Read 101 Letters to a Prime Minister for Free Online Page B

making your own way through its grand injunctions and baffling mysteries. The
Gita
is a dialogue between one man and God, and the best reading of it, at least initially, is as a dialogue between one reader and the text. After that first encounter, if you want, scholars can be of help.
    There may be ideas here that will irk you. By Western standards, there is a streak of fatalism running through Hinduism that will bother some. We live in a highly individualistic culture and we make much of the exertions of our egos. Perhaps if we took to heart one of the fundamental lessons of the
Gita
—to take action with detachment—we might exert ourselves in a calmer way and see that the ego, in the scheme of things, really is a puny, transitory thing.
    Read the
Bhagavad Gita
in a moment of stillness and with an open heart, and it will change you. It is a majestic text, elevated and elevating. Like Arjuna, you will emerge from this dialogue with Krishna wiser and more serene, ready for action but filled with inner peace and loving-kindness.
    Om shanti
(peace be with you), as they say in India.
    Yours truly,
    Yann Martel

BOOK 6:

BONJOUR TRISTESSE
BY FRANÇOISE SAGAN
Translated from the French by Irene Ash
June
25, 2007
    To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
    Dear Mr. Harper,
    From London, England, I’m sending you an English translation of a French novel. In this novel people smoke, people get slapped in the face, people drink heavily and then drive home, people have nothing but the blackest coffee for breakfast, and always people are concerned with love. Very French
d’une certaine époque
.
    Bonjour Tristesse
came out in France in 1954. Its author, Françoise Sagan, was nineteen years old. Immediately she became a celebrity and her book a bestseller.
    More than that: they both became symbols.
    Bonjour Tristesse
is narrated in the first person by seventeen-year-old Cécile. She describes her father, Raymond, as “a frivolous man, clever at business, always curious, quickly bored, and attractive to women.” The business cleverness is never mentioned again, but clearly it has allowed Raymond to enjoy freely his other attributes, his frivolity, curiosity, boredom andattraction, all of which revolve around dalliances of the heart and loins. He and his beloved daughter share the same temperament and they are in the south of France for the summer holidays with Elsa, his latest young mistress. This triangle suits Cécile perfectly and she is assiduous at pursuing her idle seaside pleasures, which come to include Cyril, a handsome young man who is keen on her.
    But all is ruined when her father invites Anne to stay with them. She’s an old friend of the family, a handsome woman her father’s age, made of sterner, more sober stuff. She starts to meddle in Cécile’s life. Worse, a few weeks after arriving, fun Elsa is dumped when Raymond starts a relationship with Anne. And finally, not long after, Anne announces that she and her father are planning to get married. Cécile is aghast. Her serial frolicker of a father and Anne, husband and wife? She, Cécile, a stepdaughter to Anne, who will work hard to transform her into a serious and studious young person?
Quel cauchemar
! Cécile sets to work to thwart things, using Elsa and Cyril as her pawns. The results are tragic.
    After the grim work of the Second World War and the hard work of the post-war reconstruction,
Bonjour Tristesse
burst onto the French literary scene like a carnival. It announced what seemed like a new species, youth,
la jeunesse
, who had but one message: have fun with us or be gone; stay up all night at a jazz club or never come out with us again; don’t talk to us about marriage and other boring conventions; let’s smoke and be idle instead; forget the future—who’s the new lover? As for the
tristesse
of the title, it was an excuse for a really good pout.
    Such a brash, proudly indolent attitude,