What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book for book lovers,
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,

Here is a book that I hope you’ve already read. There’s safety in being published in book form. Who knows what might happen to the letters I sent you? I print an extra copy of each before mailing it to you, and the originals are I hope gathering in an archive box, but these physical traces are subject to the erosion of time or might simply be lost. As for the website which bears public witness to our book club, despite the easy access anyone has to it on a computer, it too is ephemeral. Though a website may appear on a limitless number of screens at the same moment, its underlying support is far more limited: just a virtual memory somewhere that, despite all the safeguards and backups, could be compromised and its contents destroyed. More simply, a website needs to be maintained, the subscription kept up, and so on. After you leave office, I’m not sure there will be a reason to keep www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca going.

Hence the satisfaction in seeing the letters—or at least the first fifty-five in the English Canada edition (sixty in the Quebec edition)—published as a book. Books last. They last first of all because they are cleverly constructed. I’m stating the obvious here, but a book’s cover serves not only as decoration, allowing its contents to be visually represented, but as protection. If you remember the edition of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge that I sent you, the thirty-sixth book, it was over forty years old, and that was a run-of-the-mill paperback with the thinnest of covers. Imagine the durability of a proper hard-cover book. Such books can last for hundreds and even thousands of years. But books last for another reason. Words are oral artefacts, originally going from the mouths of speakers into the ears of listeners, vanishing upon being heard like waves crashing upon a coastline. The amazing, civilization-making cleverness of books is that they preserve, like a refrigerator, the freshness of words so that words can go unspoken from the minds of writers into the minds of readers through the medium of sight. But the value of a book still remains with what it says, not with what it is. Of course, some books are valued for their own sake, Gutenberg bibles, for example, of which fewer than fifty copies exist. But most books are merely messengers, conveying a message to whomever wants to listen. And since millions of people love to read, millions of books are produced. And so What Is Stephen Harper Reading?, the book version, will last because it will find protection in all the homes and libraries that shelter it. 

I won’t say anything about the book except the following: though your name appears in it over and over, in the inscription and in the first line of each letter for starters, in fact the main subject is the books I discuss. What Is Stephen Harper Reading? is a book about books. Eventually, there will be a complete edition. When it comes out, how many letters it will contain—that all depends on you.

Lastly, during a radio interview I did a few days ago in Montreal while promoting our book, the host mentioned that the Quebec journalist Chantal Hebert had sent you a book called Fearful Symmetry, The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Founding Values, by the economist Brian Lee Crowley, and that you had written back to her, thanking her for the book and saying “…and I have read it”! Well, I don’t have to ask what she has that I don’t. I know the answer: I haven’t sent you a single book on economic or political theory, or, for that matter, much non-fiction of any sort. Good of you to have read Fearful Symmetry. I’m not familiar with it. I hope you liked it. But is there any space on your reading list for a novel, a play or a poem? Last week you sang poetry to the Canadian people. No one expected With a Little Help from My Friends from you. And look at the effect you had. People were amazed. You made the front page of newspaper after newspaper, and often with a big photo of you at the piano. It goes to show how art can amaze, connect and unify.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: two inscribed trade paperbacks, one in English, one in French

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