What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A whole-person work,
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,

You may have asked yourself on occasion what process I go through to select the books I have been sending you. Why don’t I answer that question in this letter.

Any book adheres to one convention or another—be it that of the Novel or the Biography—and all sentences are either conventionally grammatical or conventionally ungrammatical. It’s the rare, very rare writer who is genuinely unconventional, and usually their revolution is at one level only, affecting, say, point-of-view, while following the herd when it comes to punctuation. A writer who is unconventional on too many levels runs the risk of losing the reader, who can’t manage to get a solid footing on so much new territory and gives up the effort. Finnigans Wake, by the Irish writer James Joyce, is an example of such arduous total newness.

A book is a convention, then, as are the categories of thinking that produce books: Art, History, Geography, Science, and so on. That’s how we like it, we humans. We like orderly sentences and orderly books in much the same way we like orderly streets and orderly governments. Which is not to say that we are not bold creatures. We are; in fact, there is no bolder creature on Earth. To give you a non-literary example: in the late 1960s, the Americans marshalled together the conventions of science, engineering, management and financing, and as a result achieved the highly unconventional goal of popping two of their citizens onto the Moon.

Back to books. They are products of convention, but there are many conventions. I mentioned two already, the Novel and the Biography, which flow from two other conventions, Fiction and Non-fiction. Within each, there are sub-conventions, categories, genres. I have tended to send you books of fiction rather than non-fiction because fiction is a more worked-through interpretation of life. What do I mean by that? I mean that fiction is both more personal and more synthesized than non-fiction. Fiction is more whole-person. A novel is about Life itself, whereas a history remains about a specific instance of Life. A great Russian novel—remember the Tolstoy I sent you—will always have a more universal resonance than a great history of Russia; you will think of the first as being about you on some level, whereas the second is about someone else.

So that’s the first rule: a work of fiction. Now, there are many kinds of fictions. There is the literary novel, the thriller, the murder mystery, the satire, and so on. As you haven’t yet communicated to me your literary interests, and since it’s not for me to judge what you should read, I have not excluded any genre. Whatever book I send you must only be good; that is, once you’ve read it, you must feel wiser, or at least more knowledgeable. Or to put it another way, as I did many months ago, it must increase your sense of stillness.

The other considerations are simple: (1) I send you short books, generally under two hundred pages. You are probably busier than most people, and you probably feel that you are more importantly busy. I believe that’s an illusion. As a friend once told me, the only thing that will really go down in history is how we raise our children. The life of the Canadian people is determined and built by each and every Canadian, one small act at a time. There are twenty-four hours in a day and each one of us chooses how to fill those hours. No one’s hour is more important than anyone else’s. Nonetheless, it’s harder to follow an eight-hundred-page tome in fifteen minutes snatches than it is a slim novel.

(2) For the same reason that you likely don’t give yourself stretches of hours in which to wrap your mind around a convoluted story, I send you books that speak plainly.

(3) I send you books that are varied, that will show you all that the word can do. At the rate of one book every two weeks, this is a harder requirement to satisfy. There are so many good books out there, Mr. Harper. But I must pace myself. I am starting with older books, aiming to be foundational, and from there I will build up to books from our comparatively young nations of Canada and Quebec.

Within those broad criteria, I choose the books I send you in a spontaneous, nearly  random way, just whatever strikes me as possibly of interest to you. I also listen to the suggestions of others, as I did two weeks ago with Frye’s The Educated Imagination. (Did you enjoy it, by the way?)

But some rules are meant to be broken, and this week’s book is an example of that. Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo speaks plainly, but it’s a little too long by our criteria (fifty-eight pages over the limit), it’s Canadian and it’s so recent that it qualifies as prenatal: it hasn’t even been published yet. It’s supposed to come out in April of this year. The unadorned paperback you have in your hands is what publishers call an advance reading copy. It’s sent out to booksellers, journalists and book clubs to drum up interest and excitement in a book prior to its publication—sort of like politicians doing the summer barbecue circuit before an election. The general reading public does not normally see an advance reading copy. What you are holding in your hands is a rare item.

And it’s also a grand and powerful novel about how people retain or reclaim their humanity when they are under extreme duress. I’m sure you will hear about The Cellist of Sarajevo from other people than just me. It’s set during the brutal siege of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. That story was in the news for years, yet I think most of us just took it in dumbly, wondering how people could do that to each other. Well, Galloway’s novel explains how. It does the work of a good fiction: it transports you to a situation that might be alien to you, makes it familiar, and so brings understanding. That’s what I meant when I said fiction is “whole-person”. While reading The Cellist of Sarajevo you are imaginatively there, in Sarajevo, as the mortar shells are falling and snipers are seeking to kill you as you cross a street. Your mind’s eye sees, your moral sense is outraged: your full humanity is being exercised.

Yet The Cellist is a directed and digested take on reality, it’s not journalism. There is subtle intent woven into the realistic narrative of its three main characters. You will see that when you read the last line of the novel, which is magnificent.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed advance reading copy

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