphasia who, when we meet him, suddenly begins to speak again, only in English rather than in his native tongue. And what he recounts is how, long ago, he was a sixteen-year-old boy in love with a twelve-year-old boy by the name of Pierre Gagnon-Connally and how the two went by the river bank to play and Pierre asked Gaston to be his horse and Pierre

…catches me
with an invisible lasso
inserts in my mouth an invisible bit
and jumps on my back
he rides me guiding me with his hands on my hair
after a while he gets down from my back
looks at me as he never did before
then he starts to give me orders in English

I don’t know English
but on that hot sunny day of July
every word which comes
from the mouth of Pierre Gagnon-Connally
is clearly understandable

Get rid of your clothes
Yes sir
Faster faster

And then something happened, it’s not clear what, an accident, an inexplicable burst of violence, and Pierre Gagnon-Connally dies and Gaston Talbot falls into silence.

The play is a web of self-confessed lies and inventions. The first thing Gaston Talbot says is “I travel a lot.” Later, he admits that he hasn’t travelled anywhere. In recounting a dream, he first says that he had one face, a “Picasso face”, then admits that it was another face. Gaston Talbot holds these lies up like a shield, and with them he edges forward towards the truth. English words are thus just one more of these truth-revealing lies that allow him to address what pushed him into the worst abyss of all: silence.

As I did for the fourth book I sent you, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart, I would suggest that you read The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi aloud. Even better: that you read it silently a first time, as if you were Gaston Talbot before the start of the play, and then read it a second time aloud, as if you were Gaston Talbot gasping for expression.

The play of course raises the question of language and identity, of what it means to speak in one language rather than another. Languages obviously have cultural reference points, but these can change. Witness English, spoken, taken on fully, by so many people around the world who are not of English culture. But the play puts the question on a more personal level. Gaston Talbot manages to reach back into his painful past and say what he has to say thanks to a bilingual subterfuge. That is the startling and moving conclusion of the play: the sight of truth found through a mask.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A modernist masterpiece,
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,

Curiously, the book that I am sending you this early March, a play, only the second dramatic work I’ve sent you, is one that I don’t actually like. It has always irked me. Which is not to say that it is not a good play, indeed, a great play. In fact, that it continues to irk me confirms its greatness in a way, because if I said to you confidently, “This is a masterpiece,” that would imply I had a settled view of it, a fixed understanding, and that the play stood for me like a statue on a pedestal: lofty, staid and undisturbing. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is none of these.

To further confirm that I’m wrong in my view of Godot, I’ll say that despite being written in the late 1940s, the play will not feel dated when you read it. This is a significant achievement. Plays, to state the obvious, are made up of dialogue. There is no surrounding prose to supply context. You might think the setting of a play would be the equivalent of the description in a novel that sets up the story, but that is not the case. Many historical plays and operas are restaged in settings that their playwrights and composers would never have imagined, and no meaning is lost. Shakespeare’s Macbeth does not need a castle in the background to make sense to theatregoers. The meaning and development of a play is entirely carried on the shoulders of its dialogue. But the way we speak changes over time, and quickly words and expressions that were current to the playwright sound old-fashioned to us today.

Moreover, plays are exclusively concerned with relationships, with the feelings between characters, revealed in what they say to each other and how they behave, and some relationships have also changed over the course of history. Lastly, plays are precisely, literally situated, the actors wearing costumes and moving about settings that we actually see, as opposed to imagining them in prose. How these last two points make most plays a more perishable product than most prose will be made clear if you think back to old television shows. Do you remember the 1970s American television series Bewitched, Mr. Harper, about a witch named Samantha who lives in suburbia with her husband Darrin and their daughter Tabitha? I lapped it up when I was a kid. A few years ago I happened to see an episode again—and I was appalled. The sexism struck me as egregious, what with Darrin always trying to prevent Samantha from using her magic and Samantha, being the good, docile housewife, always trying to comply. And the way they dressed and their hairdos—that at least was innocently laughable. You get my point. What was fresh and funny then is now old and embarrassing. Women are now more free to use their magic, and we dress differently. By capturing so exactly a time, a place and a lingo, many plays are as fleeting as newspapers.

It is a mighty playwright who manages to speak to his or her time and also to ours. Shakespeare does it, toweringly. That a student doesn’t know what a “thane” is, that kings don’t rule in 2008 the way they ruled in 1608 in no way affects the power and meaning of the Scottish play today. Waiting for Godot has also managed to speak to all times, so far. Despite premiering in 1953, the antics, musings and worries of Vladimir and Estragon will likely strike you as funny, puzzling, insightful, maddening and still current.

The play is about the human condition, which in Beckett’s pared-down vision of it means that the play is mostly about nothing. Two men, the ones just mentioned, Didi and Gogo familiarly, wait around because they believe they have an appointment with a certain Godot. They wait around and talk and despair, are twice interrupted by two crazies by the name of Pozzo and Lucky, and then they go back to waiting around, talking and despairing. That’s pretty well it. No plot, no real development, no final point. The setting is also mostly nothing: just a single, solitary tree along an empty country road. The only props of note are boots, bowler hats and a rope.

Essentially, two hours of nothing that’s good and deep, pessimistic and funny. Beckett meant to strip away at the vanities of our existence and look at the elemental. Therein lies what makes Waiting for Godot both great and eye-rolling as far as I’m concerned. There is this line, for example, said by I can’t remember which character: “We give birth astride a grave.” I suppose that’s true. Death interrupting life, what value can life have? If we must eventually let go of everything, why take hold of anything to start with? This sort of pessimism is the burden of those who have witnessed terrible times (Beckett lived in France during the German occupation) and the delight of undergraduates in the throes of youthful angst. I realize that my life is no more durable than a leaf’s, but between when I’m fresh and gloriously atop a tree and when I’ll be yellow and raked away by Time, there are some good moments to be had.

Samuel Beckett was with the same woman, Suzanne Beckett, née Deschevaux-Dumesnil, for over fifty years. And he was apparently an avid fan and player of tennis. In these two attachments, I see a contradiction between what the man wrote and how he lived. If he had the joy and energy to whack a bouncy yellow ball over a net, if he had the joy and comfort of knowing that someone was there for him at the end of each day, what was he so desperate about? A wife and tennis—how much more did he expect from life? And this is aside from exploring the ideas of those who dismiss death as a mere threshold, just a gap you have to mind between the train of life and the platform of the eternal.

Still, I know Waiting for Godot is a great play. You’ll see that when you read it. It’s a masterpiece. It does what no play did before it.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Hot stuff,
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,

Valentine’s Day was just a few days ago and we’ve had a long cold snap here in Saskatchewan—two good reasons to send you something warming.

Anaïs Nin—such a lovely name—lived between 1903 and 1977 and she was the author of a number of novels that remain unknown to me: Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love and Solar Barque form a five-volume roman-fleuve entitled Cities of the Interior (1959). She also published the novels House of Incest (1936), The Seduction of the Minotaur (1961) and Collages (1964), and a collection of short stories, Under a Glass Bell. The only pleasure these have given me has been to wonder what they are about. What story would a novel called Solar Barque tell? What was the Albatross and who were her Children?

Nin is better known for her published diaries, which covered every decade of her life except the first (and she missed that one only by a year, since she started her diary when she was eleven years old). She was born in France, lived in the United States for many years, she was beautiful and cosmopolitan, and she came to know many interesting and famous people, the writer Henry Miller among them, all of whom she discussed and dissected in her diary. Her diary’s importance lies in the fact that female voices have often been silenced or ignored—still are—and an extended female monologue covering the first half of the twentieth century is rare.

And Anaïs Nin also wrote erotica. Hot stuff. Kinky stuff. Pages full of women who are wet not because it’s raining and men who are hard not because they’re cruel. Artists and Models, which contains two stories from her collections of erotic writings Delta of Venus and Little Birds, is the latest book I’m sending you. It may leave you cold, Mr. Harper, reading about Mafouka the hermaphrodite painter from Montparnasse and her lesbian roommates or about the sexual awakening of a painter’s model in New York, but it bears noting that while covering our loins and our hearts with clothes is often useful—it’s minus 23 degrees Celsius outside as I write these words—there is the risk that they are also hiding, perhaps burying, an essential part of us, one that does not think but rather feels. Clothes are the commonest trappings of vanity. When we are naked, we are honest. That is the essential quality of these lustful stories of Nin, embellished or wholly invented though they may be: their honesty. They say: this is part of who we are—deny it, and you are denying yourself.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book from a fellow head of government,
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,

Like you, Marcus Aurelius was a head of government. In AD 161, he became Emperor of Rome, the last of the “five good emperors”—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—who ruled over an eighty-four-year period of peace and prosperity that lasted from AD 96 to 180, the Roman Empire’s golden apogee.

The case of Rome is worth studying. How a small town on a river became the centre of one of the mightiest empires the world has known, eventually dominating thousands of other small towns on rivers, is a source of many lessons. That Rome was mighty is not to be doubted. The sheer size the empire achieved is breathtaking: from the Firth of Forth to the Euphrates, from the Tagus to the Rhine, spilling over into Northern Africa, for a time the Romans ruled over most of the world known to them. What they didn’t rule over wasn’t worth having, they felt: they left what was beyond their frontiers to “barbarians”.

Another measure of their greatness can be found in the Roman influences that continue to be felt to this day. Rome’s local lingo, Latin, became the mother language of most of Europe, and Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese are still spoken all over the world. (The Germanic hordes beyond the Rhine, meanwhile, have managed to sponsor only one international language, albeit a successful one, English.) We also owe the Romans our calendar, with its twelve months and 365-and-a-quarter-day years; three days in our week hark back to three Roman days—Moonday, Saturnday and Sunday; and though we now use the Roman number system (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi…) only occasionally, we use their 26-letter alphabet constantly.

Despite their power and might, another lesson about the Roman Empire forces itself upon us: how it’s all gone. The Romans reigned far and wide for centuries but now their empire has vanished entirely. A Roman today is simply someone who lives in Rome, a city that is beautiful because of its clutter of ruins. Such has been the fate of all empires: the Roman, the Ottoman, the British, the Soviet, to name only a few European empires. Which will be the next empire to fall, the next to rise?

The interest in reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, the book I am sending you this time, lies as much in their content as in the knowledge of who wrote them. European history has got us used to seeing one monarch after another reach the throne for no reason other than direct filial relation, with talent and ability playing no role. Thus the unending line of mediocre personalities—to put it charitably—who came to rule and mismanage so many European nations. This was not Marcus Aurelius’s route to power. Although he inherited the throne from Emperor Antoninus Pius, he was not Pius’s biological son.

Nor was he elected. He was rather selected. Roman emperors did pass on their emperorship to their sons, but this linkage was rarely directly biological. They instead designated their successors by a system that was authoritarian yet flexible: adoption. Marcus Aurelius became emperor as a result of being adopted by the reigning emperor. Each emperor chose whom he wanted as his successor from among the many capable and competing members of Rome’s diverse elite class. Members of that class were often related, but they still had to prove themselves if they wanted to move up in the world.

In that, Roman society was much like the modern democracies of today, with an educated, principled elite that sought to perpetuate the system and, with it, itself. The Rome of then, in some ways, doesn’t seem so different from the Ottawa, Washington or London of today. After the alien abyss, frankly, that is much European history, with the Europeans thinking and behaving in ways that are close to unfathomable by contemporary standards, it is a surprise to see, nearly two thousand years ago, a people who thought and fought and squabbled and had principles which they squandered, and so on—why, a people seemingly just like us. Hence the endless interest of Roman history.

So Marcus Aurelius was a man of great ability selected to be Roman emperor. In other words, he was a politician, and, like you, a busy one; he spent much of his time battling barbarian hordes on the frontiers of the empire. But at the same time, he was a thinking man—with a penchant for philosophy—who put his thoughts down on the page. He was a writer.

Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic and some of his pronouncements are on the gloomy side: “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you,” is a fairly typical pronouncement of his. There is much made in these meditations on the ephemerality of the body, of fame, of empires, of pretty well everything. Over and over, Marcus Aurelius exhorts himself to higher standards of thinking and behaving. It’s bracing, salutary stuff. In many ways, it’s the perfect book for you, Mr. Harper. A practical book on thinking, being and acting by a philosopher-king.

It’s also not the sort of book one reads right through from page 1 to page 163. It has no continuous narrative or developing argument. The Meditations are rather self-contained musings divided into twelve books, each book divided into numbered points that range in length from a single sentence to a few paragraphs. The book lends itself to being dipped into at random. My suggestion is that each time you open and read it, you put a dot next to the meditations you read. That way, over time, you will read all of them.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A whole-person work,
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,

You may have asked yourself on occasion what process I go through to select the books I have been sending you. Why don’t I answer that question in this letter.

Any book adheres to one convention or another—be it that of the Novel or the Biography—and all sentences are either conventionally grammatical or conventionally ungrammatical. It’s the rare, very rare writer who is genuinely unconventional, and usually their revolution is at one level only, affecting, say, point-of-view, while following the herd when it comes to punctuation. A writer who is unconventional on too many levels runs the risk of losing the reader, who can’t manage to get a solid footing on so much new territory and gives up the effort. Finnigans Wake, by the Irish writer James Joyce, is an example of such arduous total newness.

A book is a convention, then, as are the categories of thinking that produce books: Art, History, Geography, Science, and so on. That’s how we like it, we humans. We like orderly sentences and orderly books in much the same way we like orderly streets and orderly governments. Which is not to say that we are not bold creatures. We are; in fact, there is no bolder creature on Earth. To give you a non-literary example: in the late 1960s, the Americans marshalled together the conventions of science, engineering, management and financing, and as a result achieved the highly unconventional goal of popping two of their citizens onto the Moon.

Back to books. They are products of convention, but there are many conventions. I mentioned two already, the Novel and the Biography, which flow from two other conventions, Fiction and Non-fiction. Within each, there are sub-conventions, categories, genres. I have tended to send you books of fiction rather than non-fiction because fiction is a more worked-through interpretation of life. What do I mean by that? I mean that fiction is both more personal and more synthesized than non-fiction. Fiction is more whole-person. A novel is about Life itself, whereas a history remains about a specific instance of Life. A great Russian novel—remember the Tolstoy I sent you—will always have a more universal resonance than a great history of Russia; you will think of the first as being about you on some level, whereas the second is about someone else.

So that’s the first rule: a work of fiction. Now, there are many kinds of fictions. There is the literary novel, the thriller, the murder mystery, the satire, and so on. As you haven’t yet communicated to me your literary interests, and since it’s not for me to judge what you should read, I have not excluded any genre. Whatever book I send you must only be good; that is, once you’ve read it, you must feel wiser, or at least more knowledgeable. Or to put it another way, as I did many months ago, it must increase your sense of stillness.

The other considerations are simple: (1) I send you short books, generally under two hundred pages. You are probably busier than most people, and you probably feel that you are more importantly busy. I believe that’s an illusion. As a friend once told me, the only thing that will really go down in history is how we raise our children. The life of the Canadian people is determined and built by each and every Canadian, one small act at a time. There are twenty-four hours in a day and each one of us chooses how to fill those hours. No one’s hour is more important than anyone else’s. Nonetheless, it’s harder to follow an eight-hundred-page tome in fifteen minutes snatches than it is a slim novel.

(2) For the same reason that you likely don’t give yourself stretches of hours in which to wrap your mind around a convoluted story, I send you books that speak plainly.

(3) I send you books that are varied, that will show you all that the word can do. At the rate of one book every two weeks, this is a harder requirement to satisfy. There are so many good books out there, Mr. Harper. But I must pace myself. I am starting with older books, aiming to be foundational, and from there I will build up to books from our comparatively young nations of Canada and Quebec.

Within those broad criteria, I choose the books I send you in a spontaneous, nearly  random way, just whatever strikes me as possibly of interest to you. I also listen to the suggestions of others, as I did two weeks ago with Frye’s The Educated Imagination. (Did you enjoy it, by the way?)

But some rules are meant to be broken, and this week’s book is an example of that. Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo speaks plainly, but it’s a little too long by our criteria (fifty-eight pages over the limit), it’s Canadian and it’s so recent that it qualifies as prenatal: it hasn’t even been published yet. It’s supposed to come out in April of this year. The unadorned paperback you have in your hands is what publishers call an advance reading copy. It’s sent out to booksellers, journalists and book clubs to drum up interest and excitement in a book prior to its publication—sort of like politicians doing the summer barbecue circuit before an election. The general reading public does not normally see an advance reading copy. What you are holding in your hands is a rare item.

And it’s also a grand and powerful novel about how people retain or reclaim their humanity when they are under extreme duress. I’m sure you will hear about The Cellist of Sarajevo from other people than just me. It’s set during the brutal siege of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. That story was in the news for years, yet I think most of us just took it in dumbly, wondering how people could do that to each other. Well, Galloway’s novel explains how. It does the work of a good fiction: it transports you to a situation that might be alien to you, makes it familiar, and so brings understanding. That’s what I meant when I said fiction is “whole-person”. While reading The Cellist of Sarajevo you are imaginatively there, in Sarajevo, as the mortar shells are falling and snipers are seeking to kill you as you cross a street. Your mind’s eye sees, your moral sense is outraged: your full humanity is being exercised.

Yet The Cellist is a directed and digested take on reality, it’s not journalism. There is subtle intent woven into the realistic narrative of its three main characters. You will see that when you read the last line of the novel, which is magnificent.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed advance reading copy

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book that defends the essential,
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 hope you and your family had a good Christmas and that you are returning to work with your mind and heart refreshed. I suspect 2008 will be a busy year for us. I have a book to finish and you have a government to run. We both hope to get good reviews for our respective labours.

I was in Moncton in late November last year, doing a series of special events organized by the Northrop Frye Literary Festival, which runs every year in April. Someone asked me, in a lovely Acadian accent, “As-tu lu The Educated Imagination, de Northrop Frye?”

I hadn’t read Frye’s The Educated Imagination. Or anything else by him. Northrop Frye—and I’m educating myself as I tell you what follows, catching up—lived between 1912 and 1991, spending his early formative years in Moncton (hence the name of the festival) and most of his adult years at the University of Toronto, where he was a great light. Frye was a world-class literary critic who wrote such books as Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, Anatomy of Criticism and The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. He led a thrilling life of the mind, most of it fed by literature, and he gave much to his students and readers. He was a great thinker, teacher, Canadian.

I should explain why I have never until now read Frye. It wasn’t intellectual sloth. It was rather a conscious decision. Frye, as I’ve just said, was a literary critic. He looked at literature, he looked through literature, seeing in it recurring symbols, underlying structures, overarching metaphors. All of which is no doubt fascinating—but not to the young man I was when I started writing. Self-knowledge is often a good thing—it teaches you your limits—but too much of it too soon can ruin the incipient artist in you if it gives you the sense that you have no original core, that you are just dough in a pre-established mold. Then, as now, I just wanted to write, to create, to invent. I wasn’t interested in being told what I was doing, whom I was repeating, what convention I was adhering to. Why become self-conscious if it meant I wouldn’t dare to write? So I avoided literary criticism, those words and books that might snuff out my wavering creative flame. Trope was tripe to me.

However, right after being asked the question by the person with the lovely Acadian accent, I was presented by her with the book in question, Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination. She thought of it because of the small book club you and I have going. She wondered if you might not enjoy it (you may be interested to know that I get suggestions of books to send you all the time). I felt it would be rude not to read so considerate a gift. And surely, with three books completed and a fourth one nearly done, I could withstand a literary critic suddenly turning a mirror on me.

Well, I’m happy to report that I read the book and I’m still standing. The Educated Imagination was interesting to me, and I think it might be even more interesting to you. Frye, in this short, oral book—he delivered it in six parts as the 1962 Massey Lectures—speaks about the role of literature in education and society, about whether the first is needed by the other two.

It certainly is needed, Frye argues persuasively. It all comes down to language and the imagination. Frye explains that no matter what use we are making of language, whether it’s for practical self-expression, to convey information or self-consciously to be creative, we must use our imagination. As he puts it: “Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination. But we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and practical life: it even produces dreams when we’re asleep. Consequently we have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not.” Imagination is not just for writers. It’s for everyone. At another point, Frye says, “The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life…is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.” This statement has obvious political implications. You see why I said this book might be of interest to you.

One of the classic dualities of existence is that of the head and the heart, of thinking and feeling, of reason and emotion. It’s not untrue, but I do wonder how useful this division is. One might suppose that a mathematician hard at work is being entirely reasonable while someone crying at the scene of a terrible accident is being entirely emotional, but otherwise can we so clearly delineate between the two? Frye believed that these are rather different ways of using one’s imagination, that the imagination underpins them both. And the better, the more fertile our imagination, the better we can be at being both reasonable and emotional. As broad and deep as our dreams are, so can our realities become. And there’s no better way to train that vital part of us than through literature.

The imagination, then, is where is all starts, both for you and for me.

Happy New Year.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback book

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Three books to make you and your family dream,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
P.S. Merry Christmas

Letter:

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

Dear Mr. Harper,

It is Christmas tomorrow, and we live in a country where the first-mentioned fundamental freedom in the Charter of Rights is the freedom of conscience and religion. It is a time to celebrate. But curious how, despite the vast, lawful liberty that is ours to enjoy, we Canadians are so constricted in our religious expression. So “Merry Christmas!” is fast disappearing from public greetings, replaced by formulations such as “Happy Holidays” or “Holiday Greetings”, which are held to be safely generic, the original meaning of holiday—holy day—being conveniently forgotten.

Yet “Merry Christmas” is just a blessing being offered. Does it offend? Would you or I be offended, actually offended, if someone shouted to us, “Happy Diwali!” or “Happy Hanukkah!” or “Happy Eid!” with a smile and a wave of the hand? Wouldn’t we rather be gratified by the well-wishers kind intentions, even if we are not Hindu, Jewish or Muslim? Similarly, when we gift a “Merry Christmas” to a stranger—and how good it is to reach out to strangers—is our intention not kind? Our spiritual stomach is full, so to speak, and we are offering blessed food to another. If that person should reply, “Thank you! Blessed be your Baby, my Prophet thought most highly of him,” we don’t take offence that their stomach is already full. In fact, we are happy for them. Better an abundance of food than a lack, no?

I love it that one religious group stops working, halts the making of money, to celebrate the birth of a baby. We tend to forget babies too much, I think. We tend to neglect magical thinking.

Most of our compatriots take their religious freedom as meaning they are free not to practice any religion, and they address life with big questions and big myths they get elsewhere. That’s fine. To each his or her own path.

But it’s Christmas tomorrow, I repeat, and by all accounts you are a Christian, and rightly entitled to say “Merry Christmas”, though you are far more discreet about your Christianity than your predecessor as party leader, the Honourable Stockwell Day. It made people uncomfortable, his liberal use of his constitutionally-given religious freedom. You are more savvy and cautious. You seem to be somewhat of a closet Christian, not speaking much or sharing much of Jesus of Nazareth.

Still, it’s Christmas tomorrow and there’s a Baby to be celebrated.

So, in the spirit of the occasion, I offer you this time not one book, but three, and books not to be read alone, like an adult, but to be shared with children. The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg, and Imagine a Day, written by Sarah L. Thomson and illustrated by Rob Gonsalves, are picture books of contagious magic. You will look at them, at each page, and marvel. The Brothers Lionheart (pardon the terrible cover—it’s the only edition I could find), by Astrid Lindgren, of the famous Pippi Longstocking series, is a novel for children with fewer illustrations, and black and white, but it is just as magical. I hope you and your family enjoy all three books.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Harper. May your heart be the manger in which the newborn Baby lies.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: three inscribed hard cover books

Reply:

Pending…

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A cautionary tale of sorts,
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 book that accompanies this letter is one of the great literary icons of the twentieth century. If you haven’t already read it, you’ve surely heard of it. The story it tells—of an anxious, dutiful travelling salesman who wakes up one morning transformed into a large insect—is highly intriguing, and therefore entertaining. The practical considerations of such a change—the new diet, the new family dynamic, the poor job prospects, and so on—are all worked out to their logical conclusion. But that Gregor Samsa, the salesman in question, nonetheless remains at heart the same person, the same soul, still moved by music, for example, is also plainly laid out. And what it all might mean, this waking up as a bug, is left to the reader to determine.

Franz Kafka published Metamorphosis in 1915. It was one of his few works published while he was alive, as he was racked by doubts about his writing. Upon his death in 1924 of tuberculosis, he asked his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy all his unpublished works. Brod ignored this wish and did the exact opposite: he published them all. Three unfinished novels were published, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, but in my opinion his many short stories are better, and not only because they’re finished.

Kafka’s life, and subsequently his work, was dominated by one figure, his domineering father. A coarse man who valued only material success, he found his son’s literary inclinations incomprehensible. Kafka obediently tried to fit into the mold into which his father squeezed him. He worked most of his life, and with a fair degree of professional success, for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia (doesn’t that sound like it’s right out of, well, Kafka?). But to work during the day to live, and then to work at night on his writings so that he might feel alive, exhausted him and ultimately cost him his life. He was only forty years old when he died.

Kafka introduced to our age a feeling that hasn’t left us yet: angst. Misery before then was material, felt in the body. Think of Dickens and the misery of poverty he portrayed; material success was the road out of that misery. But with Kafka, we have the misery of the mind, a dread that comes from within and will not go away, no matter if we have jobs. The dysfunctional side of the twentieth century, the dread that comes from mindless work, from constant, grinding, petty regulation, the dread that comes from the greyness of urban, capitalist existence, where each one of us is no more than a lonely cog in a machine, this was what Kafka revealed. Are we done with these concerns? Have we worked our way out of anxiety, isolation and alienation? Alas, I think not. Kafka still speaks to us.

Kafka died seven months into the public life of Adolf Hitler—the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch, in which the ugly Austrian corporal had prematurely tried to seize power, took place in November of 1923—and there is something annunciatory about the overlap, as if what Kafka felt, Hitler delivered. The overlap is sadder still: Kafka’s three sisters died in Nazi concentration camps.

Metamorphosis makes for a fascinating yet grim read. The premise may bring a black-humoured smile to one’s face, but the full story wipes that smile away. One possible way of reading Metamorphosis is as a cautionary tale. So much alienation in its pages makes one thirst for authenticity in one’s life.

Christmas is fast approaching. I’ll see with the next book I send you if I can’t come up with something cheerier to match the festive season.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback book

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