101 Letters to a Prime Minister (45 page)

Scorched
is appropriately titled. Part of the action of the play takes place in a war-torn country which, though unnamed, is obviously Lebanon, a hot place where one is likely to be scorched by the sun. But more to the point, the play scorches the soul. It tells the story of a twin brother and sister, Simon and Janine, and their mother, Nawal, who falls into complete silence for a reason her children will discover only after her death. The play turns on a revelation that is truly disturbing. I read it and felt dazed. And this is after merely
reading
it. The effect upon hearing it from a stage, revealed by an actor, brought to life, would be something close to shell shock, I’d think. And the emotional impact lingers in the mind, too. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story that more potently symbolizes the horror and insanity of war. In a few pages the power of art is revealed: just a few people talking on a stage, pretending to be someone else somewhere else, quite obviously a
device
—and yet, at the end of it, you walk away feeling as if you’d lived through a war that’s ripped your life apart.

I’d love to see the play staged, and I can’t wait to see the movie.

Now that we’re closing down our literary duet, there are so many books I regret not sending you. Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Tristram Shandy
, Martin Buber’s
I-Thou
, Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger
, more of J. M. Coetzee, the list goes on.
Oh well, they will wait for you on a shelf in a bookstore or library somewhere. Books are patient. They have time. They’ll still be there long after you and I are gone.

What I’ve been trying to do in this long epistolary dead end with you, beyond the plying of irony, is to make the following point: that the books available in bookstores and libraries throughout Canada, that the exhibits to be seen in this nation’s galleries and museums, that the movies coming out of this country, that the plays and dance pieces seen on its stages, that the music heard in its concert venues, be they bars or orchestra halls, that the clothes that come from our designers, the cuisine from our best restaurants, and so on and so forth with every creative act of Canadians, that all these cultural manifestations are not mere entertainment, something to pass the time and relax the mind after the “serious” business of the day is over with, the earning of money—no, no, no. In fact, these manifestations are the various elements that add up to the sum total of Canadian civilization. Take these away and nothing worthwhile remains of Canadian civilization. Corporations come and go, leaving hardly any trace, while art endures.

Yet it is corporations and their voracious demands that regulate our lives nowadays, far more than theatres, bookstores and museums. Why is that? Why is it that people work so crazily hard these days, at the expense of family, health and happiness? Have we not perhaps forgotten that work is a means to an end, that we work so that we may live, and not the other way round? We’ve become slaves to our work and have forgotten that it’s in moments of leisure and stillness, when we’re free from working with a hoe or at a keyboard, that we can contemplate life and become fully ourselves. We work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as they move
forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves. And so that has been the point of my fruitless book-gifting to you: to raise my voice against Canada becoming a nation of erasers.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

W
AJDI
M
OUAWAD
(b. 1968) is a Lebanese-Canadian actor, playwright and director. His play
Littoral
won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, and
Incendies
was adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an Officer of the Order of Canada

Dear Mr. Harper,

I wanted to offer you one last book. All the books I sent you earlier were comparatively short, usually under two hundred pages. But this one is far, far longer. I’ve chosen to send you a six-volume box set of Marcel Proust’s complete
In Search of Lost Time
not to thump you with a 4,347-page club of irony, but because it’s a work I’ve been meaning to read for years. It’s surprising that I’ve never read
À la recherche du temps perdu
. After all, French is my mother tongue and I lived in France for ten years, the first four in the very arrondissement where Proust was born, the sixteenth. And I’ve read other very long novels,
The Brothers Karamazov
, by Dostoyevsky, and
War and Peace
, by Leo Tolstoy, for example. So why did I never take on Proust’s masterpiece? I suppose for the same reason that many books are left unread, a mixture of fear and slothfulness,
fear that I wouldn’t understand the work and unwillingness to spend so much intellectual energy reading all those pages. But as you and I both know, fear and slothfulness lead nowhere. Great achievements only come through courage and hard work. In sending you Proust’s monument, then, I’m reminding myself that I, too, must read it. I’m committed to reading it from start to finish before I die, and I hope you join me in making that same commitment.

Proust’s ten-page description of the eating of a madeleine is famous. It is, apparently, a bravura piece of writing, moving, profound, life-changing. The experience of reading
In Search of Lost Time
as a whole is said to be life-changing. I don’t need my life to change, I don’t think, but I do want to discover what people mean when they say that of Proust’s masterwork of nostalgia. I want to understand how ten pages can be devoted to the eating of a small cake and how my life could possibly be different afterwards. I invite you to join me, on your own time, in reading this mammoth novel. I do believe it will bring stillness to our souls.

And now our little book club truly comes to an end. The project has been, in many ways, as much a gift to me as it has been to you. Because of it, I have read or reread over one hundred books. I will miss the challenge of finding you a new short book every second week. But in foregoing that activity, I hope to find the lost time I need to read Marcel Proust. I hope you find the time, too.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

M
ARCEL
P
ROUST
(1871–1922) was a French novelist, critic and essayist. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an omission or error, please notify the publisher.

Animal Farm
by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1945) by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by M. D. Herter Norton. Copyright 1934, 1954 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., renewed (ca) 1962, 1982 by M. D. Herter Norton. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

“Bump, Bump, Bump Little Heart” by Milton Acorn. By permission of The Estate of Milton J. R. Acorn.

Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett, copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc.; copyright © renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston. Copyright 1937 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.; renewed © 1965 by John C. Hurston and Joel Hurston. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

“Chance” in
Runaway
by Alice Munro, copyright © 2004. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd. eBook published 2011. Used with permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from
A Right Honourable Summary
by Michèle Provost, used with permission of the author.

Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places
by Dave Bidini copyright © 2000. Published by McClelland and Stewart Ltd. Used with permission of the publisher.

Excerpts from
Eunoia
by Christian Bök, copyright © 2001. Used with permission of Coach House Books and the author.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Used with permission of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, London.

Charlotte’s Web
. Copyright 1952 by E. B. White. Text copyright renewed 1980 by E. B. White. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Excerpts from
Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments
by Sappho, translated by Aaron Poochigian, copyright © 2009. Used with permission of Penguin Books (UK) and the translator.

“The Road to Newfoundland” by Al Purdy,
Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy
, Harbour Publishing, 2000,
www.harbourpublishing.com

Excerpts from
The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs
by Cyril Edwards (2010). By permission of Oxford University Press.

Chess
by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell. Used with permission of Penguin Books (UK).

Excerpt from
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, translated and edited by James Winny. Copyright © 1992 by James Winny. Reprinted by permission of Broadview Press.