101 Letters to a Prime Minister Read online

  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

  ALAN BENNETT (b. 1934) is an English author, actor, humorist and playwright. His first great success was co-authoring and starring in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. He then performed in innumerable stage, radio and television productions and wrote several short stories, novellas, non-fiction works and plays. Among his many acclaimed creations are the Academy Award-winning film adaptation The Madness of King George, and The History Boys, a play that won three Laurence Olivier Awards and was adapted for the screen.

  BOOK 44:

  THE GOOD EARTH

  BY PEARL S. BUCK

  December 8, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A novel of fortunes made and lost,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  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 in 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

  PEARL S. BUCK (1892–1973) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American author and the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1938. Born in the United States but raised in Zhenjiang, eastern China, Buck was an avid student of Chinese history and society, which contributed immensely to the vivid and detailed descriptions of Chinese life in her many novels. In addition to writing prolifically, Buck established Welcome House, the first international interracial adoption agency.

  BOOK 45:

  FICTIONS

  BY JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley

  December 22, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A book you may or may not like,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  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

  JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899–1986) was an Argentinian poet, short story writer, anthologist, critic, essayist and librarian. In his writings, he often explored the ideas of reality, philosophy, identity and time, frequently using the images of labyrinths and mirrors. Borges shared the 1961 Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, gaining international fame. In addition to writing and giving speaking engagements in the United States, Borges was the director of the National Library in Argentina, ironically gaining this position as he was losing his eyesight.

  BOOK 46:

  BLACKBIRD SINGING:

  POEMS AND LYRICS 1965–1999

  BY PAUL MCCARTNEY

  January 5, 2009

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  Hey Jude,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Christmas crept up on me unnoticed this winter. Suddenly it was December 25 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 (this is our second Christmas together, 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 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

  PAUL MCCARTNEY (b. 1942) has been a musical icon for nearly fifty years, penning songs, movie soundtracks and orchestral arrangements. He remains most famous as a member of the Beatles, for whom, wit
h John Lennon, he wrote some of his best songs. His success continued after the breakup of the band in 1970. Performing with Wings, and as a solo artist, McCartney has maintained his status as one of the most prolific and talented musicians of all time. He is also known for his animal rights activism.

  BOOK 47:

  THE LESSER EVIL:

  POLITICAL ETHICS IN AN AGE OF TERROR

  BY MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

  January 19, 2009

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A book for a leader by a leader,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  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.