What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel of fortunes made and lost,
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,

One of the curious aspects of the life and work of Pearl Buck is the speed with which she rose to fame and then sank into comparative obscurity. Her first book was published in 1930. Eight years later, at the remarkably young age of forty-six, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, only the third American so rewarded, and this, principally on the basis of the three novels that form the trilogy The House of Earth: The Good Earth (1931), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, Sons (1932), and A House Divided (1935). It is The Good Earth I am offering you this week.

Yet after this stellar start, despite continuing to produce quantities of books and fighting for many a good cause, Buck faded from the forefront of literature so that when she died in 1973 she was nearly a forgotten figure. The reasons for this are, I think, easy enough to discern. She wrote too many books—over eighty—and while a very able writer, she was no great experimenter. She didn’t renew the novel or its language the way Faulkner and Hemingway did, fellow Americans who are still widely read and studied. Nor can her books—or at least the ones I’m familiar with—be stamped with the label “universal”, which sometimes helps an author gain literary immortality. No, the books that made her name were remarkably local, even rooted. Pearl Buck was one of the first writers to bring to life for Western readers that country-civilization called China. It’s a country she knew well for having spent a good part of her life there as the daughter of Christian missionaries and then as a missionary and teacher herself. Despite the hardships she endured there at times, China was a country she loved. She saw its people as just that, people, and she observed them with great sympathy and mixed with them and, eventually, wrote about them. She was the writer-as-bridge, and many people chose to cross the bridge she built.

You will see why when you read The Good Earth. From the first line—”It was Wang Lung’s marriage day”—you slip into the skin of a Chinese peasant from pre-Communist times and you begin to live his life as he sees it and feels it. It’s a harsh story, blighted by poverty and famine, and harsher still for the women in it, but it’s also entirely engrossing. The Good Earth is the sort of novel you’ll be itching to get back to whenever you have to put it down. After reading it, you’ll feel that you know what it might mean to be Chinese at a certain time and in a certain part of China. Therein lies the passing nature of Buck’s work. China has changed radically since The Good Earth was published. What was new and revelatory then is now hoary and out of date. The main appeal of Buck’s work today is in the power of her stories rather than their currency.

Still, The Good Earth remains an excellent introduction to old China and a vivid parable on the fragility of fortune, how things gained can be lost, how what is built can easily be destroyed. This lesson will not be lost on you considering the political turmoil you are now going through. The fate of a politician is so terribly uncertain. Pearl Buck is a staple of every used bookstore. She is still widely read. Her name evokes fond memories. Whereas politicians, when they go, when they disappear from the stage, kicking and screaming sometimes, they really go, they vanish into oblivion so that quickly people scratch their heads, trying to remember when exactly they were in power and what they accomplished.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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