by Yann Martel
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 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 in the wild and in captivity, on survival at sea, gave me further ideas and the facts from 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 life is discussed and displayed in all its manifestations, from the most conventional to the most heinous to the most idealistic. Contemplating this vast display not only of what life should be, but of what life is, plants the seed of wisdom. To shun art, then, is to shun living beyond the narrow confines of one’s own experience. By contrast, to plunge into art is to live multiple lives. Art is a microscope or a telescope, either way making other realities, other worlds, other choices brighter, clearer, closer 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. A politician wants to claim to have good ideas, not necessarily original ones. Some politicians may have the luck of putting forward 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; that is, by people putting their heads together and hammering out policies. The political ideas of the lone, original mind will often be quixotic, simplistic, hare-brained or dangerous. I believe your own career shows the truth of what I’m saying. Throw your mind back to your early days in the Reform Party, and look at you now. What happened to the originality of the Reform Party, to 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 easily led astray by the claims of demagogues and tyrants.
But to return to 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
J. M. COETZEE (b. 1940) is a South African novelist, literary critic, academic and translator who now lives in Australia. His novels have twice won the Booker Prize—for Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace—and in 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He is also an advocate for animal rights.
BOOK 68:
GENERATION A
BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND
November 9, 2009
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A time capsule,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
And sometimes a book can be a time capsule, 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 books of this nature. 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 with, say, 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 and 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 United States, 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 the language crackles with vitality throughout. It’s a story about reading and storytelling, the power of reading to strengthen the individual and of storytelling to solder the group together.
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 twenty-first century, they will do well to read Douglas Coupland.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
DOUGLAS COUPLAND was born on a NATO base in Germany in 1961. He is the author of the international bestseller Jpod and thirteen other novels including Player One (his novelized Massey Lecture), The Gum Thief, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic and Generation X. He is also a visual artist and sculptor, furniture designer, clothing designer (for Roots) and screenwriter. His most recent book is the collection Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People, illustrated by Graham Roumieu.
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BOOK 69:
PROPERTY
BY VALERIE MARTIN
November 23, 2009
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel on corruption,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
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 some time ago. I finally got around to reading it last week and I’m glad I did so. It’s a 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 destroys not only its victims but also perverts its victimizers, blind though the victimizers may 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 is to exercise an insidious power, 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 studio and workshop on Elm Street called Patrick Gordon Framing. When I got there I was surprised to find that a show of paintings had been organized around the theme of our little book club. Over twenty-five artists had used the books I sent you as their inspiration. It makes for a great show. I include an invitation to the opening. The show runs until December 19. 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, exquisite 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. 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 audiobook 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 reproductions of all the book covers. 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. To give you a taste, here’s how it starts:
During an interval in the Melvinski trial in the large building of the Law Courts the members and public prosecutor met in Ivan Egorovich Shebek’s private room, where the conversation turned on the celebrated Krasovski case. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs. Jones was already snoring. There was nothing to be done. And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forego my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire. “O my teacher, behold the great army of the sons of Pandu, so expertly arranged by your intelligent disciple the son of Drupada.”
At that time “everybody else” was my father and his mistress, Elsa. My Lady Baroness, who weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, consequently was a person of no small consideration; and then she did the honours of the house with a dignity that commanded universal respect.
And so on. It’s a most curious and bracing new tale.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
VALERIE MARTIN (b. 1948) is the author of nine novels, three collections of short stories and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. She was raised in New Orleans and now lives in upstate New York. Her novel Mary Reilly won the Kafka Prize and was made into a film. Property won the 2003 Orange Prize.
BOOK 70:
TROPIC Of HOCKEY
BY DAVE BIDINI
December 7, 2009
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book for the hockey fan in you,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
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 who will be familiar to you, I’m sure, 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 became 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 book is 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 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 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 with what he feels is the packaged product the NHL puts out today.
Nothing beloved 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.
