by Yann Martel
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
WAJDI MOUAWAD (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
P.S. BOOK 101:
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
BY MARCEL PROUST
Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence
Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright, in a six-volume box set
February 28, 2011
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
We must find the time,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
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
MARCEL PROUST (1871–1922) was a French novelist, critic and essayist. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
PERMISSION CREDITS
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.
The award-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, Self, Life of Pi, Beatrice & Virgil, and 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, YANN MARTEL was born in Spain in 1963. He studied philosophy at Trent University, worked at odd jobs—tree planter, dishwasher, security guard—and travelled widely before turning to writing. Life of Pi won the 2002 Man Booker, among other prizes, and was an international bestseller.
Yann Martel lives in Saskatoon with the writer Alice Kuipers and their children.