101 Letters to a Prime Minister

by Yann Martel

  “To be so bent on marriage, to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I would rather be teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.”

  “I would rather do anything than be teacher at a school,” said her sister. “I have been at school, Emma, and know what a life they lead; you never have. I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself, but I do not think there are many very disagreeable men; I think I could like any good-humoured man with a comfortable income.”

  How sad to have the most important profession in the world thought of as worse than what has facetiously been called the oldest profession in the world. Thankfully, things have changed. Today, the middle class in Canada has expanded to absorb all other classes, so that practically everyone is of the working class, the class that works, and the sinking and the soaring is called mobility, and it is a triumph of our time that women can avail themselves of that mobility (though still not as much as men—there’s still some liberating work that needs doing).

  But back to Jane Austen: boxed in, left only to play card games, look forward to the next ball and keep an eye out for eligible bachelors, surrounded by green pastures and rolling hills, does this strike you as promising grounds for great art?

  Well, in the case of Jane Austen, it was. Because she had the great and good luck of having a loving and intellectually lively family, and she was blessed with a keen and critical sense of observation, as well as an inherently positive disposition.

  So though limited by class and by sex, Jane Austen was able to transcend these limitations. Her novels are marvels of wit and perspicacity, and in them she examined her society with such fresh and engaging realism that the English novel was durably changed.

  The Watsons is easily Jane Austen’s least-known work. But I selected it for you for two reasons: it is short, and it is unfinished. Its shortness will I hope make you want to read some of Austen’s longer novels, Pride and Prejudice or Emma perhaps.

  And though it is unfinished, an abandoned draft, there is more perfection in it than in many a completed novel. Austen abandoned The Watsons in 1805 as a result of personal difficulties: the death of a good friend, and right afterwards the illness and death of her own father, which left her and her sister and her mother in uncertain circumstances. Eventually, four years later, her brother Edward was able to provide his mother and sisters with a cottage, and Austen began writing again.

  She let go and then started up again, able to produce novels that marked the English novel forever. In that, there is something instructive. There is so much we must leave unfinished. How hard it is to let go.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  JANE AUSTEN (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose realist works offer strong female characters and biting social commentary. She never married, and lived with her family until her death at the age of forty-one. Several of her novels have been adapted for the screen. Her novels are still popular today, and Pride and Prejudice has inspired modern spoofs including Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, the Bollywood film Bride & Prejudice directed by Gurinder Chadha, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, adapted from Austen’s original novel by Seth Grahame-Smith.

  BOOK 12:

  MAUS

  BY ART SPIEGELMAN

  September 17, 2007

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  This most disturbing and necessary book,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  I am sorry but you will have to endure this time a letter written in my terrible handwriting. I didn’t manage to find a printer in Oświęcim, the small Polish town where I’m staying at the moment.

  Oświęcim is better known by the name the Germans gave it: Auschwitz. Have you been?

  I am here trying to finish my next book. And it also explains my choice of the latest book I am sending you: the graphic novel Maus, by Art Spiegelman. Don’t be fooled by the format. This comic book is real literature.

  Some stories need to be told in many different ways so that they will exist in new ways for new generations. The story of the murder of nearly six million of Europe’s Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis and their criminal accomplices is just the sort of story that needs renewing if we don’t want a part of ourselves to fall asleep, like grandchildren nodding off after hearing grandfather repeat the same story of yore one time too many.

  I know I said I would send you books that would increase your “stillness.” But a sense of peace and calm focus, of what Buddhists call “passionate detachment,” must not fall into self-satisfaction or complacency. So a disturbance—and Auschwitz is profoundly disturbing—can be the right way to renew one’s stillness.

  Maus is a masterpiece. Spiegelman tells his story, or, more accurately, the story of his father and mother, in a bold and radical way. It’s not just that he takes the graphic form, thought perhaps by some to be a medium only for children, to new artistic heights by taking on such a momentous topic as exterminationist genocide. It’s more than that. It’s how he tells the story. You will see. The narrative agility and ease of it. And how the frames speak large. Some, small though they are, and in black and white, have an impact that one would think possible only with large paintings or shots from a movie.

  And I haven’t even mentioned the main device, which explains the title of the book: all the characters have the heads of one kind of animal or other. So the Jews have the heads of mice, the Germans of cats, the Poles of pigs, the Americans of dogs, and so on.

  It’s brilliant. It so takes you in, it so rips you apart. From there you must make your own tricky way back again to what it means to be human.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  ART SPIEGELMAN (b. 1948) is a Swedish-born American comic artist who was part of the underground comics movements of the 1960s and ’70s, contributing to several publications and co-founding Arcade and Raw. He was a co-creator of garbage candy and Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Named one of TIME magazine’s “Top 100 Most Influential People” in 2005, he has won multiple awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for Maus and its sequel, Maus II. He continues to publish new work and promote the comic medium, and in 2004 published a large board book, In the Shadow of No Towers, about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City.

  BOOK 13:

  TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

  BY HARPER LEE

  October 1, 2007

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  In an interview some years ago Mavis Gallant mentioned an operation she underwent. She awoke from general anaesthesia in a state of mental confusion. For several minutes she couldn’t remember any details of her identity or of her life, not her name or her age or what she did, not where she was nor why she was there. An amnesia that was complete—except for this: she knew she was a woman and that she was thinking in English. Inextricably linked to the faintest glimmer of consciousness were those two identity traits: sex and language.

  Which says how deep language goes. It becomes part of our biology. Our lungs need and are made for air, our mouths and stomachs need and are made for nutrition; our ears and noses can hear and smell and, lo, there are things to be heard and smelled. The mind is the same: it needs and is made for language, and, lo, there are things to be said and understood.

  I am no champion of any particular language. Every language, from Afrikaans to Zulu, does the job it is required to do: map the world with sounds that conveniently identify objects and concepts. Given a little time, every living lan
guage spoken by a sufficient number of people will match any new object or concept with a new word. Have you heard the notion of how the Inuit are supposed to have twenty-six words for snow, while we in English have only the one, “snow”? Well, that’s nonsense. Ask avid English-language skiers and they’ll come up with twenty-six words or compounds to describe snow.

  Just as there are many cuisines on this earth, many styles of dress and many understandings of the divine, each of which can keep the stomach content, the body smartly covered and the soul attuned to the eternal, so there are many different kinds of sounds with which we can make ourselves understood. Each language has its own sonority, cadence, specialized vocabulary, and so on, but it all evens out. Each of us can be fully human in any language.

  But since you are a native English speaker, let me champion English in this letter as an introduction to the latest semi-monthly book I am sending you. The English language has by far the largest vocabulary of any language on earth, well over 600,000 words. French, by comparison, is said to have 350,000 words and Italian, 250,000. Now right away, before I get jumped upon by those from my native province and all my Italian-speaking friends, this exuberance of vocabulary is largely irrelevant. Just 7,000 words represent 90 percent of the root vocabulary the average English speaker uses.

  And let’s not forget: the voluble Italians showed no reticence in launching—and thoroughly enjoying—their Renascimento with their fewer words while the reserved Britons sat in their dark and dank island idling away the hours of pouring rain by wondering whether they should adopt the Italian word for that explosion of optimism and sunshine or call it the Rebirth or the Renaissance.

  How did a local-yokel language spoken on an island—truly, an insular language—come to span the globe? The explanation can be summarized in two words: invasions and counter-invasions; that is, colonialism. The Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons was immeasurably enriched by a number of invasions. In linguistic terms, the Christianization of Britannia was a beachhead, the Norman invasion of 1066 was a flood, and the Renaissance was a flourish. After that, the verbally empowered English set out to conquer the world, a great plundering that made them wealthy, not only with other people’s gold but also with other people’s words.

  English is a hot stew of many ingredients. In it can be found words that have their origin in Arabic, Breton, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Gaelic, Hindi, Inuit, Japanese, Latin, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Welsh, to mention only a selection. And that’s only vocabulary. English usage—how people speak their English—is also extraordinarily varied.

  And that’s the reason for my gift to you this time: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. It’s a modern classic, a great story, one that will make you love lawyers, but it’s for the usage that I chose it. Rural Alabama English of the 1950s as spoken by children is something else. And yet it is English, so you will understand it without a problem. That is the rare privilege of those who speak English: in reading untranslated books from every continent they can feel both at home and abroad.

  Bonne lecture!

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  HARPER LEE (b. 1926) is an American writer, best-known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. This novel, which is frequently taught in schools to this day, was made into an Academy Award–winning film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. Many autobiographical elements are present in the novel, and the character of Dill is based on Lee’s lifelong friend Truman Capote. After publishing her book to instant acclaim and long-lasting success, Lee retreated from public life. To date, To Kill a Mockingbird is the only work she has published beyond the scope of magazines.

  BOOK 14:

  LE PETIT PRINCE

  BY ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

  October 15, 2007

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  Ce livre en français,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Cher Monsieur Harper,

  Vous parlez le français. Vous avez fait de grands et fructueux efforts pour apprendre et parler cette langue depuis que vous êtes premier ministre. Vous espérez ainsi apprivoiser les Québécois.

  Par ailleurs, la dernière fois, je vous ai beaucoup entretenu de l’anglais. Alors cette fois-ci je vous envoie un livre en français. Il est très connu. C’est Le Petit Prince, de l’écrivain français Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Vous l’avez peut-être lu au cours de vos études mais il saura vous être encore assurément très utile, non seulement pour maintenir votre français, mais aussi pour vous aider auprès des Québécois, puisque Le Petit Prince c’est aussi l’histoire d’un apprivoisement, dans ce cas-ci, d’un renard.

  Le renard fait cadeau d’une très importante leçon au Petit Prince, mais je ne vais pas la répéter. Je vous laisse la redécouvrir.

  Le vocabulaire est simple, les scènes claires à comprendre, la morale évidente et attachante. C’est en fait un conte chrétien.

  Vous allez soupirer, “Si seulement les Québécois étaient aussi faciles à apprivoiser que les renards.”

  Mais nous sommes plutôt, nous Québécois, comme la fleur du Petit Prince, avec notre orgueil et nos quatre épines.

  Cordialement vôtre,

  Yann Martel

  [TRANSLATION]

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  You speak French. You’ve made great and fruitful efforts to learn the language since you became Prime Minister. You hope in this way to tame Quebeckers.

  In my last letter, I discussed the English language. So this time I’m sending you a book in French, one that is very well known. It’s The Little Prince, by the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. You perhaps read it during your French-language studies, but I’m certain it will still be of use to you, not only to help you maintain your French, but also to help you with Quebeckers, since The Little Prince is also the story of a taming, in this case of a fox.

  The fox teaches the Little Prince a very important life lesson, but I won’t divulge it here. I’ll leave it for you to find it.

  The vocabulary is simple, the scenes easy to understand, the moral obvious and endearing. It’s a Christian tale.

  You’ll sigh, “If only Quebeckers were so easy to tame.”

  But we Quebeckers are rather like the Little Prince’s flower, with our pride and our four thorns.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY (1900–1944), a French novelist and artist, is most famous for his illustrated philosophical novella, Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). This story is so beloved that Saint-Exupéry’s drawing of the Little Prince was printed on the French 50-franc note until the introduction of the euro. Saint-Exupéry was an aviator and, in most of his works, including Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars, he drew on his experiences as a pilot. He worked as a pilot for the postal service for years. During World War II, he flew reconnaissance missions for the Allies. On one of these flights he went missing and was presumed dead.

  BOOK 15:

  ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT

  BY JEANETTE WINTERSON

  October 29, 2007

  To Stephen Harper,

  From an English writer,

  With best wishes,

  Jeanette Winterson

  (Sent to you by a Canadian writer, Yann Martel)

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  The great thing about reading books is that it makes us better than cats. Cats are said to have nine lives. What is that compared to the girl, boy, man, woman who reads books? A book read is a life added to one’s own. So it takes only nine books to make cats look at you with envy.

  And I’m not talking here only of “good” books. Any book—trash to classic—makes us live the life of another person, injects us with the wisdom and folly of their years. When we’ve read the last page of a book, we know more, either in the form of raw knowledge—the name of a gun, perhaps—or
in the form of greater understanding. The worth of these vicarious lives is not to be underestimated. There’s nothing sadder—or sometimes more dangerous—than the person who has lived only his or her single, narrow life, unenlightened by the experience, real or invented, of others.

  The book I am sending you today is a perfect instance of a story that offers you another life. It is a Bildungsroman (from the German, literally a “novel of education”), a novel that follows the moral development of its main character. Because it’s told in the first person, the reader can easily slip into the skin, see through the eyes, of the person speaking. Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a brief 170 pages, but during those pages you become “Jeanette,” the main character. Jeanette is a young woman who lives in small-town England a few decades ago. Her mother loves the Lord in a big way, and so does Jeanette. But the problem is, the problem becomes, that Jeanette also loves women in a big way. And those two—loving the Lord and loving women when you are yourself a woman—are not compatible, at least according to some who love the Lord and take it upon themselves to judge in His name.

  Written in sparkling prose, Oranges is the sad, funny, tender tale of a young woman who must break into two pieces and then choose which of the two she wants to become. And that, having to make hard choices, having to choose between competing loves and lives, having to lose oneself so that one might find oneself, is instructive—besides highly entertaining—not only to adolescent Lancashire lesbians, but to me, to you, to everyone who is interested in making the most of life.