What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

for Runaway:

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

for The Door:

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

for Camino:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Haunting, beautiful music,
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,

Have you called Alice Munro? I remember when I won the Booker Prize I got a phone call from Prime Minister Chrétien. I was living in Berlin at the time, he was calling from Ottawa, so the call required a little bit of organizing. I spoke with an aide, he took my phone number and we agreed on a time the next day. At the appointed time, the phone in my office rang, I answered and it was Jean Chrétien. Though I knew it would be him, it still came as a shock. I had the Prime Minister of Canada on the line! And he wanted to talk to me! We spoke for a few minutes. He congratulated me on my win. I replied I was happy to have won a third Booker for Canada. He said he found writing a book hard work. He was referring to his memoir, Straight from the Heart. Writing a book is hard work, I said, but well worth the effort. He agreed. We went on like this for a few minutes, two strangers chatting amiably. Then he said he had to go, I promptly thanked him for calling me, saying I was honoured, and I wished him a good day. He thanked me and wished me the same. I was touched that a man so busy and important should take a moment to speak to me. After all, what did he gain from it? It was a private phone call to one Canadian. At most, he might gain one vote. But that wasn’t the reason. He was Prime Minister of Canada, Prime Minister of all Canadians, and clearly he felt it was his duty to speak to a Canadian writer who had just received a high honour, even if he hadn’t read the book for which that writer was honoured.

And now Alice Munro has been honoured with the International Booker Prize, given out only once every two years to a writer for their outstanding achievement in fiction. After the Albanian writer Ismael Kadare in 2005, after the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe in 2007, our very own Alice Munro has won the 2009 International Booker Prize. Highly worthy of commendation, no?

In honour of Alice Munro, I’m sending you this week her 2004 collection of short stories, Runaway, both in print form and as an audiobook read by the actor Kymberly Dakin. There’s no particular reason why I chose to send you the audiobook. I just happened to see that it was available and what with it being summer and the travelling that summer often brings on, I thought it might be pleasant for you to pop the CDs, nine in all, into your car’s CD player and involve yourself in Munro’s intimate stories. In the second story of the collection, Chance, a curious coincidence will jump out at you. The protagonist, Juliet, mentions that she and a fellow teacher have gone to see a “revival of a movie”. What’s the movie? Hiroshima Mon Amour, the very movie I sent you last week. How likely is that? (Did you enjoy it?) Alice Munro is very well known and hugely admired, so I feel a little silly talking of her work, but in case you aren’t familiar with it, I will say the following. Much fiction—my own included—relies on the extraordinary, on characters unlikely to be met, and events unlikely to be shared, by the reader. Stories of this kind are like a trip abroad; we are refreshed by what is strange and exotic in them. This approach hasn’t been Munro’s. Her stories are about people who could be our neighbours and what happens to them might very well be familiar to us. Does this make these stories boring, uninteresting, banal? Under another writer’s pen, it might. But under Munro’s, it doesn’t. By force of telling details and psychological candour, the life of her characters become as interesting to us as our own lives are interesting to us. It’s not that Munro makes the ordinary extraordinary. She doesn’t. What she does is restore to the ordinary its vital, pulsing feel. Her stories are less about the great upheavals that can tear a life apart and more about the smaller ups and downs that define it. In a word, her stories are about texture. What I like about Alice Munro is that she makes me like my neighbours more because after reading a collection of her stories my neighbours all seem like they could be characters in her stories, and that’s an attaching quality in people, that they seem as rich as fiction.

Runaway, both book and audiobook, counts as Book Number 58. I’m leaving shortly on that expedition I was talking to you about in my letter that accompanied Book Number 52, Burning Ice: I’m off to trek the mountains and forests of Peru for three weeks to see the effects of climate change on the tropical environment. I’m not sure about mailing you a book from the Amazon, so I’ve decided to include Book Number 59 in this week’s package, a two-for-one deal that I’ve done once before. And what book would go more naturally with an Alice Munro than one by Margaret Atwood? The two names are so often paired, one would think they were Siamese twins. They are no doubt Canada’s best known writers on the international stage, along with Michael Ondaatje. And since we’re speaking of the prize, Atwood won Canada its second Booker (while Ondaatje won Canada its first).

I have selected for you Margaret Atwood’s latest collection of poetry, The Door. I haven’t sent you poetry in a while and Atwood is a versatile writer, as adept with poetry as she is with fiction. What’s great about a collection of poetry is how much ground it can cover in so few pages. A rediscovered dollhouse, the death of a much-loved cat, ageing parents, life under Emperor Caligula, war, old photographs, and many other subjects—each poem is its own world and the collection as a whole, a gallaxy. The poems in The Door are conversational in tone yet incisive, and they range emotionally from the sentimental to the political. I would especially recommend to you the poems “Owl and Pussycat, some years later”, which is about the life of the poet, and the marvellous title poem, “The Door”, which is about, well, about life, all of it, the living of it and the meaning of it, all seen through the metaphor of a swinging door and all in two pages. I would also recommend, as with all poetry, that you read each poem silently first, to get a sense of it, and then aloud, so that you get its full effect.

Sending you two writers from the same country makes me wonder if there is such a thing as a national literature. Is there something essentially Canadian about Munro and Atwood, essentially Russian about Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, essentially English about Austen and Dickens, and so on. Of course, the language and setting of a work gives something away. A story set in Germany told in German is likely the work of a German writer—but is it therefore a German story? If a Canadian writer sets a story in, say, India, as Rohinton Mistry did with A Fine Balance, is that story any less Canadian, somehow, than a story set in rural Ontario? You suggested that Michael Ignatieff’s Canadianness was somehow suspect because he spent so many years abroad. Does that loss of national identity apply to stories too? I think not, neither with people nor with stories. I too spent many years abroad and never felt any less Canadian for it. And I think the same can be said of a Canadian story. Let’s take as an example Josef Škvorecký. He writes in Czech mostly about Czech matters, but he’s been living in Canada for over forty years. Would we deny Škvorecký his Canadianness? If we do, by what standard? If it’s language, again, what claim do we have on the English and French languages? We share those with many other countries. This question of a national literature is a fascinating quagmire. If such a literature does exist, it’s clearly an ever-shifting, highly permeable body of work. And it engenders another question: does the country determine the nature of a writer’s work or does the writer determine the nature of the country? I think it could be argued both ways. In some cases, a writer—Kafka would be one example—clearly seems to emanate from a country and a culture. But others—Atwood and Munro, for instance—seem more universal, as if, given different circumstances but similar personalities, they might as well have come from England or France or the US. Who’s to know? Gosh, I wonder how many times I’ve contradicted myself in one paragraph. No matter. I asked the question about national literature without having any readymade answer.

Lastly this week, I’m sending you a music CD by a Canadian violinist named Oliver Schroer. It’s called Camino, after the Camino de Santiago de Compostella, named after the town in northwestern Spain which has been an important pilgrimage destination since the Middle Ages. People have walked to Santiago from all over Europe for centuries. I did it in 2001, right after finishing my last novel. I walked 1,600 kilometres in five weeks. It was a luminous experience. Schroer also explored the Camino and this CD is the result of that exploration. I offer it to you simply because the music is hautingly beautiful. Sadly, Schroer died of leukemia just last summer, which adds poignancy to his music.

A rather busy package. May you enjoy it all.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: two books, one audiobook and on CD, all inscribed

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