101 Letters to a Prime Minister (15 page)

However, the world is strewn with such bottles, and many don’t get much rubbing. Sometimes that’s right, sometimes it’s unfair. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the writer continues to labour.

Then, one day, you are told that five readers liked your book. And they’re the right readers, because they’re on the jury of a prize. In fact, they’ve decided to give you the prize. Suddenly the clouds of the book world part and you hear a booming voice say, “This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” You’re ceremoniously hauled out of obscurity. It’s not an unpleasant experience, far from it. I’m grateful for every nod I’ve ever received.

But if I won, doesn’t it mean that someone lost? That’s the less appealing part of it, the feeling that you’ve become a racehorse, that you are competing, that there are winners and losers. History may decree that it is so, but it’s not how it feels on the inside. On the inside, you’re alone in your shop with your bottle and your genie.

Back to Junot Díaz.
Drown
is a collection of ten short stories, ranging in length from six to thirty-nine pages. These are the first short stories I’ve sent you. You’ll find the experience quite different from reading novels. You’ll be changing gears more often, so to speak. Díaz is a Dominican-American and his stories cover what it means to have a hyphen in one’s identity, the potential for it to be a gulf, a dream, a strain, a loss. The English is peppered
with Spanish, the tone is oral and informal, the characters profane and touching. It’s a world of kids left to themselves, where there’s no money and no father, no jobs and no prospects, only streets and harried mothers, drugs and fickle relations.

Now how will these stories expand your stillness, you might ask, the stillness with which life is properly examined? The answer might be found in the following quote from the story “Boyfriend,” about a couple breaking up. The man comes by a few times to pick his stuff up:

The toughness is surface. Beneath it is hurt and questioning. People are people, just trying to get by and make sense of things. No matter the language or the posing, the yearning for stillness is the same.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

J
UNOT
D
ÍAZ
(b. 1968) is a Dominican-American novelist and short story writer. He and his family moved to New Jersey when he was six years old. His first novel,
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
, is his best-known work; it has earned him several awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and has been optioned for film. Díaz currently teaches creative writing at MIT and is the fiction editor at the
Boston Review
.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Tolstoy again. Sixty weeks back I sent you
The Death of Ivan Ilych
, if you remember. This week it’s
The Kreutzer Sonata
, published three years later, in 1889. A very different book. As much as
Ilych
is an artistic gem, the realism seemingly effortless, the characters fully incarnate yet universal, the emotions finely expressed, the lyricism simple and profound, the portrayal of life and its fleetingness dead on, so to speak—in sum, as much as
Ilych
is perfect,
The Kreutzer Sonata
is imperfect. For example, the setting—a long train ride in which two passengers converse—comes off poorly because nearly the entire novella is taken up by the endless discourse of the main character, Pozdnyshev. Our nameless narrator just sits there, stunned into listening and memorizing the seventy-five-page tirade directed at him. It’s as clunky a device as one of Plato’s dialogues—without the wisdom, for the most part.
The Kreutzer
Sonata
is a long rant about love, sex and marriage, with sideswipes at doctors and children, leading up to a vivid portrayal of insane jealousy, all of it told by an unconvicted murderer. Imagine that, a man telling you on a train, “I killed my wife. Let me tell you about it, since we’ve got all night.” I guess I wouldn’t interrupt him, either.

Imperfect art, then. So why the interest? Because it’s still Tolstoy. Simple people lead simple lives. Complex people lead complex lives. The difference between the two has to do with one’s openness to life. Whether determined by misfortune—a congenital deficiency, a stunting upbringing, a lack of opportunity, a timid disposition—or determined by will—by the use and abuse of religion or ideology, for example—there are many ways in which life, one’s portion of it, can be regulated and made acceptably simple. Tolstoy was unregulated. He lived in a manner unbridled and unblinkered. He took it all in. He was supremely complex. And so there was much of life in his long life, life good and bad, wise and unwise, happy and unhappy. Thus the interest of his writings, because of their extraordinary existential breadth. If the earth could gather itself up, could bring together everything upon it, all men, women and children, every plant and animal, every mountain and valley, every plain and ocean, and twist itself into a fine point, and at that fine point grasp a pen, and with that pen begin to write, it would write like Tolstoy. Tolstoy, like Shakespeare, like Dante, like all great artists, is life itself speaking.

But whereas
Ilych
elicits consonance in the reader,
The Kreutzer Sonata
elicits dissonance. In it, love between men and women does not really exist but is merely a euphemism for lust. Marriage is covenanted prostitution, a cage in which lust unhappily fulfills itself. Men are depraved, women hate sex, children are a burden, doctors are a fraud. The only solution
is complete sexual abstinence, and if that means the end of the human species, all the better. Because otherwise men and women will always be unhappy with each other, and some men may be driven to killing their wives. It’s a bleak, excessively scouring view of the relations between the sexes, a reflection of Tolstoy’s frustration at the social constrictions of his times, no doubt, but nonetheless going too far, wrong-headed, objectionable. And so its effect, the scandal upon its publication, and the reaction it has to this day. Tolstoy does indeed go too far in
The Kreutzer Sonata
, but in it are nonetheless expressed all the elements—the hypocrisy and the outrage, the guilt and the anger—that were at the core of that greatest revolution of the twentieth century: feminism.

As an aside, this second book by Tolstoy was a last-minute choice. There’s such a world of books out there to share with you that I thought one book per author as introduction was enough. After that, if you were interested, you could look up for yourself any given author’s other books.

Only I wanted a book this week that touched on music. (I’ve forgotten to explain the title of Tolstoy’s novella. Pozdnyshev’s wife is an amateur pianist. The couple meets an accomplished amateur violinist by the name of Trukhashevsky, a man. The wife and he become, in all innocence, friends because of their mutual fondness for music. They decide to play Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, for piano and violin, together. In the wings, her husband grows angrier.) Why a book on music? Because serious music, at least as represented by new and classical music, is fast disappearing from our Canadian lives. I have belatedly learned of the latest proof of this: the CBC Radio Orchestra is to be disbanded. Already our public radio’s fare of music has been paltrified. There was once, Mr. Harper, a show called
Two New Hours
on CBC, hosted by Larry Lake. It
played Canadian new music. Its last slot, surely the least desirable for any show, was on Sundays between 10 p.m. and midnight, too late for the early birds, too early for the night owls. Airing at that time, no surprise that few people managed to listen to it. When I did, though, I was grateful. New music is a strange offering. It is, as far as I can tell, music that has broken free. Free of rules, forms, traditions, expectations. Frontier music. New world music. Anarchy as music. Which might explain the screechy violins, the pianos gone crazy, the weird electronic stuff.

I have intense memories of listening to
Two New Hours
and doing nothing but that. Because really, it’s impossible to read while your radio is sounding like two tractors mating. I suppose I’m more jaded when it comes to writing—jaded, jealous, bored, whatever. But I listened to
Two New Hours
out of pure curiosity. And I was surprised, moved and proud that there were creators out there responding to our world in such fresh and serious ways. Because it was clear to me: this was serious stuff, strange as it sounded. This was music that, under whatever guise, was the voice of a single person trying to communicate with me. And I listened, thrilled at the newness of it. That is, I listened until the show was cancelled.

And now the CBC Radio Orchestra, the last radio orchestra in North America, is to be similarly cancelled. No more, “That was _______, played by the CBC Radio Orchestra, conducted by Mario Bernardi,” as I heard for years. Who will play us our Bach and Mozart now, our R. Murray Schafer and Christos Hatzis?

It amazes me that at a time when Canada is riding the commodities wave to unprecedented wealth, with most levels of government experiencing budgetary surpluses, that we are ridding ourselves of a piddly little orchestra. If this is how we
are when in fortune, how will we be when in misfortune?
^*
How much culture can we do
without
before we become lifeless, corporate drones?

I believe that both in good and bad times we need beautiful music.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

Dear Mr. Harper,

Some voices are barely heard. They are left to speak among themselves, worlds within worlds. Then someone listens, gives them artistic expression, and now the loss is lesser, because those voices have become eternal. Such is the achievement of the American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) with her masterpiece
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. You will notice the language right away. There are two voices in the novel. One is the narrative voice that frames the story. It is lyrical, metaphor laden and formal. Take the first two paragraphs of the novel:

The other voice is that of the characters, and it’s something else. They speak in the African-American vernacular, and you’ll hardly believe that English can do such things. A random example:

It’s not cute, it’s not folkloric, it’s not patronizing. The effect is rather of a renewal of language. You read—you hear—as if you were hearing for the first time. And what you will hear is the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman whose voyage of self-discovery, with its hard-earned lessons, is told through her three marriages.

The most significant element in the life of Zora Neale Hurston—even greater than that she was a woman—was that she was black. It is inconceivable that her writing—consisting of four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography and more than fifty shorter pieces—would have been the same had she been white. She was black in a white society that for two hundred years had held blacks in slavery. She was black in a society that was, at best, racial in its thinking, and, at worst, racist. I imagine that every day of her life there was some glance, some exchange, some limitation that reminded Hurston of the colour of her skin and what that was held to mean.

Now, it’s hard, when you are perpetually made aware of one single element of your identity, be it the colour of your skin, the shape of your body, your sexual orientation, your ethnic heritage, whatever, not to linger and dwell on that element, not to become twisted and bitter as a result. Yet the miracle of Hurston’s art is that it manages not to linger and dwell, not to be twisted and bitter.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
is not a diatribe about racist America, though examples of racism are easily found in it. It is instead an incandescent novel about a character whose full humanity and destiny is explored—and she happens to be black.

I suspect that if you read the first chapter of
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, you’ll read the other nineteen. You will read about Janie and Tea Cake, about love and muck, about happiness and disaster. And the worth of that—other than that you will have been entertained—is that for the duration of a story you will have entered the being of an African-American woman. You will have heard voices that you might otherwise never have heard.