101 Letters to a Prime Minister (4 page)

Books make us climb higher, and I always have my hand on a book, as if on a banister. But unlike some readers I know who effortlessly bound up the stairs four steps at a time, floor after floor, never stopping to catch their breath, I creep up slowly. If there’s an autobiographical character in my novel
Life of Pi
, it’s not Pi, it’s the sloth. To me, a good book is a rich lode of leaves and I can read only so many pages before my tummy gets full
and I nod off. My banister is more of a branch and from it I hang upside down, nursing the book that is feeding my dreams. I read slowly but continuously. Otherwise I would starve.

Art is water, and just as humans are always close to water, for reasons of necessity (to drink, to wash, to grow) as well as for reasons of pleasure (to play in, to relax in front of, to sail upon), so humans must always be close to art in all its incarnations, from the frivolous to the essential. Otherwise we dry up.

So this is the image I’d like to finish with, the quintessence of stillness and a visual summation of what I tried to convey to Prime Minister Stephen Harper with dozens of polite letters and good books: the image of a sloth hanging from a branch in a green jungle during a downpour of tropical rain. The rain is quite deafening, but the sloth does not mind; it’s reviving, this cascade of water, and other plants and animals will appreciate it. The sloth, meanwhile, has a book on his chest, safely protected from the rain. He’s just read a paragraph. It’s a good paragraph, so he reads it again. The words have painted an image in his mind. The sloth examines it. It’s a beautiful image. The sloth looks around. His branch is high up. Such a lovely view he has of the jungle. Through the rain, he can see spots of bright colours on other branches: birds. Down below, an angry jaguar races along a track, seeing nothing. The sloth turns back to his book. As he breathes a sigh of contentment, he feels that the whole jungle has breathed in and out with him. The rain continues to fall. The sloth falls asleep.

Dear Mr. Harper,

The Death of Ivan Ilych
, by Leo Tolstoy, is the first book I am sending you. I thought at first I should send you a Canadian work—an appropriate symbol since we are both Canadians—but I don’t want to be directed by political considerations of any sort, and, more important, I can’t think of any other work of such brevity, hardly sixty pages, that shows so convincingly the power and depth of great literature.
Ivan Ilych
is an indubitable masterpiece. There is nothing showy here, no vulgarity, no pretence, no falseness, nothing that doesn’t work, not a moment of dullness, yet no cheap rush of plot either. It is the story, simple and utterly compelling, of one man and his ordinary end.

Tolstoy’s eye for detail, both physical and psychological, is unerring. Take Schwartz. He is in dead Ivan Ilych’s very home, has spoken to his widow, but he is mainly concerned with his game of cards that night. Or take Peter Ivanovich and his struggle with the low pouffe and its defective springs while he
attempts to navigate an awkward conversation with Ivan Ilych’s widow. Or the widow herself, Praskovya Fedorovna, who weeps and laments before our eyes, yet without ever forgetting her self-interest, the details of her magistrate husband’s pension and the hope of getting perhaps more money from the government. Or look at Ivan Ilych’s dealings with his first doctor, who, Ivan Ilych notices, examines him with the same self-important airs and inner indifference that Ivan Ilych used to put on in court before an accused. Or look at the subtle delineation of the relations between Ivan Ilych and his wife—pure conjugal hell—or with his friends and colleagues, who, all of them, treat him as if they stood on a rock-solid bank while he had foolishly chosen to throw himself into a flowing river. Or look, lastly, at Ivan Ilych himself and his sad, lonely struggle.

How clearly and concisely our vain and callous ways are showed up. Effortlessly, Tolstoy examines life’s shallow exteriors as well as its inner workings. And yet this pageant of folly and belated wisdom comes not like a dull moral lesson, but with all the weight, shine and freshness of real life. We see, vividly, Ivan Ilych’s errors—oh, they are so clear to us, we certainly aren’t making his mistakes—until one day we realize that someone is looking at us as if we were a character in
The Death of Ivan Ilych
.

That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, as in the case of this book, it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker.

One quality that you will no doubt notice is how despite the gulf of time between when the story is set—1882—and today, despite the vast cultural distance between provincial tsarist Russia
and modern Canada, the story reaches us without the least awkwardness. In fact, I can’t think of a story that while completely set in its time, so very,
very
Russian, so leaps from the bounds of the local to achieve universal resonance. A peasant in China, a migrant worker in Kuwait, a shepherd in Africa, an engineer in Florida, a prime minister in Ottawa—I can imagine all of them reading
The Death of Ivan Ilych
and nodding their heads.

Above all else, I recommend the character Gerasim to you. I suspect he is the character in whom we recognize ourselves the least yet whom we yearn the most to be like. We hope one day, when the time comes, to have someone like Gerasim at our side.

I know you’re very busy, Mr. Harper. We’re all busy. Meditating monks in their cells are busy. That’s adult life, filled to the ceiling with things that need doing. (It seems only children and the elderly aren’t plagued by lack of time—and notice how they enjoy their books, how their lives fill their eyes.) But every person has a space next to where they sleep, whether a patch of pavement or a fine bedside table. In that space, at night, a book can glow. And in those moments of docile wakefulness, when we begin to let go of the day, then is the perfect time to pick up a book and be someone else, somewhere else, for a few minutes, a few pages, before we fall asleep. And there are other possibilities, too. Sherwood Anderson, the American writer best known for his collection of stories
Winesburg, Ohio
, wrote his first stories while commuting by train to work. Stephen King apparently never goes to his beloved baseball games without a book that he reads during breaks. So it’s a question of choice.

And I suggest you choose, just for a few minutes every day, to read
The Death of Ivan Ilych
.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

REPLY
:

May 8, 2007

Dear Mr. Martel:

On behalf of the Prime Minister, I would like to thank you for your recent letter and the copy of Tolstoy’s
The Death of Ivan Ilych
. We appreciated reading your comments and suggestions regarding the novel.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to write.

Sincerely,

Susan I. Ross

Assistant to the Prime Minister

L
EO
T
OLSTOY
(1828–1910) was a prolific author, essayist, dramatist, philosopher and educational reformist. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, he is best known for writing realist fiction, focusing particularly on life in Russia, and is considered one of the major contributors to nineteenth-century Russian literature. His marriage to Sophia Tolstaya (Tolstoy) produced thirteen children, eight of whom survived into adulthood. Tolstoy wrote fourteen novels (two of his most famous being
Anna Karenina
and
War and Peace
), several essays and works of non-fiction, three plays and over thirty short stories.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Now that your Flames have been knocked out of the playoffs I guess you’ll have more free time on your hands.

I fear that some may criticize me for the second book I am sending you,
Animal Farm
, by George Orwell. It’s so well known, and it’s another book by a dead white male. But there is time yet to be representative of all those who have harnessed the word to express themselves—believe me, they are varied and legion—unless you lose the next election, which would likely give you even more time to read, but not, alas, according to my suggestions.

Many of us read
Animal Farm
when we were young—perhaps you did too—and we loved it because of the animals and the wit. But it’s in our more mature years that its import can better be understood.

Animal Farm
has some commonalities with
The Death of Ivan Ilych
: both are short, both show the reality-changing power
of great literature, and both deal with folly and illusion. But whereas
Ivan Ilych
deals with individual folly, the failure of one individual to lead an authentic life,
Animal Farm
is about collective folly. It is a political book, which won’t be lost on someone in your line of business. It deals with one of the few matters on which we can all agree: the evil of tyranny. Of course a book cannot be reduced to its theme. It’s in the reading that a book is great, not in what it seeks to discuss.

But I also have a personal reason for why I’ve chosen
Animal Farm
: I aspire to write a similar kind of book.

Animal Farm
first. You will notice right away the novel’s limpid and unaffected style, Orwell’s hallmark. You get the impression the words just fell onto the page, as if it were the easiest, the most natural thing in the world to write such sentences and paragraphs and pages. It’s not. To think clearly and to express oneself clearly are both hard work. But I’m sure you know that from working on speeches and papers.

The story is simple. The animals of Manor Farm have had enough of Farmer Jones and his exploitative ways so they rebel, throw him out, and set up a commune run according to the highest and most egalitarian principles. But there’s a rotten pig named Napoleon and another one named Squealer—a good talker he—and they are the nightmare that will wreck the dream of Animal Farm, as the farm is renamed, despite the best efforts of brave Snowball, another pig, and the meek goodness of most of the farm animals.

I’ve always found the end of Chapter II very moving. There’s the question of five pails of milk from the cows. What to do with them, now that Farmer Jones is gone and the milk won’t be sold? Mix it with the mash they all eat, hints a chicken. “Never mind the milk, comrades!” cries Napoleon. “The harvest is more important. Comrade Snowball will lead the way. I shall follow
in a few minutes.” And so off the animals go, to bring in the harvest. And the milk? Well, “… in the evening it was noticed that the milk had disappeared.”

With those five pails of white milk the ideal of Animal Farm, still so young, begins to die, because of Napoleon’s corrupted heart. Things only get worse, as you will see.

Animal Farm
is a perfect exemplar of one of the things that literature can be: portable history. A reader who knows nothing about twentieth-century history? Who has never heard of Joseph Stalin or Leon Trotsky or the October Revolution? Not a problem:
Animal Farm
will convey to that reader the essence of what happened to our neighbours across the Arctic. The perversion of an ideal, the corruption of power, the abuse of language, the wrecking of a nation—it’s all there, in a scant 120 pages. And having read those pages, the reader is made wise to the ways of the politically wicked. That too is what literature can be: an inoculation.

And now the personal reason why I’ve sent you
Animal Farm
: the Jewish people of Europe murdered at the hands of the Nazis also need to have their history made portable. And that is what I’m trying to do with my next book. But to take the rubble of history—so many tears, so much bloodshed—and distil it into some few elegant pages, to turn horror into something light—it’s no easy feat.

I offer you, then, a literary ideal of mine, besides a great read.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Happy birthday
.

G
EORGE
O
RWELL
(1903–1950), born Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, journalist, essayist, poet and literary critic. He was born in India into what he called a “lower-upper-middle class” family. He fought and was wounded in the Spanish Civil War. His two most famous works,
Animal Farm
and
1984
, reflect his signature style as well as his two largest preoccupations: his consciousness of social injustice and his opposition to totalitarianism. He is also well known for his interest in the power of language in politics and in shaping how we view the world. He died from tuberculosis at the age of forty-six.

Dear Mr. Harper,

What is there not to like about Agatha Christie? Her books are a guilty pleasure; who would have thought that murder could be so delightful? I’ve selected
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
for you. Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective, has rather incongruously chosen to retire to the village of King’s Abbot to grow vegetable marrows. But his gardening plans are upset by a shocking murder. Who could have done it? The circumstances are so peculiar.…