does not normally see an advance reading copy. What you are holding in your hands is a rare item.
And it’s also a grand and powerful novel about how people retain or reclaim their humanity when they are under extreme duress. I’m sure you will hear about
The Cellist of Sarajevo
from other people than just me. It’s set during the brutal siege of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. That story was in the news for years, yet I think most of us just took it in dumbly, wondering how people could do that to each other. Well, Galloway’s novel explains how. It does the work of a good fiction: it transports you to a situation that might be alien to you, makes it familiar, and so brings understanding. That’s what I meant when I said fiction is “whole-person.” While reading
The Cellist of Sarajevo
you are imaginatively there, in Sarajevo, as the mortar shells are falling and snipers are seeking to kill you as you cross a street. Your mind’s eye sees, your moral sense is outraged: your full humanity is being exercised.
Yet
The Cellist
is a directed and digested take on reality, it’s not journalism. There is subtle intent woven into the realisticnarrative of its three main characters. You will see that when you read the last line of the novel, which is magnificent.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
S TEVEN G ALLOWAY (b. 1975) is a Canadian novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Besides
The Cellist of Sarajevo
, he has written the novels
Finnie Walsh
and
Ascension
. Galloway teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.
BOOK 22:
MEDITATIONS
BY MARCUS AURELIUS
Translated from the Greek by Maxwell Staniforth
February
4, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book from a fellow head of government,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
Like you, Marcus Aurelius was a head of government. In AD 161, he became Emperor of Rome, the last of the “five good emperors”—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—who ruled over an eighty-four-year period of peace and prosperity that lasted from AD 96 to 180, the Roman Empire’s golden apogee.
The case of Rome is worth studying. How a small town on a river became the centre of one of the mightiest empires the world has known, eventually dominating thousands of other small towns on rivers, is a source of many lessons. That Rome was mighty is not to be doubted. The sheer size the empire achieved is breathtaking: from the Firth of Forth to the Euphrates, from the Tagus to the Rhine, spilling over into Northern Africa, for a time the Romans ruled over most of the world known to them. What they didn’t rule over wasn’t worthhaving, they felt: they left what was beyond their frontiers to “barbarians.”
Another measure of their greatness can be found in the Roman influences that continue to be felt to this day. Rome’s local lingo, Latin, became the mother language of most of Europe, and Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese are still spoken all over the world. (The Germanic hordes beyond the Rhine, meanwhile, have managed to sponsor only one international language, albeit a successful one, English.) We also owe the Romans our calendar, with its twelve months and 365-and-a-quarter-day years; three days in our week hark back to three Roman days—Moonday, Saturnday and Sunday; and though we now use the Roman number system (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi …) only occasionally, we use their 26-letter alphabet constantly.
Despite their power and might, another lesson about the Roman Empire forces itself upon us: how it’s all gone. The Romans reigned far and wide for centuries but now their empire has vanished entirely. A Roman today is simply someone who lives in Rome, a city that is beautiful because of its clutter of ruins. Such has been the fate of all empires: the Roman, the Ottoman, the British, the Soviet, to name only a few
And it’s also a grand and powerful novel about how people retain or reclaim their humanity when they are under extreme duress. I’m sure you will hear about
The Cellist of Sarajevo
from other people than just me. It’s set during the brutal siege of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. That story was in the news for years, yet I think most of us just took it in dumbly, wondering how people could do that to each other. Well, Galloway’s novel explains how. It does the work of a good fiction: it transports you to a situation that might be alien to you, makes it familiar, and so brings understanding. That’s what I meant when I said fiction is “whole-person.” While reading
The Cellist of Sarajevo
you are imaginatively there, in Sarajevo, as the mortar shells are falling and snipers are seeking to kill you as you cross a street. Your mind’s eye sees, your moral sense is outraged: your full humanity is being exercised.
Yet
The Cellist
is a directed and digested take on reality, it’s not journalism. There is subtle intent woven into the realisticnarrative of its three main characters. You will see that when you read the last line of the novel, which is magnificent.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
S TEVEN G ALLOWAY (b. 1975) is a Canadian novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Besides
The Cellist of Sarajevo
, he has written the novels
Finnie Walsh
and
Ascension
. Galloway teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.
BOOK 22:
MEDITATIONS
BY MARCUS AURELIUS
Translated from the Greek by Maxwell Staniforth
February
4, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book from a fellow head of government,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
Like you, Marcus Aurelius was a head of government. In AD 161, he became Emperor of Rome, the last of the “five good emperors”—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—who ruled over an eighty-four-year period of peace and prosperity that lasted from AD 96 to 180, the Roman Empire’s golden apogee.
The case of Rome is worth studying. How a small town on a river became the centre of one of the mightiest empires the world has known, eventually dominating thousands of other small towns on rivers, is a source of many lessons. That Rome was mighty is not to be doubted. The sheer size the empire achieved is breathtaking: from the Firth of Forth to the Euphrates, from the Tagus to the Rhine, spilling over into Northern Africa, for a time the Romans ruled over most of the world known to them. What they didn’t rule over wasn’t worthhaving, they felt: they left what was beyond their frontiers to “barbarians.”
Another measure of their greatness can be found in the Roman influences that continue to be felt to this day. Rome’s local lingo, Latin, became the mother language of most of Europe, and Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese are still spoken all over the world. (The Germanic hordes beyond the Rhine, meanwhile, have managed to sponsor only one international language, albeit a successful one, English.) We also owe the Romans our calendar, with its twelve months and 365-and-a-quarter-day years; three days in our week hark back to three Roman days—Moonday, Saturnday and Sunday; and though we now use the Roman number system (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi …) only occasionally, we use their 26-letter alphabet constantly.
Despite their power and might, another lesson about the Roman Empire forces itself upon us: how it’s all gone. The Romans reigned far and wide for centuries but now their empire has vanished entirely. A Roman today is simply someone who lives in Rome, a city that is beautiful because of its clutter of ruins. Such has been the fate of all empires: the Roman, the Ottoman, the British, the Soviet, to name only a few
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