101 Letters to a Prime Minister

by Yann Martel

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  As a musician, DAVE BIDINI (b. 1963) was the co-founder of the Rheostatics and is the leader of Bidiniband. He has also made a name for himself as a writer with the success of his journalism, plays and his books The Best Game You Can Name, Baseballissimo, On a Cold Road and Tropic of Hockey. Bidini wrote and hosted the Gemini Award–winning small-screen adaptation of Tropic of Hockey, called Hockey Nomad. His newest book is about Gordon Lightfoot and the Mariposa Folk Festival of 1972. He lives in Toronto with his wife and their two children.

  BOOK 71:

  THE FINANCIAL EXPERT

  BY R. K. NARAYAN

  December 21, 2009

  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

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  R. K. Narayan is the mercifully shortened nom de plume of Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami. 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, 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, rises 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.

  R. K. NARAYAN (1906–2001) was an Indian novelist and short story writer. Most of his stories are set in the fictional town of Malgudi in southern India. He was the author of numerous novels, short story collections, mythologies and non-fiction books.

  BOOK 72:

  BOOKS: A MEMOIR

  BY LARRY McMURTRY

  January 4, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A life in books,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  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. The travails of independent bookselling are another story, although not 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. Except for Lonesome Dove, which I remember hearing about when it won McMurtry the Pulitzer Prize in 1986, none of the titles were familiar to me. That is, with the exception of those that were adapted for 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 bookstore, first in Georgetown, a neighbourhood of Washington, DC, 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 twentieth 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 r
eader, 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 subculture—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, this can be an act of self-definition that leaves one a little more knowledgeable about oneself and, sometimes, a little wiser. One thing I learned 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 bookstore. 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

  LARRY MCMURTRY (b. 1936) is an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter and bookseller. He owns Booked Up, a store specializing in antiquarian and scholarly books, in his home town of Archer City, Texas. He is the author of more than forty books.

  BOOK 73:

  THINGS FALL APART

  BY CHINUA ACHEBE

  January 18, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A great novel from Africa,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  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 an epic portrayal of the encounter between African and British societies in the late nineteenth century, and the ensuing wreckage of colonialism. This comment perhaps makes it sound as if Things Fall Apart is an overtly political novel, with the grinding of the author’s axe 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, 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’s of the white man, wins the day—and things fall apart.

  The novel is a marvel of even-handedness. It is not that the African way of life is Edenic 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 flouting the rule of the native gods, just as the missionaries expect evil to befall the villagers if they continue to disobey 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 core of the novel: things didn’t have to fall apart. Given better emissaries, given greater efforts to reach out, perhaps Africa wouldn’t have been so wrecked and Europe so tainted.

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

  I should mention that I am writing this letter in unusual circumstances. Normally I write to you in the quiet of my home office. Not tonight. Tonight I’m sitting in the middle of the Mendel Art Gallery here in Saskatoon, on a raised platform, writing my letter in public. I’m participating in a multidisciplinary, 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 Gay (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 Anita Diamant

  Expect Resistance, by CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective

  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, with 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 Out 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 P. G. 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)