What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
We must find the time,
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 wanted to offer you one last book. All the books I sent you earlier were comparatively short, usually under two hundred pages. But this one is far, far longer. I’ve chosen to send you a six-volume box set of Marcel Proust’s complete In Search of Lost Time not to thump you with a 4,347-page club of irony, but because it’s a work I’ve been meaning to read for years. It’s surprising that I’ve never read À la recherche du temps perdu. After all, French is my mother tongue and I lived in France for ten years, the first four in the very arrondissement where Proust was born, the 16th. And I’ve read other very long novels, The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky,  and War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, for example. So why did I never take on Proust’s masterpiece? I suppose for the same reason that many books are left unread, a mixture of fear and slothfulness, fear that I wouldn’t understand the work and unwillingness to spend so much intellectual energy reading all those pages. But as you and I both know, fear and slothfulness lead nowhere. Great achievements only come through courage and hard work. In sending you Proust’s monument, then, I’m reminding myself that I, too, must read it. I’m committed to reading it from start to finish before I die, and I hope you join me in making that same commitment.

Proust’s ten-page description of the eating of a madeleine is famous. It is, apparently, a bravura piece of writing, moving, profound, life-changing. The experience of reading In Search of Lost Time as a whole is said to be life-changing. I don’t need my life to change, I don’t think, but I do want to discover what people mean when they say that of Proust’s masterwork of nostalgia. I want to understand how ten pages can be devoted to the eating of a small cake and how my life could possibly be different afterwards. I invite you to join me, on your own time, in reading this mammoth novel. I do believe it will bring stillness to our souls.

And now our little book club truly comes to an end. The project has been, in many ways, as much a gift to me as it has been to you. Because of it, I have read or re-read over one hundred books. I will miss the challenge of finding you a new short book every second week. But in foregoing that activity, I hope to find the lost time I need to read Marcel Proust. I hope you find the time, too.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one box set with six inscribed trade paperbacks

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