101 Letters to a Prime Minister (32 page)

And then the man can write. Take the following line. Bidini and his wife have just left Hong Kong by train, heading for Beijing:

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:

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.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

As a musician, D
AVE
B
IDINI
(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.

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. N
ARAYAN
(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.

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 reader, 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

L
ARRY
M
C
M
URTRY
(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.

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.