Book 1: The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tostoy

Dear Mr. Martel,

I finished The Death of Ivan Ilych today. You see, I’ve been following your correspondence with Prime Minister Harper (sporadically, I admit) since the beginning and have been growing increasingly disappointed by his lack of response. It was somewhat reassuring, in recent weeks, to see that you have received a couple of replies from his staff, but still, doesn’t it seem a little shabby, after the gift of fifty-five books, to have not yet had so much as a word from the man himself? Perhaps a “Dear Yann, Thanks for the books – I’m keeping them for my retirement. In the meantime I prefer to expand my stillness with Dick Francis. Your P.M…” I know the man is busy, but that only took me a few seconds to type out. Like you, I wonder about our leader and what makes him tick. And I began to wonder about what he was missing out on as well. Does he read your letters but not the books? Does he flip through the copies you send, admiring your dedication and skimming the back cover? Or is this all completely off his radar? Is there absolutely no time in his week for any literary interests, is he completely spent from politics and never gets to read for pleasure? I wonder. Which brings me to the real subject of my letter. I have decided to take on your reading list myself.

Please allow me to introduce myself: I am a 31-year old Canadian woman. I was born in Montreal, where I lived until last August, when my husband and I decided to move to the West Coast. Not for work or school, just for a change, and because we thought it would be nice to live by the sea (it is). I find myself without any employment or academic pursuits at the moment and am in need of something to keep my mind off this situation, in the moments when I am not busy trying to remedy it. Feeling that your project deserves a bit more attention than it has so far received, I am embarking on the literary journey you mapped out for Stephen Harper.

I am looking forward to most of the titles you have chosen - I have previously read twelve on the list, and started but not finished another two, maybe three. I am only dreading a couple. My plan is to read them all, in the order you sent them, and send you a response to each one. You may notice that I am only making a plan, and not a vow as you did. This is because I know myself well, and admit that I am easily distracted, especially from things I’ve assigned myself. I tend to start things out with great enthusiasm, which then fizzles out after a few months. I do hope this won’t happen, as your own persistence inspires me, but I am not prepared to make any promises. Nor do I aspire to write anything illuminating or especially erudite about these books, only a few assorted impressions I had while reading. My primary hope in doing this is to expand my own stillness (I like your phrase), but perhaps I also hope to bolster your mission in my small way – to affirm to our PM that yes, the average Canadian does care about culture. We are mourning the cuts to arts funding and the demise of small circulation arts, literary and cultural magazines. And yes, we read.

So I read The Death of Ivan Ilych over the past few days. I read it as you suggested Prime Minister Harper read it, in just a few minutes a day. I read it as I sat at the Aveda Institute letting the colour seep into my hair (please don’t get the wrong impression, I very rarely get my hair done, and when I do I usually see it as an opportunity to read for the trashy magazines that one finds there), I read it at the edge of the YMCA pool while my children were having their Sunday swimming lessons, letting the pages dampen with little chlorinated water droplets, and I read in other places too. I found it especially compelling to read it in these various spots, with so much life buzzing around, to contrast the death scene being drawn out in the book. At one point Ivan Ilych struck me as a sort of literary precursor to Holden Caulfield, that where Caulfield obsessed over the phoniness apparent to him in adolescence, Ilych was preoccupied by all the falsity surrounding him in his decline.

I’m embarrassed to report that this was my first proper taste of Tolstoy. I did try to read War and Peace the summer I was 19, but it did not grab me the way one wants a summer book to, and as I’ve already confessed, I am easily distracted. But back to Ivan. It wasn’t immediately obvious why you would have chosen it for the first book to send Harper, but looking over your article in the Globe from April 2007 that kicked this all off, I see how it would have seemed appropriate, given what you had just experienced in the House of Commons, to send a man wielding so much power at this stage of his life the chronicle of the final days of another powerful man who is agonising over whether he has lived the right life. It is an enormous question, and impossible to read without pausing and taking stock. Hmm, I wondered last night as I dozed off, am I doing what I want to do with this limited time I have? And if I’m not, how exactly to change course? Important considerations. I also liked the character of Gerasim, and he made me reflect on how some people are naturally so good at being with the infirm, without betraying any sense of pity or grudging or fears of their own, or any of the other emotions that surface in the presence of the terminally ill, while others are not (sadly, I feel that I fall into the latter category – as you said, he is the character in which we recognize ourselves the least). I had some other thoughts as well, but I think I've gone on long enough for today.

I’m off to the post now. I will mail this to you care of your publisher in Scotland, as that was the only contact address I came across online. I will be in touch again in two weeks when I have reread Animal Farm, which I have not looked at since I was in Shirley Pearlman’s grade 7 English class.

Until then, I wish you all the best,

Rebecca Baugniet