After sending 100 volumes to his country's leader at fortnightly intervals, Life of Pi author tires 'of using books as political bullets'
by: Benedicte Page
After four years and the donation of 100 carefully chosen books, Yann Martel, author of the 2002 Man Booker prize-winner Life of Pi, has finally ended his self-appointed role as the literary mentor of Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.
Martel has been sending Harper one book every fortnight since April 2007 – bar a short break last year to promote his own new novel Beatrice and Virgil – in an attempt to engage the Canadian political leader in a love of literature.
Starting with Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych, and thereafter ranging from volumes by Sappho, Camus and Lu Xun to the works of Chinua Achebe, Alan Bennett and Douglas Coupland, Martel has sent a book to Harper every second Monday, accompanied by a chatty letter explaining their merits. Other than the occasional polite note from the prime minister's office, the Man Booker winner's personally selected reading list has elicited no response from its recipient.
But yesterday, Martel called time on his one-sided book club, saying that with a new novel of his own, The High Mountains of Portugal, in the pipeline, and a second child also on the way, it is time to move on. "It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades," he added. "Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion."
His final choice for the prime minister is a play, Incendes by Wajdi Mouawad, translated by Linda Gaboriau as Scorched.
Set in an unnamed country identifiable as a war-torn Lebanon, it is the story of a twin brother and sister whose mother becomes mute for a reason her children discover only after her death. "A play by Mouawad is an excellent choice for our final book together because he's a multilingual Québécois of Lebanese origin, and thus a typical hybrid Canadian, and I wanted to end with a Canadian writer," Martel tells Harper in his final missive. Anyway, the author's "brilliant," he adds, with "fire in his guts and bile on his tongue ... I don't think I've ever read a story that more potently symbolises the horror and insanity of war."
Martel adds a valediction to the whole "epistolary dead-end" he has been pursuing, saying he has been trying to show Harper that Canada's books, film, music and dance exist not as mere entertainment alongside the real business of making money, but as "the various elements that add up to the sum total of Canadian civilisation." The voracious demands of corporations dominate the lives of Canadians, he proclaims. "We've become slaves to our work and have forgotten that it's in moments of leisure and stillness, when we're free from working with a hoe or at a keyboard, that we can contemplate life and become fully ourselves." He has wanted to raise his voice against Canada becoming a nation of "erasers", people who move forward leaving in their wake no trace of themselves.
from: Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment