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What Will Stephen Harper Read?

Wednesday, Feb 02, 2011 at 10:15am

$21.00

Yann Martel, the Booker Prize winning Saskatoon resident began his letter campaign of sending books promoting "stillness" to our Prime Minister in 2007, Recently Martel sent his one hundredth, and final book to Prime Minister Harper: Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, translated from the French by Linda Gaboriau.

And it so happens that this is the hundredth letter I've written to you. One hundred. One, zero, zero. The same as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's a lot of letters and books. And come to think of it, it's the same number of chapters as in my novel Life of Pi. One hundred is a nice round number and a good number to end on. (The number of times you personally have written back to me is also a nice round number, by the way: 0. That's zero, naught, nada, zilch.)

It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

Martel's efforts are documented on the website What is Stephen Harper Reading.

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What Is Stephen Harper Reading?

- Yann Martel

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"I know you're very busy, Mr. Harper. We're all busy. 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."

From the author of Life of Pi comes a literary correspondence--recommendations to Canada's Prime Minister of great short books that will inspire and delight book lovers and book club readers across our nation.

Every two weeks since April 16th, 2007, Yann Martel has mailed Stephen Harper a book along with a letter. These insightful, provocative letters detailing what he hopes the Prime Minister may take from the books--by such writers as Jane Austen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Stephen Galloway--are collected here together. The one-sided correspondence (Mr. Harper's office has only replied once) becomes a meditation on reading and writing and the necessity to allow ourselves to expand stillness in our lives, even if we're not head of government.

Beatrice & Virgil

- Yann Martel

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Yann Martel's astonishing novel begins with a successful writer attempting to publish his latest book, made up of a novel and an essay. Henry plans for it to be a "flip book" that the reader can start at either end, reading the novel or the essay first, because both pieces are equally concerned with representations of the Holocaust. Faced with severe and categorical rejection, Henry gives up hope. He abandons writing, moves with his wife to a foreign city, joins a community theatre, becomes a waiter in a chocolatería. But then he receives a package containing a scene from a play, photocopies from a short story by Flaubert--about a man who hunts animals down relentlessly--and a short note: "I need your help."
 
Intrigued, Henry tracks down his correspondent, and finds himself in a strange part of the city, walking past a stuffed okapi into a taxidermist's workshop. The taxidermist--also named Henry--says he has been working on his play, A 20th-Century Shirt, for most of his life, but now he needs Henry's help to describe his characters: the play's protagonists are a stuffed donkey and a howler monkey named Beatrice and Virgil, respectively, and Henry's successful book was in part about animals. And though his new acquaintance is austere, abrupt and almost unearthly, Henry the writer is drawn more and more deeply into Henry the taxidermist's uncompromising world.
 
Beatrice & Virgil gradually grows into something more, a shattering and ultimately transfixing work that asks searching questions about the nature of our understanding of history, the meaning of suffering and the value of art. As we are drawn deeper into their disturbing moral fable, the relationship between the two faltering writers named Henry becomes more and more complex until it can only be resolved in an explosive, unexpected catastrophe.

Life of Pi

- Yann Martel

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Revised Edition

Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Life of Pi tells the story of Pi, who lives in Pondicherry, India, where his family -- mother, father and an older brother -- runs a zoo. When the family decides to immigrate to Canada, they board a cargo ship with their animals and bravely set sail for the New World. Alas, early one morning in rough seas, the ship sinks. A solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the surface of the wild blue Pacific. In it are five survivors: Pi, a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. Yann Martel has given us a book to delight in, to talk about and treasure. It possesses that greatest quality of good fiction: the power to transform. It will convince the most jaded among us -- and remind the rest -- that something grander is afoot in our lives than we may have realized.

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

- Yann Martel

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Revised and with a new author's note and cover, here is Booker Prize-winning author Yann Martel's debut.

First published in 1993, this remarkable collection of four stories launched the career of a masterful writer. In the exquisite title novella, a young man dying of AIDS joins his friend in fashioning a story of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, set against the yearly march of the twentieth century, whose horrors and miracles their story echoes. In "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton," a Canadian university student visits Washington, DC and experiences the Vietnam War and its aftermath through an intense musical encounter. "Manners of Dying" has variations of a warden's letter to the mother of a son he has just executed, revealing how each life is contained in its end. Finally, in "The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company,"
a young man discovers a strange contraption in his grandmother's basement. As the machine runs, she reflects upon her beloved husband.

Self

- Yann Martel

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A modern-day Orlando--edgy, funny and startlingly honest--Self is the fictional autobiography of a young writer and traveller who finds his gender changed overnight.