What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper
From an English writer
With best wishes
Jeanette Winterson
(sent to you by a Canadian writer, Yann Martel)

Letter:

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

Dear Mr. Harper,

The great thing about reading books is that it makes us better than cats. Cats are said to have nine lives. What is that compared to the girl, boy, man, woman who reads books? A book read is a life added to one’s own. So it takes only nine books to make cats look at you with envy.

And I’m not talking here only of “good” books. Any book—trash to classic—makes us live the life of another person, injects us with the wisdom and folly of their years. When we’ve read the last page of a book, we know more, either in the form of raw knowledge—the name of a gun, perhaps—or in the form of greater understanding. The worth of these vicarious lives is not to be underestimated. There’s nothing sadder—or sometimes more dangerous—than the person who has lived only his or her single, narrow life, unenlightened by the experience, real or invented, of others.

The book I am sending you today is a perfect instance of a story that offers you another life. It is a Bildungsroman (from the German, literally a “novel of education”), a novel that follows the moral development of its main character. Because it’s told in the first person, the reader can easily slip into the skin, see through the eyes, of the person speaking. Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a brief 170 pages, but during those pages you become “Jeanette”, the main character. Jeanette is a young woman who lives in small-town England a few decades ago. Her mother loves the Lord in a big way, and so does Jeanette. But the problem is, the problem becomes, that Jeanette also loves women in a big way. And those two—loving the Lord and loving women when you are yourself a woman—are not compatible, at least according to some who love the Lord and take it upon themselves to judge in His name.

Written in sparkling prose, Oranges is the sad, funny, tender tale of a young woman who must break into two pieces and then choose which of the two she wants to become. And that, having to make hard choices, having to choose between competing loves and lives, having to lose oneself so that one might find oneself, is instructive—besides highly entertaining—not only to adolescent Lancashire lesbians, but to me, to you, to everyone who is interested in making the most of life.

So enclosed, a fifteenth book, a fifteenth life.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Note the dedication. A book signed by the author herself. I had the good luck of meeting Jeanette Winterson in England recently and she kindly inscribed a copy of her book to you.

encl: one inscribed paperback book

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