101 Letters to a Prime Minister (6 page)

I wonder if she visited Laurier House.

By Grand Central Station
is a masterly—or, better, mistressly—evocation of love. A life untouched by Elizabeth Smart’s kind of passion is a life not fully lived. About that, we can take her word.

Who would have thought that language could do so much? Who would have thought that grunts would so recall the miracle of the world?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Please thank Susan Ross, from your office, for replying to me on your behalf about the first book I sent you. Perhaps you could lend Ms. Ross your copy of
Ivan Ilych
once you’ve finished with it?

E
LIZABETH
S
MART
(1913–1986) was a Canadian novelist and poet. She was born into an influential family in Ottawa, and travelled extensively, working in the United States and the United Kingdom. While in London, she read a book of George Barker’s poetry and fell in love, first with the writing and then with the man. Their relationship is the basis of her best-known work,
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
, which she wrote in British Columbia. She settled in England and continued a long-term affair with the married Barker, with whom she had four children. She worked as a copywriter for thirteen years, then as an editor for
Queen
magazine, and retired to a cottage in Suffolk.

Dear Mr. Harper,

With this fifth book, I am taking you in a direction you might find surprising: Hindu scripture. There is much Hindu scripture about, into the thousands of pages. You might have heard of the Vedas, especially the Rigveda, or of the Upanishads, or of the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, among many others. In their lengthy and varied entirety, they are the sum total of the thinking about life of an ancient and still thriving civilization, that which started in the Indus Valley, the place that today we call India. It’s all quite dizzying. If you feel that you know nothing, that you are paralyzed with fear and ignorance, don’t worry: we all feel that way. I’m sure even devout Hindus feel that way at times.

That feeling of fear and ignorance is in fact a good starting place, because it’s exactly how Arjuna feels at the beginning of the
Bhagavad Gita
, the book you now have in your hands. The
Gita
is one short part of the Mahabharata, a much longer text, and it is the
best known of Hindu scriptures, certainly the most widely read, and because of that arguably the most important. What Arjuna needs, what I need, what you need, what we all need, is a lesson in dharma, in proper conduct. And that is the lesson that Arjuna receives from Krishna, who is Arjuna’s charioteer and friend but who also happens to be the Lord Supreme God of All Things.

Arjuna is on the eve of a great battle. He has asked Krishna to drive their chariot between the two facing armies and he surveys the assembled mass of soldiers. He sees that he has friends and enemies on both sides and he knows that many will die. That is when he loses heart.

Arjuna’s battle may have its origins in a real, historical event, but in the
Bhagavad Gita
we are to read it as a metaphor. The true battle here is the battle of life and each one of us is an Arjuna facing his or her life, with all its daunting challenges.

I suggest you read neither the introduction by the scholar nor that by the translator, though Juan Mascaró’s translation is excellent; that’s why I chose it for you. It’s clear and poetic, uncluttered by jargon or pedantry. Read it aloud and you will feel the cosmic wind blowing through the words. But the introductions, leave aside, I suggest, because it is the same thing with Hinduism as with every religion: there are matters of history and there are matters of faith. The Jesus of history is one thing, the Jesus of faith another. Search too far into the Jesus of history and you will lose yourself in anthropology and miss the point. The
Gita
of faith—much like the Jesus of faith—will have its greatest influence on you if you take it entirely on its own terms, making your own way through its grand injunctions and baffling mysteries. The
Gita
is a dialogue between one man and God, and the best reading of it, at least initially, is as a dialogue between one reader and the text. After that first encounter, if you want, scholars can be of help.

There may be ideas here that will irk you. By Western standards, there is a streak of fatalism running through Hinduism that will bother some. We live in a highly individualistic culture and we make much of the exertions of our egos. Perhaps if we took to heart one of the fundamental lessons of the
Gita
—to take action with detachment—we might exert ourselves in a calmer way and see that the ego, in the scheme of things, really is a puny, transitory thing.

Read the
Bhagavad Gita
in a moment of stillness and with an open heart, and it will change you. It is a majestic text, elevated and elevating. Like Arjuna, you will emerge from this dialogue with Krishna wiser and more serene, ready for action but filled with inner peace and loving-kindness.

Om shanti
(peace be with you), as they say in India.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

Dear Mr. Harper,

From London, England, I’m sending you an English translation of a French novel. In this novel people smoke, people get slapped in the face, people drink heavily and then drive home, people have nothing but the blackest coffee for breakfast, and always people are concerned with love. Very French
d’une certaine époque
.

Bonjour Tristesse
came out in France in 1954. Its author, Françoise Sagan, was nineteen years old. Immediately she became a celebrity and her book a bestseller.

More than that: they both became symbols.

Bonjour Tristesse
is narrated in the first person by seventeen-year-old Cécile. She describes her father, Raymond, as “a frivolous man, clever at business, always curious, quickly bored, and attractive to women.” The business cleverness is never mentioned again, but clearly it has allowed Raymond to enjoy freely his other attributes, his frivolity, curiosity, boredom and
attraction, all of which revolve around dalliances of the heart and loins. He and his beloved daughter share the same temperament and they are in the south of France for the summer holidays with Elsa, his latest young mistress. This triangle suits Cécile perfectly and she is assiduous at pursuing her idle seaside pleasures, which come to include Cyril, a handsome young man who is keen on her.

But all is ruined when her father invites Anne to stay with them. She’s an old friend of the family, a handsome woman her father’s age, made of sterner, more sober stuff. She starts to meddle in Cécile’s life. Worse, a few weeks after arriving, fun Elsa is dumped when Raymond starts a relationship with Anne. And finally, not long after, Anne announces that she and her father are planning to get married. Cécile is aghast. Her serial frolicker of a father and Anne, husband and wife? She, Cécile, a stepdaughter to Anne, who will work hard to transform her into a serious and studious young person?
Quel cauchemar
! Cécile sets to work to thwart things, using Elsa and Cyril as her pawns. The results are tragic.

After the grim work of the Second World War and the hard work of the post-war reconstruction,
Bonjour Tristesse
burst onto the French literary scene like a carnival. It announced what seemed like a new species, youth,
la jeunesse
, who had but one message: have fun with us or be gone; stay up all night at a jazz club or never come out with us again; don’t talk to us about marriage and other boring conventions; let’s smoke and be idle instead; forget the future—who’s the new lover? As for the
tristesse
of the title, it was an excuse for a really good pout.

Such a brash, proudly indolent attitude, coming with an open contempt for conventional values, landed like a bomb among the bourgeoisie. Françoise Sagan earned herself a papal denunciation, which she must have relished.

A book can do that, capture a time and a spirit, be the expression of a broad yearning running through society. Read the book and you will understand not only the characters but the zeitgeist. Sometimes the book will be one a group strongly identifies with—for example,
On the Road
, by Jack Kerouac, among American youth—or, conversely, strongly identifies against—Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses
among some Muslims.

So that too is what a book can be, a thermometer revealing a fever.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

F
RANÇOISE
S
AGAN
(1935–2004), born Françoise Quoirez, was a novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Sagan’s novels centre around disillusioned bourgeois characters (often teenagers) and primarily romantic themes; her work has been compared to that of J. D. Salinger. The writer François Mauriac described her as “a charming little monster.” Her oeuvre includes dozens of works for print and performance. She suffered a car accident in 1957, an experience that left her addicted to painkillers and other drugs for much of her life.

Dear Mr. Harper,

You’ve no doubt heard the theory of six degrees of separation, how each one of us on this planet is connected to everyone else through a chain of five people. Well, in a way, you and I are linked through the seventh book I am sending you,
Candide
, by Voltaire. Let me explain. On pages 110 and 111 of Chapter XXIII there is a brief scene in which Candide, having just arrived in Portsmouth, England, witnesses the execution of a British admiral. “Why execute this admiral?” asks Candide.

“Because he had not enough dead men to his credit,” comes the reply.

This incident was no invention of Voltaire’s. There was indeed a British admiral who was executed for failing to “do his utmost” during a naval battle with the French off the island of Minorca. He was the first and only British admiral so treated by Britannia, and his name was John Byng.

Do you recognize that last name? That’s right: Lord Byng of Vimy, of the “King-Byng Affair,” Governor General of Canada from 1921 to 1926, and a direct descendant of the ill-fated Admiral Byng. I’m sure you have regular meetings with Lord Byng’s current successor, Her Excellency Michaëlle Jean. And the last degree of separation: a direct descendant of both Byngs, Jamie Byng, is a good friend of mine and my British publisher. So there you have it, six degrees of separation: me-Voltaire-Byng-Byng-Byng-Jean-you.

It’s in this same Chapter XXIII of
Candide
, in the paragraph just before Admiral Byng’s execution in fact, that Voltaire famously dismissed Canada as “a few acres of snow,” “quelques arpents de neige.” Isn’t that amazing? Voltaire speaks of Canada and then right after tells a story about a mutual acquaintance of ours. Mr. Harper, the link between us couldn’t be more preordained than that!

One last anecdote. I can also say this of
Candide
: not once but twice I have come upon people reading a book, thought I recognized the title, exclaimed what a great novel it was, anticipating some good talk about the terrible, funny calamities that poor Candide must endure, only to be told by the readers, in both cases women, that the “e” was an “a” and that the book they were reading was not Voltaire’s brilliant satire but rather a book on candida, which is a bothersome, often recurring and terribly itchy yeast infection of the vagina. After that, as you can imagine, the conversation became a bit stilted.

Let’s get to the point.
Candide
, published in 1759, is a short, funny and engaging tale about a serious problem: evil and the suffering it engenders. Voltaire lived between 1694 and 1778 and was one of the great gadflies of his time. In
Candide
he lampooned what he felt was the facile optimism of the day, an optimism best expressed by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s formulation
that our world is “the best of all possible worlds” (you might remember that line from an ironic Kris Kristofferson song). The reasoning behind this conclusion was that since God is good and all-powerful, the world cannot be anything but the best conceivable world, with the optimum combination of elements. Evil was thus posited as serving the purpose of maximizing good, since it is in having a choice between good and evil that we fallible human beings can improve ourselves and become good.

Now, we can perhaps agree that adversity can bring the best out of us, and it is still Christian doctrine that we are “perfected by suffering.” But such a blithe justification of evil has fairly obvious limits. It might do for the sort of evil that comes as a kick-in-the-behind, as a retrospective blessing in disguise. But will it serve for heinous evil and egregious misfortune?

Voltaire wrote
Candide
in part as a reaction to just such an instance of misfortune. On the morning of November 1, 1755, a cataclysmic earthquake struck Lisbon. Immediately, most churches in the city collapsed, killing thousands of people who were inside. Other public buildings also came down, as did over 12,000 dwellings. Once the tremors had stopped, a tsunami struck the city, and after that, fires wreaked further havoc. Over sixty thousand people were killed and the material damage, in an age still innocent of the destructive power of modern bombs, was unprecedented. The Lisbon earthquake had the same troubling effect on people at the time as the Holocaust had in our time. But whereas the Nazi barbarity had us mostly wondering about human nature, the Lisbon earthquake had people wondering about the nature of God. How could God allow such cruelty to take place in a city as piously Catholic and evangelical as Lisbon, and of all days on All Saints’ Day? In what conceivable way could killing so many people in one stroke maximize the good of this world?