101 Letters to a Prime Minister

by Yann Martel

The book that accompanies this letter was heartily recommended to me by a bookseller. I’d never heard of it or of its author. I thought to myself, Well, why not? An obscure book that moved at least one reader. That makes it as valid as a book that moved a million. A little later, I mentioned my choice to a friend and she said, “Oh, he just won the Pulitzer Prize two days ago.”

  So much for the obscurity of Junot Díaz. I’m sending you Drown, his first book, a collection of short stories. It came out in 1996. It took Díaz eleven years to write his second book, the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for which he won, just a month ago, the Pulitzer.

  That’s one of the good things about literary prizes. They bring attention to books or authors that might otherwise be missed by readers. The life of the literary writer is mostly invisible, like the movement of lava under the surface of the earth. Poems, short stories and novels are published, they are reviewed here and there, sales are modest, the world forgets, the writer writes on. It sounds dull, it’s generally financially impoverishing, but hidden from view is the intoxication of being creative, the wrestling with words, the heaven of good writing days, the hell of bad ones, with at the end of it the sense that one has proven King Lear wrong, that something can come of nothing. A book is a bottle with a genie inside it. Rub it, open it, and the genie will come out to enchant you. Imagine being the one who put the genie in the bottle. Yes, it’s terribly exciting work.

  However, the world is strewn with such bottles, and many don’t get much rubbing. Sometimes that’s right, sometimes it’s unfair. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the writer continues to labour.

  Then, one day, you are told that five readers liked your book. And they’re the right readers, because they’re on the jury of a prize. In fact, they’ve decided to give you the prize. Suddenly the clouds of the book world part and you hear a booming voice say, “This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” You’re ceremoniously hauled out of obscurity. It’s not an unpleasant experience, far from it. I’m grateful for every nod I’ve ever received.

  But if I won, doesn’t it mean that someone lost? That’s the less appealing part of it, the feeling that you’ve become a racehorse, that you are competing, that there are winners and losers. History may decree that it is so, but it’s not how it feels on the inside. On the inside, you’re alone in your shop with your bottle and your genie.

  Back to Junot Díaz. Drown is a collection of ten short stories, ranging in length from six to thirty-nine pages. These are the first short stories I’ve sent you. You’ll find the experience quite different from reading novels. You’ll be changing gears more often, so to speak. Díaz is a Dominican-American and his stories cover what it means to have a hyphen in one’s identity, the potential for it to be a gulf, a dream, a strain, a loss. The English is peppered with Spanish, the tone is oral and informal, the characters profane and touching. It’s a world of kids left to themselves, where there’s no money and no father, no jobs and no prospects, only streets and harried mothers, drugs and fickle relations.

  Now how will these stories expand your stillness, you might ask, the stillness with which life is properly examined? The answer might be found in the following quote from the story “Boyfriend,” about a couple breaking up. The man comes by a few times to pick his stuff up:

  She let him fuck her every time, maybe hoping that it would make him stay but you know, once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving. I would listen to them going at it and I would be like, Damn, ain’t nothing more shabby than those farewell fucks.

  The toughness is surface. Beneath it is hurt and questioning. People are people, just trying to get by and make sense of things. No matter the language or the posing, the yearning for stillness is the same.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  JUNOT DÍAZ (b. 1968) is a Dominican-American novelist and short story writer. He and his family moved to New Jersey when he was six years old. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is his best-known work; it has earned him several awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and has been optioned for film. Díaz currently teaches creative writing at MIT and is the fiction editor at the Boston Review.

  BOOK 30:

  THE KREUTZER SONATA

  BY LEO TOLSTOY

  Translated from the Russian by Aylmer Maude

  May 26, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  Music, both beautiful and discordant,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Tolstoy again. Sixty weeks back I sent you The Death of Ivan Ilych, if you remember. This week it’s The Kreutzer Sonata, published three years later, in 1889. A very different book. As much as Ilych is an artistic gem, the realism seemingly effortless, the characters fully incarnate yet universal, the emotions finely expressed, the lyricism simple and profound, the portrayal of life and its fleetingness dead on, so to speak—in sum, as much as Ilych is perfect, The Kreutzer Sonata is imperfect. For example, the setting—a long train ride in which two passengers converse—comes off poorly because nearly the entire novella is taken up by the endless discourse of the main character, Pozdnyshev. Our nameless narrator just sits there, stunned into listening and memorizing the seventy-five-page tirade directed at him. It’s as clunky a device as one of Plato’s dialogues—without the wisdom, for the most part. The Kreutzer Sonata is a long rant about love, sex and marriage, with sideswipes at doctors and children, leading up to a vivid portrayal of insane jealousy, all of it told by an unconvicted murderer. Imagine that, a man telling you on a train, “I killed my wife. Let me tell you about it, since we’ve got all night.” I guess I wouldn’t interrupt him, either.

  Imperfect art, then. So why the interest? Because it’s still Tolstoy. Simple people lead simple lives. Complex people lead complex lives. The difference between the two has to do with one’s openness to life. Whether determined by misfortune—a congenital deficiency, a stunting upbringing, a lack of opportunity, a timid disposition—or determined by will—by the use and abuse of religion or ideology, for example—there are many ways in which life, one’s portion of it, can be regulated and made acceptably simple. Tolstoy was unregulated. He lived in a manner unbridled and unblinkered. He took it all in. He was supremely complex. And so there was much of life in his long life, life good and bad, wise and unwise, happy and unhappy. Thus the interest of his writings, because of their extraordinary existential breadth. If the earth could gather itself up, could bring together everything upon it, all men, women and children, every plant and animal, every mountain and valley, every plain and ocean, and twist itself into a fine point, and at that fine point grasp a pen, and with that pen begin to write, it would write like Tolstoy. Tolstoy, like Shakespeare, like Dante, like all great artists, is life itself speaking.

  But whereas Ilych elicits consonance in the reader, The Kreutzer Sonata elicits dissonance. In it, love between men and women does not really exist but is merely a euphemism for lust. Marriage is covenanted prostitution, a cage in which lust unhappily fulfills itself. Men are depraved, women hate sex, children are a burden, doctors are a fraud. The only solution is complete sexual abstinence, and if that means the end of the human species, all the better. Because otherwise men and women will always be unhappy with each other, and some men may be driven to killing their wives. It’s a bleak, excessively scouring view of the relations between the sexes, a reflection of Tolstoy’s frustration at the social constrictions of his times, no doubt, but nonetheless going too far, wrong-headed, objectionable. And so its effect, the scandal upon its publication, and the reaction it has to this day. Tolstoy does indeed go too far in The Kreutzer Sonata, but in it are nonetheless expressed all the elements—the hypocrisy and the outrage, the guilt and the anger—that were at the core of th
at greatest revolution of the twentieth century: feminism.

  As an aside, this second book by Tolstoy was a last-minute choice. There’s such a world of books out there to share with you that I thought one book per author as introduction was enough. After that, if you were interested, you could look up for yourself any given author’s other books.

  Only I wanted a book this week that touched on music. (I’ve forgotten to explain the title of Tolstoy’s novella. Pozdnyshev’s wife is an amateur pianist. The couple meets an accomplished amateur violinist by the name of Trukhashevsky, a man. The wife and he become, in all innocence, friends because of their mutual fondness for music. They decide to play Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, for piano and violin, together. In the wings, her husband grows angrier.) Why a book on music? Because serious music, at least as represented by new and classical music, is fast disappearing from our Canadian lives. I have belatedly learned of the latest proof of this: the CBC Radio Orchestra is to be disbanded. Already our public radio’s fare of music has been paltrified. There was once, Mr. Harper, a show called Two New Hours on CBC, hosted by Larry Lake. It played Canadian new music. Its last slot, surely the least desirable for any show, was on Sundays between 10 p.m. and midnight, too late for the early birds, too early for the night owls. Airing at that time, no surprise that few people managed to listen to it. When I did, though, I was grateful. New music is a strange offering. It is, as far as I can tell, music that has broken free. Free of rules, forms, traditions, expectations. Frontier music. New world music. Anarchy as music. Which might explain the screechy violins, the pianos gone crazy, the weird electronic stuff.

  I have intense memories of listening to Two New Hours and doing nothing but that. Because really, it’s impossible to read while your radio is sounding like two tractors mating. I suppose I’m more jaded when it comes to writing—jaded, jealous, bored, whatever. But I listened to Two New Hours out of pure curiosity. And I was surprised, moved and proud that there were creators out there responding to our world in such fresh and serious ways. Because it was clear to me: this was serious stuff, strange as it sounded. This was music that, under whatever guise, was the voice of a single person trying to communicate with me. And I listened, thrilled at the newness of it. That is, I listened until the show was cancelled.

  And now the CBC Radio Orchestra, the last radio orchestra in North America, is to be similarly cancelled. No more, “That was _______, played by the CBC Radio Orchestra, conducted by Mario Bernardi,” as I heard for years. Who will play us our Bach and Mozart now, our R. Murray Schafer and Christos Hatzis?

  It amazes me that at a time when Canada is riding the commodities wave to unprecedented wealth, with most levels of government experiencing budgetary surpluses, that we are ridding ourselves of a piddly little orchestra. If this is how we are when in fortune, how will we be when in misfortune?* How much culture can we do without before we become lifeless, corporate drones?

  I believe that both in good and bad times we need beautiful music.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  * The CBC Radio Orchestra was indeed disbanded at the end of November 2008. It is now trying to survive as the National Broadcast Orchestra, on a budget of one million dollars a year, peanuts compared to the money Western economies have lost thanks to incompetent bankers and politicians. We are now poorer in every way, with less classical music coming to us from the radio and less money in our pockets.

  BOOK 31:

  THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

  BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON

  June 9, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  An incandescent novel,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Some voices are barely heard. They are left to speak among themselves, worlds within worlds. Then someone listens, gives them artistic expression, and now the loss is lesser, because those voices have become eternal. Such is the achievement of the American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) with her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God. You will notice the language right away. There are two voices in the novel. One is the narrative voice that frames the story. It is lyrical, metaphor laden and formal. Take the first two paragraphs of the novel:

  Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

  Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

  The other voice is that of the characters, and it’s something else. They speak in the African-American vernacular, and you’ll hardly believe that English can do such things. A random example:

  “Well, all right, Tea Cake, Ah wants tuh go wid you real bad, but,—oh, Tea Cake, don’t make no false pretense wid me!”

  “Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah’m lyin.’ Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom.”

  It’s not cute, it’s not folkloric, it’s not patronizing. The effect is rather of a renewal of language. You read—you hear—as if you were hearing for the first time. And what you will hear is the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman whose voyage of self-discovery, with its hard-earned lessons, is told through her three marriages.

  The most significant element in the life of Zora Neale Hurston—even greater than that she was a woman—was that she was black. It is inconceivable that her writing—consisting of four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography and more than fifty shorter pieces—would have been the same had she been white. She was black in a white society that for two hundred years had held blacks in slavery. She was black in a society that was, at best, racial in its thinking, and, at worst, racist. I imagine that every day of her life there was some glance, some exchange, some limitation that reminded Hurston of the colour of her skin and what that was held to mean.

  Now, it’s hard, when you are perpetually made aware of one single element of your identity, be it the colour of your skin, the shape of your body, your sexual orientation, your ethnic heritage, whatever, not to linger and dwell on that element, not to become twisted and bitter as a result. Yet the miracle of Hurston’s art is that it manages not to linger and dwell, not to be twisted and bitter. Their Eyes Were Watching God is not a diatribe about racist America, though examples of racism are easily found in it. It is instead an incandescent novel about a character whose full humanity and destiny is explored—and she happens to be black.

  I suspect that if you read the first chapter of Their Eyes Were Watching God, you’ll read the other nineteen. You will read about Janie and Tea Cake, about love and muck, about happiness and disaster. And the worth of that—other than that you will have been entertained—is that for the duration of a story you will have entered the being of an African-American woman. You will have heard voices that you might otherwise never have heard.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  P.S. One of the joys of buying secondhand books is the unexpected treasures they sometimes contain. Case in point: a colour photo slipped out of your copy of Their Eyes when I opened it. A group shot. Nothing written on the back. Nine people camping: five women, three men, and one girl in a lifejacket. Though no doubt casually taken, note what an excellent photo it happens to be, how the way the people are arranged is aesthetically pleasing, the eye moving in an easy circle from the seated woman on the left to the girl on the right, how the group is slightly off-centre so that the feel of the shot is unstudied, how the peripheral elements are unobtrusive yet revealing. It struck me that the group is shaped in the form of an eye. We think we’re looking at them, but, in fact, they are an eye looking out at us, winking. P
erhaps that’s why they’re smiling, amused at the trick they’re playing on us, the viewer being viewed. I wonder what the story of these people is. Clearly they’re a family. Was this their book? Who among them read it? What stories do they have, what voices?

  ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1891–1960) was part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. She published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography and more than fifty essays, articles, short stories and plays. Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is written in a fluid and expressive vernacular, a bold stylistic choice that gave new literary voice to African-Americans. There was a revived interest in her work following a 1975 article published in Ms. Magazine by Alice Walker about Hurston’s writings.

  BOOK 32:

  THE REZ SISTERS

  BY TOMSON HIGHWAY

  June 23, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  So far, if there is one thing that your administration has done that will stand the test of time, it is the formal apology to the victims of the Canadian government’s Native residential school system. Policies come and go, are changed and forgotten, but an apology stands. An apology changes the course of history. It is the first step in true healing and reconciliation. I congratulate you on this important symbolic gesture.

  Since your mind was recently on Canada’s original inhabitants—and since National Aboriginal Day was just two days ago—it’s appropriate that I should send you Tomson Highway’s play The Rez Sisters. It too is of historical importance. Of the author, there’s an unusually long bio at the start of the book, a full four pages, so you can read there about the life of Tomson Highway, at least until 1988, when the play was published.