by Yann Martel
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 are signs of stagnation, not security. And so the constant thinking is required, because new ideas only come from thinking.
All this to say: 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 nineteenth-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
JULIAN BARNES (b. 1946) is the author of eleven novels, three books of stories and two collections of essays. He has also written crime fiction using the nom de plume Dan Kavanagh. His works frequently address themes of British and French culture and identity. His honours include the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.
BOOK 64:
THE VIRGIN SECRETARY’S IMPOSSIBLE BOSS
BY CAROLE MORTIMER
September 14, 2009
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Can 130 million people be wrong?
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
Since I was speaking about it in my last letter, I thought I would send you an example of genre fiction, and what genre fiction has a more recognizable brand 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 nearly as many books 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 hardcover 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, by contrast, append a condensed 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 snowstorm in Scotland that would chill the hardiest Yukoner—a storm 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 the dream world of billions of people.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
CAROLE MORTIMER (b. 1960) is a romance novelist. She has written more than 150 books, and lives in England with her husband and six children.
BOOK 65:
THE TARTAR STEPPE
BY DINO BUZZATI
Translated from the Italian by Stuart Hood
September 28, 2009
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel on the perils of waiting,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
It’s not my habit to quote myself, but to introduce the novel The Tartar Steppe, by the Italian writer Dino Buzzati (1906–1972), I will:
A beautiful, m
asterly 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 to 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 twentieth-century concern. If Samuel Beckett had been writing a century earlier, he would have written Acting for Godot. But because it was the twentieth century that paid the price for the nineteenth’s actions for God and for country—all the mess of colonialism and greedy empire-building—Beckett 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 the two compositions, the century shifted from the modern to the postmodern, from acting to waiting, from hoping to dreading, and that 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 important: 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.
DINO BUZZATI (1906–1972) was an Italian novelist, journalist, playwright, short story writer, poet and painter. He worked as a journalist in Africa in World War II, and remained at the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera for the duration of his career.
BOOK 66:
WHAT IS STEPHEN HARPER READING?
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
DOZENS OF GREAT WRITERS
October 12, 2009
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book for book lovers,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
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 that 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 hardcover book. Such books can last for hundreds and even thousands of years. But books last for another reason. Words are oral artifacts, originally travelling 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 they can burst unspoken from the minds of writers into the minds of readers through the medium of sight. But the value of a book still remains in what it says, not in 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 whoever wants to look and read. Since millions of people love to read, millions of books are produced. 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 title, in the inscription, in the first line of each letter, the main subject is not actually you but the books I discuss. What Is Stephen Harper Reading?, is a book about books. Eventually, there will be a complete edition. How many letters that book will contain, when it comes out, depends on you.
During a radio interview I did a few days ago in Montreal while promoting our book, the host mentioned that the Quebec journalist Chantal Hébert had sent you a book called Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise 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, a poem? Last week you sa
ng 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
BOOK 67:
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
BY J. M. COETZEE
October 26, 2009
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A cautionary tale,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
A few letters ago—number 64, to be precise, concerning Carole Mortimer’s novel The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss—I mentioned in passing that J. M. Coetzee is my favourite living writer. Then in the next letter, in my discussion of 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—for allegedly stealing cattle. They are promptly tortured—tortured—under Joll’s supervision, and the uncle dies as a result. 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 where they too are tortured. Eventually Joll returns to the capital to make his report. The Magistrate comes upon a barbarian girl begging in the streets. Her ankles have been broken, her eyesight partially ruined, her father tortured and killed before her, and now she has been left behind after her fellow prisoners were released. 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 …
