101 Letters to a Prime Minister

by Yann Martel

  BOOK 80:

  FOR THOSE WHO HUNT

  THE WOUNDED DOWN

  BY DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

  Sent to you by Steven Galloway

  April 26, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A great Canadian novel,

  With sincere regards,

  Steven Galloway

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  It’s me again. I hope you enjoyed the last book I sent you, King Leary. Even if you haven’t yet read it, or don’t intend to read it, I still hope you enjoyed receiving it. Unexpected and free books arriving in the mail have become, now that Santa Claus’s cover has been blown and the Easter Bunny unmasked, one of the few joyous gifts that come my way.

  The book I have enclosed for you is another one of my favourites. I was in university when I read it for the first time, and it became one of the books that made me want to become a writer. David Adams Richards’s novel For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down has one of the best titles of any Canadian novel, or any novel, period.

  I’m sending you this novel for several reasons. For starters, it’s a wonderful book. Few writers capture working-class life as well as Richards, and few are as able to make seemingly ordinary lives feel extraordinary. Richards has written thirteen novels, most of them set in New Brunswick. He was recently made a Member of the Order of Canada, and has won about every possible prize for his writing.

  I think that one thing Canada is good at is being able to productively discuss ideas where there is disagreement. Tomorrow, I’ll be getting up before the sun and flying from Vancouver to New Brunswick where I’ll be taking part in Moncton’s Frye Festival. All across Canada, literary festivals are organized by people making little or no money. They are attended by readers of all political stripes, who happily part with some of their hard-earned money to spend an afternoon or evening talking about and thinking about books and the ideas contained within them. Even when they don’t like the book. And the best festivals, the ones where people are the most energetic, are in places like Moose Jaw, Campbell River and Sechelt. These festivals are often supported in part by the federal government. For this I am thankful. It makes us a better country.

  Going to festivals is not about meeting the authors, though some people like that. But often meeting an author is a terribly disappointing event. Often the person’s not what you expect, isn’t as clever as their books, says something not so brilliant. And sometimes it’s the festival-goer’s fault. A few years ago, I was in my publisher’s office in Toronto for some reason or another, and I was told that David Adams Richards was in the building if I would like to meet him. Well, of course I would. We met as he was coming out of the lunch room, and he had a cup of coffee in his hand. I shook his free hand with too much gusto, which made him spill his coffee all over his shoe. It was completely my fault, and I felt like an idiot. Since then I have scrupulously avoided running into him again in the hope that he didn’t catch my name and that by the next time we meet I will have aged enough that he won’t recognize me.

  Why do I mention this in a letter to the elected leader of my country? In a roundabout way, I’m trying to show you that writers aren’t elitists. We often sound like we are, and occasionally we even act like we are—when you spend most of your time in a room by yourself, misunderstandings are bound to occur. But on a base level, we’re ordinary people who happen to be good at writing down stories. And I think our stories are a big part of this country. Go to Moncton or anywhere else and you’ll find a lot of people who think so too.

  With sincere regards,

  Steven Galloway

  DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS (b. 1950) is a Canadian novelist, poet, non-fiction writer and screenwriter. His novels include the Miramichi Trilogy and Mercy Among the Children, which was a co-winner of the Giller Prize (with Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost) in 2001. His book about fishing on the Miramichi, Lines on the Water, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His newest novel is The Lost Highway.

  BOOK 81:

  DIARY OF A MADMAN

  BY LU XUN

  Translated from the Chinese by William A. Lyell

  Sent to you by Charles Foran

  May 10, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  China’s Tolstoy, China’s Hugo,

  from a Canadian writer,

  with thanks,

  Charles Foran

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  I read a newspaper article about a poll conducted by the largest online media company in China. The poll produced a list of the country’s ten most significant cultural icons of the twentieth century, as chosen by the Chinese themselves. A full five of them were writers and three more were singers/actors. One, curiously, was a rocket scientist, while the final cultural icon was an obscure soldier who became the focus of a propaganda campaign.

  The names on the list were familiar to me from fifteen years of reading and writing about China, and five years of living in Beijing and Hong Kong. Three of the choices, author Louis Cha and singers/actors Leslie Cheung and Faye Wong, were alive until shortly before the poll was conducted. Others, such as author Lu Xun and opera singer Mei Lanfang, continue to exert influence many decades after their deaths. I noticed strong patterns to the selections and remarked on how difficult, and extraordinary, these lives had been. I decided as well that, while far from definitive, the list was sound, and a window onto the values and sentiments of the Chinese people.

  I also had a thought: imagine replacing these names with equivalents from the West. For Faye Wong, substitute Madonna; for Leslie Cheung, Elvis Presley with a twist. Mei Lanfang has been called China’s Paul Robeson, and scientist Qian Xuesan’s impact was akin to that of Robert Oppenheimer. Further back, Lao She’s novel Rickshaw asserted the same kind of moral force as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, while Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged could be likened to a Shanghai version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Louis Cha’s populist wuxia novels are the match of Zane Grey’s westerns and John Ford’s films. As for Lu Xun, the oldest and most revered of the ten, he has no exact parallel. To appreciate his significance, it is necessary to look to Tolstoy’s importance to nineteenth-century Russia or Victor Hugo’s to the Europe of his age.

  The exercise left me wondering to what extent most of us really know China. Can someone claim to know the United States, say, if they’ve never seen a western or heard of The Grapes of Wrath? If they are oblivious to how Elvis Presley and Madonna altered the pop landscape? Our understanding of China remains stubbornly imprisoned by the most obvious markers: its rapacious economy and repressive political system, a population of staggering size and expectations. Yet a country is foremost a culture and a culture is the sum of the values and efforts, dreams and yearnings, of the people who dwell in it. To understand a nation, you must be intimate with its dreams and with its dreamers.

  As it happens, Lu Xun has been a touchstone for me since I first started thinking about China. To the extent that this towering figure is known in the West, it is for his short stories, which literally birthed modern Chinese literature in the 1920s, and which remain vivid, unsettling examinations of a crumbling society and an enduring psyche. I hope you enjoy this sampling of Lu’s most essential work.

  Best wishes,

  Charlie Foran

  REPLY:

  May 20, 2010

  Dear Mr. Foran,

  On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your recent letters, with which you enclosed a copy of Century, by Ray Smith, and one of Diary of a Madman, by Lu Xun.

  The Prime Minister wishes me to convey his thanks for sending him these publications. You may be assured that your thoughtful gesture is most appreciated.

  Yours sincerely,

  S. Russell

  Executive Correspondence Officer

  LU XUN (1881–1936) was a Chinese essayist, short story w
riter, poet, teacher, editor and translator. His works were approved by the Communist Party, though he was never a member. He is considered one of the major Chinese writers of the twentieth century.

  BOOK 82:

  THE GREY ISLANDS

  BY JOHN STEFFLER

  Sent to you by Don McKay

  May 24, 2010

  Dear Prime Minister Harper:

  As everyone on the planet probably knows by now, Yann Martel is busy touring with his new book, and has asked other writers to take over in his absence. Today it is my pleasant duty to present you, and readers of his website, with a classic of Canadian writing, John Steffler’s The Grey Islands.

  When I say “classic,” I am placing it among other masterpieces of environmental writing like Thoreau’s Walden, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild; it is a book that engages wilderness in an intense way that alters our way of perceiving it. Unlike those texts, The Grey Islands is, technically, fiction, but it is based on John Steffler’s actual experience alone on the uninhabited Grey Islands off the coast of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. It contains some of the most vivid, and varied, writing anywhere, including prose narrative, lyric poetry (which frequently registers aspects of the place in acute close-up), tall tale, ghost story, essay, dream sequences, maps, census charts and songs. What emerges is an unforgettable evocation of this remote windswept island and a record of one man’s difficult passage into wilderness. But along with this, there’s an increasing focus on the former residents of the island and the fishermen who still visit it, the narrative opening itself to include their voices in the many-threaded weave.

  I’d be hard pressed to say whether I love this book more for its central story (the progress of the protagonist from town planner to pilgrim) or for its wonderful nooks and crannies. There is such economy in the language, and such a sure musical sense in Steffler’s ear, that each of the passages—whether in the voice of a Newfoundland fisherman or the narrator-as-poet—hums with its own energy. When I first read it, back in the eighties, I found it hard to believe he was really pulling it off, making a book so various, with such diverse parts, yet working as an organic whole. It still seems unlikely, as unlikely as Confederation, another structure whose mysterious strength—as Canadians discover over and over—lies in its diversity.

  I realize that this gift may be redundant—John Steffler having been the Parliamentary Poet Laureate a few years ago. (If you already have a copy, perhaps you wouldn’t mind passing this one along to another parliamentarian.) The Grey Islands should be as inescapable for Canadians as Walden is for those south of the border, an iconic book that sets dramatically before us, in a way that is richly complex, at once meditative and entertaining, the difficult and essential encounter with wilderness.

  As a bonus, I’m also including the talking-book version, published by Janet Russell of Rattling Books, the intrepid Newfoundland publisher of such distinguished books as Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot and Michael Crummey’s Hard Light—two more books that should be included in any Canadian’s reading repertoire. On the CD, narrated by John Steffler himself, you will also hear Frank Holden speaking the part of Carm Denny, a deceased resident of the island, thought to be mad. It’s a passage not to be missed, and includes the greatest bath scene anywhere. Eat your heart out, Hollywood. My thought is that, given what I’m sure is a very tight schedule, you might squeeze the CD in now, and reserve the book for a time of greater leisure.

  Strong writing enables us to live imaginatively as well as practically; it enlarges the scope of life. When it engages the theme of wilderness, it can also enhance our understanding of ourselves as citizens of the world, as well as of a country. Of course such understanding will embrace not only our hardihood and courage, but our disgraceful blindness to the value of wilderness in and for itself. While that blindness was certainly part of the colonial experience, it remains a lamentable feature of some current attitudes, attitudes often registered in government policy. In the end, reading books like The Grey Islands can help make us better, more thoughtful, inhabitants of the planet.

  I hope you will find this a stimulating addition to what must by now be a pretty fascinating, and eclectic, library.

  Yours sincerely,

  Don McKay

  JOHN STEFFLER (b. 1947) grew up in Ontario and now lives in Newfoundland. After working a variety of jobs, including carpenter, deckhand and shoemaker, he became an English professor. His books of poetry include That Night We Were Ravenous and The Grey Islands. His novel, The Afterlife of George Cartwright, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and won the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Steffler was Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2008.

  DON MCKAY (b. 1942) is a Canadian poet, professor and editor. His books of poetry, which frequently address ecology, include the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning Night Field and Another Gravity, and the Griffin Prize–winning Strike/Slip. McKay is a co-founder of Brick Books, a Member of the Order of Canada and a birdwatcher.

  BOOK 83:

  CALIGULA

  BY ALBERT CAMUS

  Translated from the French by Justin O’Brien

  Sent to you by René-Daniel Dubois

  June 7, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  Caligula, an extraordinary play

  About pain

  The quest for Power

  And human scale,

  With respect,

  René-Daniel Dubois, O.C.

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  It is with strong feelings that I send you today Caligula, by Albert Camus.

  You will note that I am enclosing two versions: one, the original, in French, of course, but also an English version, in a skilful translation by Stuart Gilbert.

  I think—mistakenly, perhaps, and please correct me if I am wrong—that if you are not yet familiar with this author, the opportunity of comparing form and content from one language to another can only prove to be enlightening.

  There are many reasons for my having chosen this work.

  Here are two of them.

  The year 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Albert Camus, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

  I usually refrain from categorizing authors as being either “major” or “minor”: I have always thought that literature is a treasure in which each contribution is essential, and the older I grow the clearer this becomes to me. There is a style or none, a voice or none. If there is a voice, there is literature. If not, it isn’t literature.

  However, Camus—among very few others—is clearly an exception. He not only talked, he dove in, canvassing the woven link between the soul of humanity and its rebellion. From this immersion, he brought back exceptional works, notably The Rebel, a deeply moving and passionate essay on the genesis and history of this rebellion, and Caligula, of course, the play which is the transposition of this Rebel. Not just a simple sketch, nor a dialogued representation, but more: an incarnation.

  If, for example, one compared The Rebel with the plans of a mechanical device as drawn by engineers, Caligula would constitute the locomotive itself, charging ahead, never veering from its course, crushing everything in its path.

  The second reason behind my choice relates to the fact that while the character of Emperor Caligula may have seemed to Camus to be an excellent illustration of the myth seething through the events of his time—just before World War II—it is certainly plausible to claim that in our time this myth acts overtly and has become … omnipresent. It has even succeeded, in the Western public sphere, at least, in repressing anything that might tend to contradict it. Revenge against life and its corollary, the cult of pure blind power, are to be seen everywhere today. Signs of their reign assault our eyes wherever we look.

  Albert Camus has left us an extraordinarily inspiring body of work that can undoubtedly help us to better defi
ne who we are, what drives us, and to better understand our fellow man as well as our era.

  At the heart of this work is Caligula.

  Albert Camus achieved with Caligula what Sigmund Freud, in his own times, did through Oedipus: from an ancient story, he brought forward an essential myth for all people of all eras. And he gave it a name.

  The storyline? Very simple.

  Caligula, the emperor of Rome, beloved by all, has just lost Drusilla, his sister who was also his lover. He becomes a monster. Why? Because this loss makes him see that, simply put, “Men die; and they are not happy.”

  Drusilla’s death has awakened in him a yearning for the impossible. In his quest, he will be ruthless.

  My wish for you, Mr. Prime Minister, is that reading this appalling yet magnificent play will provide you with as luminous a source of inspiration as it did for me.

  Respectfully,

  René-Daniel Dubois, O.C.

  ALBERT CAMUS (1913–1960) was an author, journalist, essayist, playwright and one of the essential philosophers of the twentieth century, primarily for his work on the theory of the Absurd. He was born in French Algeria, and participated in the French Resistance during World War II. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

  RENÉ-DANIEL DUBOIS (b. 1955) is a Quebec playwright, actor and director. His plays include the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning Ne blâmez jamais les bédouins and Being at Home with Claude, which was made into a film.

  BOOK 84:

  NIKOLSKI

  BY NICOLAS DICKNER

  Translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler