What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

From London, England, I’m sending you an English translation of a French novel. In this novel people smoke, people get slapped in the face, people drink heavily and then drive home, people have nothing but the blackest coffee for breakfast, and always people are concerned with love. Very French d’une certaine époque.

Bonjour Tristesse came out in France in 1954. Its author, Françoise Sagan, was nineteen years old. Immediately she became a celebrity and her book a bestseller. More than that: they both became symbols.

Bonjour Tristesse is narrated in the first person by seventeen-year-old Cécile. She describes her father, Raymond, as “a frivolous man, clever at business, always curious, quickly bored, and attractive to women.” The business cleverness is never mentioned again, but clearly it has allowed Raymond to enjoy freely his other attributes, his frivolity, curiosity, boredom and attraction, all of which revolve around dalliances of the heart and loins. He and his beloved daughter share the same temperament and they are in the south of France for the summer holidays with Elsa, his latest young mistress. This triangle suites Cécile perfectly and she is assiduous at pursuing her idle seaside pleasures, which come to include Cyril, a handsome young man who is keen on her.

But all is ruined when her father invites Anne to stay with them. She’s an old friend of the family, a handsome woman her father’s age, made of sterner, more sober stuff. She starts to meddle in Cécile’s life. Worse, a few weeks after arriving, fun Elsa is dumped when Raymond starts a relationship with Anne. And finally, not long after, Anne announces that she and her father are planning to get married. Cécile is aghast. Her serial frolicker of a father and Anne, husband and wife? She, Cécile, a step-daughter to Anne, who will work hard to transform her into a serious and studious young person? Quel cauchemar! Cécile sets to work to thwart things, using Elsa and Cyril as her pawns. The results are tragic.

After the grim work of the Second World War and the hard work of the post-war reconstruction, Bonjour Tristesse burst on the French literary scene like a carnival. It announced what seemed like a new species, youth, la jeunesse, who had but one message: have fun with us or be gone; stay up all night at a jazz club or never come out with us again; don’t talk to us about marriage and other boring conventions; let’s smoke and be idle instead; forget the future—who’s the new lover? As for the tristesse of the title, it was an excuse for a really good pout.

Such a brash, proudly indolent attitude, coming with an open contempt for conventional values, landed like a bomb among the bourgeoisie. Françoise Sagan earned herself a papal denunciation, which she must have relished.

A book can do that, capture a time and a spirit, be the expression of a broad yearning running through society. Read the book and you will understand not only the characters but the Zeitgeist. Sometimes the book will be one a group strongly identifies with—for example, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, among American youth—or, conversely, strongly identifies against—Salman Rusdie’s The Satanic Verses among some Muslims.

So that too is what a book can be, a thermometer revealing a fever.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback book

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