101 Letters to a Prime Minister

by Yann Martel

  Lion in the Streets, a play by Judith Thompson

  The poetry of Emily Dickinson (which makes me think, I haven’t sent you poetry in ages)

  Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga (I just looked it up on the internet—sounds really neat. Set in Rhodesia in the 1960s and ’70s, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story)

  Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

  Born to Be Good, by Dacher Keltner

  The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon

  The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty

  All the Names, by José Saramago

  Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell

  Les Belles-Sœurs, by Michel Tremblay

  One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez

  The Alphabet of Manliness, by Maddox

  American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

  The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff (the person who suggested it added, “This excellent book will teach him [that is, you] openness and how to value all people in our community and land. Be more like Pooh, less like Rabbit and Piglet!”)

  By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño (more on him later, in another letter. I’m thinking of sending you Amulet)

  Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (another Nigerian novel)

  Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson

  Voltaire’s Bastards, by John Ralston Saul

  The God of Small Things and Listening to Grasshoppers:

  Field Notes on Democracy, by Arundhati Roy

  The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

  Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay (“about the heartbreaking lengths it is sometimes necessary to go to in order to address the rule of tyrants”)

  Overqualified, by Joey Comeau

  Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie

  The Maintains, poetry by Clark Coolidge

  War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (about as long a novel as they get, and I’ve already sent you two Tolstoys, but you should get to W&P before you die)

  A Street Without a Name, author not given

  Foxfire, by Joyce Carol Oates (“The book I re-read when I want to remember why I write.”)

  Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a

  Potentially Dangerous Method, poetry by Daniel Scott Tysdal

  Death in the Afternoon, by Ernest Hemingway

  The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq

  Dream Boy, by Jim Grimsley

  L’Avalée des avalés, by Réjean Ducharme

  One Native Life, by Richard Wagamese

  Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon, by Nicole Brossard

  Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, by Mem Fox

  Mid-Course Correction, by Ray C. Anderson

  The End of the Story, by Lydia Davis

  Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille

  Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada, by Allan Casey

  The Mirror Has Two Faces, by C. S. Lewis (I find no book of that name by Lewis, only a 1996 American movie by and with Barbra Streisand, a remake of a 1958 French movie of the same name. I wonder what book the reader had in mind)

  Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse

  Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh

  The Art of Japanese Bondage, author unknown (!)

  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon

  The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

  The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

  A Woman in Berlin, anonymous

  The Crackwalker, by Judith Thompson (which is playing here in Saskatoon from March 4–7 and 11–14—you are hereby invited)

  Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi

  A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry

  Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger

  That’s quite the reading list. And a reading list as it should be: multinational and of all genres, and fresh from the minds of the people of Saskatoon.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  CHINUA ACHEBE (b. 1930) is a novelist, professor, poet and critic. He is professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of five novels, four short story collections, six books of poetry and numerous other books. In 2007, Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. He lives with his wife in Providence, Rhode Island.

  BOOK 74:

  EUNOIA

  BY CHRISTIAN BÖK

  February 1, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A book in praise of soaring over limits,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Have you ever felt limited by language? I’m sure you have. A common instance would be when you’re speaking with someone and you want to convey an idea, but you’ve momentarily forgotten the word, it remains on the proverbial tip of your tongue, and you struggle to explain what you mean to say in a roundabout way. Another common occurrence of language limiting expression is when one is speaking in a foreign language. You, for example, have made admirable efforts to learn French, but it remains a language with which you’re not fully comfortable. When you give a speech in French, I’m sure you prefer to speak from a written text vetted by a native speaker, and when you have to ad lib, I imagine you seek safety in the set phrases and expressions that you’ve learned; otherwise, you must struggle, trying to express your meaning in the limited knowledge you have of the language. In English, by contrast, you must feel no sense of limitations. I imagine you feel, like most native speakers of a language feel, that what you think, you express, effortlessly and without any delay or searching.

  Of course, this sense of freedom, this perfect match between thought and expression, is an illusion born of comfort and familiarity. Faced with an utterly new experience, whether beatific or horrific, we often lose the capacity to speak, we are rendered speechless. And expression is more than simply a question of vocabulary. Experiences that are not emotionally overwhelming but intellectually complex can also have us struggling to speak meaningfully. In such situations, it is not necessarily words that fail us, but the preliminary understanding that leads to the choice of words. All this to say that sometimes we are tongue-tied—and we don’t like it. We value expression. So, humming, hawing, non-sequituring, we struggle until we manage to put idea or experience into words.

  The book I am sending you this time—the poetry collection Eunoia, by the Canadian writer Christian Bök (pronounced “book”), both the book and the CD (read with great gusto by the author)—is all about limitations and the soaring over-passing of them. Bök, a fervent admirer of Oulipo, the French experimental writers’ collective, has taken one of their favourite techniques, the lipogram, to a very high level. A lipogram is a composition in which a letter is missing throughout. A fine example of a lipogram is Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition, written entirely without the most-used vowel in French, the letter e. If you think a lipogram sounds like a gimmick, think again. In the case of the Perec novel, the letter e in French is pronounced the same as the word eux, them. La Disparition refers not only to the disappearance of a letter, but of them. Them who? Well, to start with, Perec’s parents, who were Jewish and who were swallowed up by the Holocaust. La Disparition is a metaphor on the wiping-out of a good part of Jewish civilization in Europe, something very much equivalent to an alphabet losing one of its key letters. No gimmickry there, I don’t think.

  Bök has taken the challenge even further. With Eunoia, he has written a series of poems that omit not just one letter, but several, and not consonants, of which there are many, but vowels, and not just one, two or three vowels per poem, but four vowels. That leaves just one vowel per poem. The opening lines of the collection foreshadow the treat you’re in for:

  Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art …

  The hero of the vowel A is the Arab Hassan Abd a
l-Hassad, while E features Greek Helen, who

  Restless, she deserts her fleece bed where, detested, her wedded regent sleeps. When she remembers Greece, her seceded demesne, she feels wretched, left here, bereft, her needs never met.

  Who would have thought that Homer’s Iliad could be retold using just one vowel? The vowel I allows the author to speak about his project and defend it:

  I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz—griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.

  In O we read that

  Porno shows folks lots of sordor—zoom-shots of Björn Borg’s bottom or Snoop Dogg’s crotch. Johns who don condoms for blowjobs go downtown to Soho to look for pornshops known to stock lots of lowbrow schlock—off-color porn for old boors who long to drool onto color photos of cocks, boobs, dorks or dongs.

  With O, we also get a wink at Clockwork Orange, the novel by Anthony Burgess I sent you a while ago:

  Crowds of droogs, who don workboots to stomp on downtrod hobos, go on to rob old folks, most of whom own posh co-op condos.

  Even U, that vowel the sight of which makes a Scrabble player’s heart sink, manages to speak on its own:

  Kultur spurns Ubu—thus Ubu pulls stunts.

  So it goes, the wit and inventiveness dancing across the pages, the stock of single-vowel words of the English language expended to discuss a surprising range of topics, from the bawdy to the lyrical, from the pastoral to the historical.

  And the purpose of it all? It may seem to you to be a mere game, with the lack of seriousness that one might associate with playing. To that, two responses: first, in playing, in toying, come discoveries, the result of chance juxtapositions; and second, language is never just about itself. This language-playing that Bök delights us with comments on the world because every word, whether invested with one vowel or five, connects eventually to a concrete reality. So speaking in mono-vowels though he is, Bök is also speaking volumes. Eunoia, which means “beautiful thinking” and is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, is a narrow but perfect work. It is a gambol through language, and it would be a sad mistake to dismiss it as merely facetious, which word—lo!—contains all five vowels in order. After such wordplay, the tongue is better fixed in the mouth and expression comes more easily.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  CHRISTIAN BÖK (b. 1960) is an experimental poet. He teaches in the English department at the University of Calgary. He is the author of three books.

  BOOK 75:

  NADIRS

  BY HERTA MÜLLER

  Translated from the German by Sieglinde Lug

  February 15, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A book from far away,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  It happens every few years that the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a source of surprise and consternation. The gasp is audible nearly around the world: “Who?!” That’s exactly how I reacted in 2004, I remember. I’d never heard of Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who was the recipient that year. Of course, German-language readers surely knew of her and no doubt applauded her win. The Nobel Committee has the wisdom and discernment to cast its net wide, finding worthy winners in writers who are not well known or who write from cultures on the margin of our Anglo-American-dominated world. I discovered Elias Canetti, for example, a wonderful writer, when I had another “Who?!” moment way back in 1981.

  Well, Stockholm has done it again. A few months ago, the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced and it was—move over, Elfriede—another “obscure” woman writer who writes in German, Herta Müller. And since the Winter Olympics are on right now in Vancouver, with hosts of foreign athletes visiting our land, I thought I would heed the Nobel Committee’s high commendation and offer you something by Herta Müller. Nadirs, her first book, a collection of short stories, is the only one I could find at McNally Robinson. It is a curious book. Right off, it feels foreign. We don’t write like that in English. It’s not a matter of translation. I wouldn’t know it, not speaking German and so not able to compare the original with the translation, but I doubt the book is poorly translated. It is rather the sensibility. The writing feels impersonal, nearly mechanical, it is laconic in the extreme and there is little effort at being beautiful. The stories, except for anecdotal bursts, are plotless. They’re full of details, yet many of them are unreal, dreamlike, nightmarish.

  It helps to know a little about Herta Müller: she’s from a German-speaking region of Romania called the Banat. A minority speaker in a poor country: that would explain the sensibility, so different from mine. I’m sometimes struck by the strange inner realities that come from central and eastern Europe. There are books from parts of the world that should feel more alien to me—for example, the book I sent you a month ago: Things Fall Apart, from Nigeria—yet don’t feel so alien to me. I felt quite comfortable slipping into the African skin of Okonkwo. And then Europe, my ancestral continent, a continent on which I lived ten years, three of whose languages I speak, whose majority religion I broadly adhere to, whose people look and dress like me, produces stories that completely puzzle me. Perhaps it’s the result of that very European mix of cultural diversity, economic chaos and political misery. Whatever the case, I read Nadirs and I thought, “Gosh, those Germans certainly know how not to have fun.”

  A worthy book nonetheless. A reminder that great literature brings us to foreign shores and makes us less narrow.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  HERTA MÜLLER (b. 1953) is a novelist, poet, short story writer, editor and essayist. She was born in Romania and now lives in Berlin.

  BOOK 76:

  ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

  BY ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

  Translated from the Russian by Bela Von Block

  March 1, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A novel about terrible governance,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  The coolest thing happened to me last week. There was a stiff, mid-size envelope in my mailbox. I don’t get as much mail as you do, but I do get my fair share (and I don’t have any staff to help me with it). So what was this, what request, what demand? I noted that it came from the United States. I opened it. Between two pieces of cardboard, a smaller envelope slipped out. On the front, top left, was the return address: The White House, Washington, DC 20500. I was intrigued. The White House? I opened the envelope, and there it was, on White House letterhead, a handwritten note from President Obama.

  I do believe my heart skipped a beat. A week later I’m still gingerly taking the note out to marvel at it. The President of the United States wrote to me—to me! For sure I’m going to have the note framed. If there was a way of tattooing it on my back, I would. What amazes me is the generosity of it. As you would know, there is a large measure of calculation in what public figures do. But here, what does he gain? I’m not a US citizen. In no way can I be of help to President Obama. Clearly he did it for personal reasons, as a reader and as a father. And in two lines, what an insightful analysis of Life of Pi. Bless him, bless him.

  Not all heads of government are as good. For proof, the book I’m sending you this week, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Joseph Stalin made his people miserable for all of his reign as leader of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953. Or to put it more accurately, whatever good he did was obliterated by the nearly immeasurable evil that came with it. The title of most heinous dictator of the twentieth century of course goes to Adolf Hitle
r, but Hitler burned out quickly, in twelve years, and was atypical of German leadership. Stalin, in contrast, lasted. He died an old man, still in power, a beacon of steady and stable evil. And while his crimes—social upheaval, economic catastrophe, massive and systematic human rights violations, widespread famine and poverty—were worse than those of his predecessors or successors, Russia didn’t fare well before him under the Tsars, didn’t fare well after him under the Soviet leaders that followed, and isn’t faring well under the authoritarian regime now in place. I am reminded of that adage “Man’s inhumanity to Man,” but with a variation for this case: “Russians’ inhumanity to Russians.” It has always puzzled me how the Russians, despite the blazing individual geniuses they have produced in the arts and sciences, have otherwise been such a calamity to themselves (and to the Europeans who had the misfortune of living in the shadow of their empire). What other country has produced a Nobel Peace Prize winner—Mikhail Gorbachev—who sought only to liberate his people from themselves? And this, in a country that has never been colonized and whose ills cannot be blamed on others.

  There’s a paragraph on page 104 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that summarizes the attitude I’m talking about:

  He could barely stand any longer. But he kept on somehow. Shukhov [that is, Ivan Denisovich] had once had a horse like that. He had thought highly of the horse, but had driven it to death. And then they had skinned the hide off him.

  He had thought highly of the horse, but had driven it to death—and with no explanation as to why. It’s just what you do. And the “he” mentioned at the start is not another horse but a human being, a fellow prisoner, one whom Ivan Denisovich also thinks highly of and will just as blithely see worked to death. One feels like crying out, “Where’s the humanity, the benevolence, the compassion?” Well, there’s precious little of that in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This short novel tells the story of an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary prisoner in the Gulag, the massive forced-labour camp system that was nearly a parallel society in Communist Russia. At most, the roughest of fraternity is fleetingly expressed during moments when fear and want have momentarily abated. At all other times, each prisoner strictly looks out for himself. It makes for appalling living, lucidly documented by Solzhenitsyn, and a searing indictment of what Stalin did to his own people.