101 Letters to a Prime Minister (34 page)

Who would have thought that Homer’s
Iliad
could be retold using just one vowel? The vowel
I
allows the author to speak about his project and defend it:

In O we read that

With
O
, we also get a wink at
Clockwork Orange
, the novel by Anthony Burgess I sent you a while ago:

Even
U
, that vowel the sight of which makes a Scrabble player’s heart sink, manages to speak on its own:

Kultur
spurns Ubu—thus Ubu pulls stunts.

So it goes, the wit and inventiveness dancing across the pages, the stock of single-vowel words of the English language expended to discuss a surprising range of topics, from the bawdy to the lyrical, from the pastoral to the historical.

And the purpose of it all? It may seem to you to be a mere game, with the lack of seriousness that one might associate with playing. To that, two responses: first, in playing, in toying, come discoveries, the result of chance juxtapositions; and second, language is never just about itself. This language-playing that Bök delights us with comments on the world because every word, whether invested with one vowel or five, connects eventually to a concrete reality. So speaking in mono-vowels though he is, Bök is also speaking volumes.
Eunoia
, which means “beautiful thinking” and is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, is a narrow but perfect work. It is a gambol through
language, and it would be a sad mistake to dismiss it as merely
facetious
, which word—lo!—contains all five vowels in order. After such wordplay, the tongue is better fixed in the mouth and expression comes more easily.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

C
HRISTIAN
B
ÖK
(b. 1960) is an experimental poet. He teaches in the English department at the University of Calgary. He is the author of three books.

Dear Mr. Harper,

It happens every few years that the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a source of surprise and consternation. The gasp is audible nearly around the world:
“Who?!”
That’s exactly how I reacted in 2004, I remember. I’d never heard of Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who was the recipient that year. Of course, German-language readers surely knew of her and no doubt applauded her win. The Nobel Committee has the wisdom and discernment to cast its net wide, finding worthy winners in writers who are not well known or who write from cultures on the margin of our Anglo-American-dominated world. I discovered Elias Canetti, for example, a wonderful writer, when I had another “
Who?!”
moment way back in 1981.

Well, Stockholm has done it again. A few months ago, the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced and it was—move over, Elfriede—another “obscure” woman
writer who writes in German, Herta Müller. And since the Winter Olympics are on right now in Vancouver, with hosts of foreign athletes visiting our land, I thought I would heed the Nobel Committee’s high commendation and offer you something by Herta Müller.
Nadirs
, her first book, a collection of short stories, is the only one I could find at McNally Robinson. It is a curious book. Right off, it feels foreign. We don’t write like that in English. It’s not a matter of translation. I wouldn’t know it, not speaking German and so not able to compare the original with the translation, but I doubt the book is poorly translated. It is rather the sensibility. The writing feels impersonal, nearly mechanical, it is laconic in the extreme and there is little effort at being beautiful. The stories, except for anecdotal bursts, are plotless. They’re full of details, yet many of them are unreal, dreamlike, nightmarish.

It helps to know a little about Herta Müller: she’s from a German-speaking region of Romania called the Banat. A minority speaker in a poor country: that would explain the sensibility, so different from mine. I’m sometimes struck by the strange inner realities that come from central and eastern Europe. There are books from parts of the world that should feel more alien to me—for example, the book I sent you a month ago:
Things Fall Apart
, from Nigeria—yet don’t feel so alien to me. I felt quite comfortable slipping into the African skin of Okonkwo. And then Europe, my ancestral continent, a continent on which I lived ten years, three of whose languages I speak, whose majority religion I broadly adhere to, whose people look and dress like me, produces stories that completely puzzle me. Perhaps it’s the result of that very European mix of cultural diversity, economic chaos and political misery. Whatever the case, I read
Nadirs
and I thought, “Gosh, those Germans certainly know how not to have fun.”

A worthy book nonetheless. A reminder that great literature brings us to foreign shores and makes us less narrow.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

H
ERTA
M
ÜLLER
(b. 1953) is a novelist, poet, short story writer, editor and essayist. She was born in Romania and now lives in Berlin.

Dear Mr. Harper,

The coolest thing happened to me last week. There was a stiff, mid-size envelope in my mailbox. I don’t get as much mail as you do, but I do get my fair share (and I don’t have any staff to help me with it). So what was this, what request, what demand? I noted that it came from the United States. I opened it. Between two pieces of cardboard, a smaller envelope slipped out. On the front, top left, was the return address: The White House, Washington, DC 20500. I was intrigued.
The
White House? I opened the envelope, and there it was, on White House letterhead, a handwritten note from President Obama.

I do believe my heart skipped a beat. A week later I’m still gingerly taking the note out to marvel at it. The President of the United States wrote to me—to
me
! For sure I’m going to have the note framed. If there was a way of tattooing it on my back, I would. What amazes me is the generosity of it. As you would
know, there is a large measure of calculation in what public figures do. But here, what does he gain? I’m not a US citizen. In no way can I be of help to President Obama. Clearly he did it for personal reasons, as a reader and as a father. And in two lines, what an insightful analysis of
Life of Pi
. Bless him, bless him.

Not all heads of government are as good. For proof, the book I’m sending you this week,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Joseph Stalin made his people miserable for all of his reign as leader of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953. Or to put it more accurately, whatever good he did was obliterated by the nearly immeasurable evil that came with it. The title of most heinous dictator of the twentieth century of course goes to Adolf Hitler, but Hitler burned out quickly, in twelve years, and was atypical of German leadership. Stalin, in contrast, lasted. He died an old man, still in power, a beacon of steady and stable evil. And while his crimes—social upheaval, economic catastrophe, massive and systematic human rights violations, widespread famine and poverty—were worse than those of his predecessors
or successors, Russia didn’t fare well before him under the Tsars, didn’t fare well after him under the Soviet leaders that followed, and isn’t faring well under the authoritarian regime now in place. I am reminded of that adage “Man’s inhumanity to Man,” but with a variation for this case: “Russians’ inhumanity to Russians.” It has always puzzled me how the Russians, despite the blazing individual geniuses they have produced in the arts and sciences, have otherwise been such a calamity to themselves (and to the Europeans who had the misfortune of living in the shadow of their empire). What other country has produced a Nobel Peace Prize winner—Mikhail Gorbachev—who sought only to liberate his people from themselves? And this, in a country that has never been colonized and whose ills cannot be blamed on others.

There’s a paragraph on page 104 of
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
that summarizes the attitude I’m talking about:

He had thought highly of the horse, but had driven it to death—
and with no explanation as to why. It’s just what you do. And the “he” mentioned at the start is not another horse but a human being, a fellow prisoner, one whom Ivan Denisovich also thinks highly of and will just as blithely see worked to death. One feels like crying out, “Where’s the humanity, the benevolence, the compassion?” Well, there’s precious little of that in
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
. This short novel tells the story of an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary prisoner in the Gulag, the massive forced-labour camp system that was nearly
a parallel society in Communist Russia. At most, the roughest of fraternity is fleetingly expressed during moments when fear and want have momentarily abated. At all other times, each prisoner strictly looks out for himself. It makes for appalling living, lucidly documented by Solzhenitsyn, and a searing indictment of what Stalin did to his own people.

I sent you, nearly three years ago now,
Animal Farm
, by the English writer George Orwell. It’s interesting to compare that novel and
Ivan Denisovich
. Both works cover the same ground, but very differently. The first portrays the evil of Stalinism by means of allegory, the second by means of realism. Which do you prefer?

I need to inform you of a temporary change in our little book club. Up till now, it’s just been you and me. But I’m leaving on a four-month trip soon, in part to promote my next novel, and I was worried that the logistics of getting a book and a letter to you every two weeks while on tour would be too much of a strain. So I’ve decided to invite other Canadian writers to join our literary journey. I’m glad about the decision. This is certainly a case of making a virtue of necessity. After all, why should I be alone in making reading suggestions to you? My knowledge of the book world is very limited. Why not plumb the literary depths of other writers?

So your next book and letter, to be delivered to your office in exactly two weeks, on Monday, March 15th, will come from a different Canadian writer. I won’t tell you who—let it be a surprise—nor do I have any idea what the next book will be. That too will be a surprise.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

A
LEXANDER
S
OLZHENITSYN
(1918–2008) was a novelist, dramatist and historian. His most famous books include
The Gulag Archipelago
and
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, inspired by the eight years he served in a Gulag for writing what was deemed anti-Soviet propaganda. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1994.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Please don’t be disappointed. I know that for some time now you’ve been receiving books in the mail from Yann Martel, and I suppose you’ve grown used to this. Even though his letters have yet to garner a personal response, I like to imagine you reading them in your robe and slippers in the morning over coffee. Is that an odd thing to imagine of one’s Prime Minister? Perhaps. I apologize if so—you are, however, the leader of our country, and leaders exist as much in our imaginations as in physical being.