What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book from far away,
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,

It happens every few years that the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a source of surprise and consternation. The gasp is audible nearly around the world: “Who?!“ That’s exactly how I reacted in 2004, I remember. I’d never heard of Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who was the recipient that year. Of course, German-language readers surely knew of her and no doubt applauded her win. The Nobel Committee has the wisdom and discernment to cast its net wide, finding worthy winners in writers who are not widely known or who write from cultures on the margin of our Anglo-American dominated world. I discovered Elias Canetti, for example, a wonderful writer, when I had another “Who?!” moment way back in 1981.

Well, Stockholm has done it again. A few months ago, the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced and it was—move over, Elfriede—another “obscure” woman writer who writes in German, Herta Müller. And since the Winter Olympics are on right now in Vancouver, with hosts of foreign athletes visiting our land, I thought I would heed the Nobel Committee’s high commendation and offer you something by Herta Müller. Nadirs, her first book, a collection of short stories, is the only one I could find at McNally Robinson. It is a curious book. Right off, it feels foreign. We don’t write like that in English. It’s not a matter of translation. I wouldn’t know it, not speaking German and so not able to compare the original with the translation, but I doubt the book is poorly translated. It is rather the sensibility. The writing feels impersonal, nearly mechanical, it is laconic in the extreme and there is little effort at being beautiful. The stories, except for anecdotal bursts, are plotless. They’re full of details, yet many of them are unreal, dreamlike, nightmarish. It helps to know a little about Herta Müller: she’s from a German-speaking region of Romania called the Banat. A minority speaker in a poor country: that would explain the sensibility, so different from mine. I’m sometimes struck by the strange inner realities that come from central and eastern Europe. There are books from parts of the world that should feel more alien to me—for example, the book I sent you a month ago: Things Fall Apart, from Nigeria—yet that don’t feel so alien to me. I felt quite comfortable slipping into the African skin of Okonkwo. And then Europe, my ancestral continent, a continent on which I lived ten years, three of whose languages I speak, whose majority religion I broadly adhere to, whose people look and dress like me, produces stories that completely puzzle me. Perhaps it’s the result of that very European mix of cultural diversity, economic chaos and political misery. Whatever the case, I read Nadirs and I thought, “Gosh those Germans certainly know how not to have fun.”

A worthy book nonetheless. A reminder that great literature brings us to foreign shores and makes us less narrow.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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