What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel on corruption,
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,

I’m afraid this is going to be a busy letter. The book first of all. The novel Property, by the American writer Valerie Martin, was fervently recommended to me. I finally came round to it a week ago and I’m glad I’ve done so. It’s an hypnotic read. From the very first paragraph, I was sucked into the morally corrupt life of Manon Gaudet, a woman of the American South from around the year 1810. Manon and her detestable husband own slaves, but it can also be said that slavery owns them. Property is about the insidious nature of injustice, how a system that is corrupt perverts not only its victims but also its victimizers, blind though the victimizers might be to the injustice. So Manon owns Sarah, a beautiful slave who is her husband’s mistress, but she cannot own Sarah and then blithely live her own life. I italicize those two owns, one a verb used to indicate the ownership of another human life, and the other an adjective to indicate the ownership of Manon’s life, because the first precludes the second, the verb precludes the adjective. Manon cannot own Sarah and then live an unsullied moral life. Her slaves obsess and corrupt her, as they do her husband and the entire white class of the antebellum South. Antebellum and postbellum, actually; the American South is still getting over the scars of slavery. The title of the novel is very apt. Sarah the slave is Manon’s property, but Manon is little more than the property of her husband because of the patriarchal society in which they live, and both are the property of the appalling system that was slavery.

The novel works because of the intelligent voice of its narrator. Manon is unremitting in her aversion to hypocrisy, her own and that of the people around her, but she never manages to improve herself. She is lucidly corrupt, her heart poisoned and her life bitter. It makes for a fascinating story, one that is contemporary, even eternal, because the nature of systems continues to be contagious, for better and for worse. An educational system can improve us, for example, while an economic system can corrupt us.

I was in Ottawa promoting my book of letters to you and while there I did a reading at a store called Patrick Gordon Framing, at 160 Elm Street. I was surprised to find when I got there that a show of paintings had been organized around the theme of our little book club. Over twenty-five artists have inspired themselves from the books I have sent you. It makes for a great show. I include an invitation to the opening. The show runs until December 19th. You can also find information on it at www.patrickgordonframing.ca.  

One piece in particular struck me. The artist Michèle Provost took the first line of the first book I sent you (The Death of Ivan Ilych), the second line of the second book (Animal Farm), the third from the third (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), the fourth from the fourth (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept), and so on, for the first sixty five books, and she strung these sentences together to create a work called A Right Honourable Summary. This random arrangement of words or sentences to create a text with a surprising new meaning was a game invented by the French Surrealists. They called it cadavre exquis, delicious corpse, the coinage coming from one of the first times they played the game. The result of a cadavre exquis delights by the mad juxtapositions that chance creates. Michèle Provost’s cadavre exquis is particularly successful. She was at my reading in Ottawa and she kindly gave me two copies of a beautiful, handmade audio book version of A Right Honourable Summary, one copy for you (number 1 of 12) and one for me (number 6 of 12). It comes with a booklet that has on its last pages tiny, colourful copies of all the book covers (one, two). To see all those covers lined up like that is not only visually arresting, it’s also a great aid in identifying the origin of the lines in the audio book. Lynda Cronin reads the text in a convincing manner, weaving with her voice a story that Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, Agatha Christie, Elizabeth Smart and all the other authors I have sent you could not have imagined.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback, one art gallery invitation, and one audio book package

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