Ladies and gentlemen of the free press,

As you know, on March 28, 2007, 50 creators crowded into the Visitors’ Gallery of the House of Commons, personifying the 50 years of existence of the Canada Council for the Arts. No sooner had the Minister of Canadian Heritage concluded her remarks than the House turned to other matters. Yann Martel couldn’t take his eyes off Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who never even looked up to acknowledge the artists. “Once someone has power over me,” explains Martel, “I have the right to probe the nature and quality of their imagination, because their dreams may become my nightmares.” He immediately started a correspondence with Mr. Harper: every second week he sent him a book, accompanied by a letter explaining the choice.

To acknowledge the supremely poetic and political gesture of this Canadian writer, the National Arts Centre French Theatre team, together with a dozen well-known personalities from the literary and theatre communities, decided to organize a staged reading. Keenly aware of the significance of such an event, all the participants were eager to lend their voices and offer our audience a magnificent bouquet of selected letters by Yann Martel. At this point, I know you must be wondering who those personalities might be... So I’m going to be nice to you and reveal one name, that of our master of ceremonies: playwright, director and writer Marcel Pomerlo.

Conceived and directed by Benoît Vermeulen and Guy Warin, our literary evening will take the form of an intimist gala, a parody of protocol where attitude and affectation will be given very short shrift! Above all, it will be an opportunity to reaffirm our desire to share and our unconditional love of literature, as sentimental and dramatic, as poetic and “non?fictional“ as it may be. As Yann Martel puts it, “Literature may not save us, but at least it enlightens us... It is wisdom and emotion, it is the discovery of language and the desire to read... It is who we are, it is the world, right here, right now.”

The evening will also include dramatic readings of excerpts from selected works—an original way to ensure your maximum enjoyment of the value, impact and beauty of words!

I couldn’t end this press release without mentioning Yann Martel’s latest and final letter to Stephen Harper, sent on January 31, 2011, in which he explains why he feels compelled to conclude their one?way correspondence:

“Dear Mr. Harper,

“This letter, I’m quite sure, will be my last one to you. I said, over and over, that I would persist with our exclusive book club as long as you were in power. But selecting a book for you; reading or re-reading it; thinking about it; writing the letter that goes with it; having the letter translated by my parents and discussing that translation with them; scanning the cover of the book; uploading the English and French letters onto their respective websites; and finally mailing book and letter so that they reach you on time every second Monday—all this takes time and effort, and while it’s been a great pleasure for me (I don’t know about you), I’ve been doing it for close to four years now and I want to move on. I have the luck of living with two pregnancies at the moment: the first is my partner Alice’s, who is carrying our second child, a girl due at the end of May, and the second is mine, a new novel gestating in my head. I’m having a small writing studio built in my backyard so I can have a space to take care of my novel not far from where Alice and I will take care of our new baby. I’m very excited about the new novel. It will be called The High Mountains of Portugal and it shimmers in my mind like snow-capped mountains catching the sun. I already have lots of notes written, I’ve been gathering material I intend to read for research, and the story in my head is bursting with promise. I can’t wait to get started on it. I’m of course equally excited about the new addition to our family. Both babies will require lots of joyful work.

“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.”

Last but not least, the Librairie du Centre will have a booth at this unique event where you can purchase the works featured during the eveningm including novels (Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illich, Sylvia Plath’s To the Lighthouse, Anthony Burgess‘ A Clockwork Orange), plays (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Larry Tremblay’s The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi), poetry by Sappho, and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Our special guest will be Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi (winner of the Man Booker Prize) and Beatrice and Virgil, who will sign copies of his books after the performance.

Best regards,

Aude Rahmani

 

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