Give Yann Martel credit for persistence. It’s been nearly a year since the author launched his campaign to set Stephen Harper’s reading list, and it’s still going, with a new book every two weeks. Granted, the publicity’s almost completely died down, and (to no one’s surprise) there’s been no perceptible political effect. But hey, at least one fringe benefit has emerged – Martel’s citations can serve as back-cover blurbs.
Back on January 21, Martel sent the PM an advance galley of The Cellist of Sarajevo, by his Knopf Canada stablemate Steven Galloway. Martel’s letter to Harper includes some condescending barbs all too typical of this exercise: he writes that he sends short books because “you are probably busier than most people, and you probably feel that you are more importantly busy.” But he also praises Cellist as “a grand and powerful novel,” in a passage that Knopf was so pleased with that they’ve reproduced it on the back cover.
Hilarious, and also pathetic. I don’t mean Martel, of course.
It’s so easy to mock politicians you’ve got to wonder about this fixation Martel has with one-upping the dim-witted. But, truly, if this passage appeared on a book cover, word for word, would any of us be surprised? It;’s bad enough that Knopf thinks that “grand and powerful” can carry any meaning. Martel while aiming his barbs at Harper has somehow managed a direct hit on his own kind. Cue the laughter.
you said it: very easy targets (i’m dimly remembering a funny about mike harris and his beloved roe hinton mystery series). while i’m no fan of harper, martel has been so pompous/self-righteous in interviews about his undertaking . . . in one of them, he actually looked sort of like a schoolboy with hurt feelings in stating that no one in the PMO had gotten back to him. what a surprise!
might be time to let a bit of the air out, herr self.
Last year, when he first began his project of harassing Stephen Harper, I thought Yann Martel had inadvertently captured the codependent, resentful, wrong-headed essence of the subsidized arts in Canada.
It was not enough for Martel to get an $18,000 Canada Council grant back in 1991, nor was it enough for him to participate in a big ceremony on Parliament Hill. It seems no amount of money or ritual celebration will ease Martel’s wounded soul. What he wants is for Stephen Harper to pay attention to him, to look up from whatever papers he is reading and actually participate in Martel’s big day.
All around the world and throughout history, artists and writers have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed by government leaders who objected to what they wrote or created. To them, Canada must seem an unimaginable paradise. You can write whatever you like, and sometimes the government will even give you money to do it! Who could ask for anything more than this? And we know, because of his background in economic history, because of his writings back in his Reform days, that Harper knows a great deal about how those rights and freedoms developed. Harper could teach a class on the subject. He is not indifferent to the rights of artists, far from it. From his response to date, I would say he is only indifferent to Martel the man.
Today, after looking over the first year’s worth of literary selections on Martel’s website (basically a freshman English class reading list with some added delusions of grandeur), I can think only of some poor Soviet dissident back in the 1970’s scribbling out samizdat in his apartment, night after night, never knowing when he might be arrested and sent off for a “tenner” in a Siberian camp. Imagine what that dissident would have written in a letter to Stalin, or Brezhnev, if he could have dared. Now imagine if he could have come to Canada and taken Martel’s place in that ceremony.
I think Martel is a pompous ass.