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Authors: Yann Martel
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pastures and rolling hills, does this strike you as promising grounds for great art?
Well, in the case of Jane Austen, it was. Because she had the great and good luck of having a loving and intellectually lively family, and she was blessed with a keen and critical sense of observation, as well as an inherently positive disposition.
So though limited by class and by sex, Jane Austen was able to transcend these limitations. Her novels are marvels of wit and perspicacity, and in them she examined her society with such fresh and engaging realism that the English novel was durably changed.
The Watsons
is easily Jane Austen’s least-known work. But I selected it for you for two reasons: it is short, and it is unfinished. Its shortness will I hope make you want to read some of Austen’s longer novels,
Pride and Prejudice
or
Emma
perhaps.
And though it is unfinished, an abandoned draft, there is more perfection in it than in many a completed novel. Austen abandoned
The Watsons
in 1805 as a result of personal difficulties: the death of a good friend, and right afterwards the illness and death of her own father, which left her and her sister and her mother in uncertain circumstances. Eventually, four years later, her brother Edward was able to provide his mother and sisters with a cottage, and Austen began writing again.
She let go and then started up again, able to produce novels that marked the English novel forever. In that, there is something instructive. There is so much we must leave unfinished. How hard it is to let go.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
J ANE A USTEN (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose realist works offer strong female characters and biting social commentary. She never married, and lived with her family until her death at the age of forty-one. Several of her novels have been adapted for the screen. Her novels are still popular today, and
Pride and Prejudice
has inspired modern spoofs including
Bridget Jones’s Diary
by Helen Fielding, the Bollywood film
Bride & Prejudice
directed by Gurinder Chadha, and
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
, adapted from Austen’s original novel by Seth Grahame-Smith.
BOOK 12:
MAUS
BY ART SPIEGELMAN
September
17, 2007
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This most disturbing and necessary book,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
I am sorry but you will have to endure this time a letter written in my terrible handwriting. I didn’t manage to find a printer in Oświęcim, the small Polish town where I’m staying at the moment.
Oświęcim is better known by the name the Germans gave it: Auschwitz. Have you been?
I am here trying to finish my next book. And it also explains my choice of the latest book I am sending you: the graphic novel
Maus
, by Art Spiegelman. Don’t be fooled by the format. This comic book is
real
literature.
Some stories need to be told in many different ways so that they will exist in new ways for new generations. The story of the murder of nearly six million of Europe’s Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis and their criminal accomplices is just the sort of story that needs renewing if we don’t want a part of ourselves to fall asleep, like grandchildren nodding off after hearing grandfather repeat the same story of yore one time too many.
I know I said I would send you books that would increase your “stillness.” But a sense of peace and calm focus, of what Buddhists call “passionate detachment,” must not fall into self-satisfaction or complacency. So a disturbance—and Auschwitz is profoundly disturbing—can be the right way to renew one’s stillness.
Maus
is a masterpiece. Spiegelman tells his story, or, more accurately, the story of his father and mother, in a bold and radical way. It’s not just that he takes the graphic form, thought perhaps by some to be a medium only for children, to new artistic heights by taking on such a momentous topic as exterminationist genocide.
Well, in the case of Jane Austen, it was. Because she had the great and good luck of having a loving and intellectually lively family, and she was blessed with a keen and critical sense of observation, as well as an inherently positive disposition.
So though limited by class and by sex, Jane Austen was able to transcend these limitations. Her novels are marvels of wit and perspicacity, and in them she examined her society with such fresh and engaging realism that the English novel was durably changed.
The Watsons
is easily Jane Austen’s least-known work. But I selected it for you for two reasons: it is short, and it is unfinished. Its shortness will I hope make you want to read some of Austen’s longer novels,
Pride and Prejudice
or
Emma
perhaps.
And though it is unfinished, an abandoned draft, there is more perfection in it than in many a completed novel. Austen abandoned
The Watsons
in 1805 as a result of personal difficulties: the death of a good friend, and right afterwards the illness and death of her own father, which left her and her sister and her mother in uncertain circumstances. Eventually, four years later, her brother Edward was able to provide his mother and sisters with a cottage, and Austen began writing again.
She let go and then started up again, able to produce novels that marked the English novel forever. In that, there is something instructive. There is so much we must leave unfinished. How hard it is to let go.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
J ANE A USTEN (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose realist works offer strong female characters and biting social commentary. She never married, and lived with her family until her death at the age of forty-one. Several of her novels have been adapted for the screen. Her novels are still popular today, and
Pride and Prejudice
has inspired modern spoofs including
Bridget Jones’s Diary
by Helen Fielding, the Bollywood film
Bride & Prejudice
directed by Gurinder Chadha, and
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
, adapted from Austen’s original novel by Seth Grahame-Smith.
BOOK 12:
MAUS
BY ART SPIEGELMAN
September
17, 2007
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This most disturbing and necessary book,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
I am sorry but you will have to endure this time a letter written in my terrible handwriting. I didn’t manage to find a printer in Oświęcim, the small Polish town where I’m staying at the moment.
Oświęcim is better known by the name the Germans gave it: Auschwitz. Have you been?
I am here trying to finish my next book. And it also explains my choice of the latest book I am sending you: the graphic novel
Maus
, by Art Spiegelman. Don’t be fooled by the format. This comic book is
real
literature.
Some stories need to be told in many different ways so that they will exist in new ways for new generations. The story of the murder of nearly six million of Europe’s Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis and their criminal accomplices is just the sort of story that needs renewing if we don’t want a part of ourselves to fall asleep, like grandchildren nodding off after hearing grandfather repeat the same story of yore one time too many.
I know I said I would send you books that would increase your “stillness.” But a sense of peace and calm focus, of what Buddhists call “passionate detachment,” must not fall into self-satisfaction or complacency. So a disturbance—and Auschwitz is profoundly disturbing—can be the right way to renew one’s stillness.
Maus
is a masterpiece. Spiegelman tells his story, or, more accurately, the story of his father and mother, in a bold and radical way. It’s not just that he takes the graphic form, thought perhaps by some to be a medium only for children, to new artistic heights by taking on such a momentous topic as exterminationist genocide.
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