101 Letters to a Prime Minister

by Yann Martel

  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 Florentine’s little sister 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 Lacasses’ 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 if an unmarried woman fell pregnant her life was ruined and her child 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 query about SSHRC’s funding [see the REPLY section of Book 51: Julius Caesar], while P. Monteith in your office thanked me in a much briefer way for the next book I sent you. [See the REPLY section of Book 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.

  GABRIELLE ROY (1909–1983) was a Quebec writer whose first novel, Bonheur d’occasion, won the Prix Femina; its English-language translation, The Tin Flute, won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal. A quotation by Roy appears on the back of the Canadian twenty-dollar bill: “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?”

  BOOKS 61:

  WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

  AND

  IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN

  STORIES AND PICTURES BY MAURICE SENDAK

  August 3, 2009

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A reminder of childhood’s wonder,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  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 unforgettable books. 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 minds, beholden to the real and the factual, adults whose imagination has so shrunk that they can’t even remember (let alone imagine) what it is like to be a child, even though that was once their real and factual condition. Being children, they knew no gravity of the mind but could 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, harden all the more, 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 he or she will be 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 to expand the imagination at an early age.

  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? Look at the illustrations of 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.

  MAURICE SENDAK (1928–2012) was a writer and illustrator of children’s literature. He was the author of more than sixteen books and the illustrator of many, many more books. His archives are housed in the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, and an elementary school in North Hollywood is named after him.

  BOOK 62:

  EVERYMAN

  BY PHILIP ROTH

  August 17, 2009

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A novel about where we’re all heading,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  D
ear 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 twenty-six 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 aging 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. Aging is shrinking. The body grows smaller and weaker. 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 physically 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 members 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 any 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, practises 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 aging 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 foregone. 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 form 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 and the ideas one may have about its meaning are 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 aging 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 sixty-eight a few days ago, sent me a poem he wrote. By coincidence, it too deals with the anguish of aging 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

  PHILIP ROTH (b. 1933) is an American novelist. He has written numerous books, including the Zuckerman novels, Portnoy’s Complaint, the National Book Award–winning Goodbye, Columbus, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral. Roth’s works generally focus on Jewish and American identity, and are often set in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. In 2011 Roth was honoured with the Man Booker International Prize.

  BOOK 63:

  FLAUBERT’S PARROT

  BY JULIAN BARNES

  August 31, 2009

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A fine example of a literary novel,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  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 mind: the twenty-seventh 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 a 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 di
dn’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 film, 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, by contrast, has few redeeming qualities. It often commits the worst sins of a book: it is boring and it lacks credibility.