Life of Pi was published in to warm, although somewhat mixed, critical reception, and, along with winning the Man Booker Prize, became an international best-seller. The similarities between the books, however, are few, and nothing came of the charges. Martel is currently based in Montreal, although he frequently lives internationally. Life of Pi began with some casual reading. Becky : what was your inspiration in writing Life of Pi? Becky : what was the review? Yann Martel : The review was by Updike of a Brazilian novel.
He panned it, but the premise of a Jew in a lifeboat with a black panther in struck me. Terri : had you visited India prior to deciding to write the book?
Yann Martel : Terri, I've been to India three times, each time with a backpack, dazzled by it all. Terri : but did you go after you'd decided to write the book?
Yann Martel : Yes. I did research the second time I was there, and then went back to clear up small details. Why was your main character Indian when you are not an Indian yourself? Yann Martel : Desigrrl, Indian because India is a place where all stories are possible.
You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it. Becky : Why the three religions in your book? I have a similar one, why these 3?? Yann Martel : Becky, the three religions because I wanted to discuss faith, not Carol Birch. Carol Birch is the author of ten novels. After establishing his career as a writer, Yann earned significant success in his career. He gained immense popularity on account of his thoughtful ideas and unconventional style.
Using an emancipating style of writing, he shined a light on universal themes and different elements throughout his literary works by effectively using certain literary elements and different structural techniques.
Moreover, his writings present a perfect blend of humorous situations and seriousness. Also, the representation of animal characters in We ate the Children Last, Beatrice and Virgil helped him to amplify different elements and convey universal themes. He never dealt with fanciful subjects and unnecessary details in his pieces, instead, he preferred focusing on the morals of the society at that time.
Marked with the use of allegory and symbolism his works constantly engage and attract his readers. Initially, Martel wanted to be a politician; he also considered anthropology. Then, after a long period of travel he began writing plays and short stories; by the time he was 27, he was earning his living as a writer.
The opening of Life of Pi , with its quirky allegorical feel, is pleasing in its gentle and warm-hearted tone. It is also a spirited and unexpected defence of zoos. Piscine grows up in Pondicherry in India, the son of a zookeeper. It invests belief with a sense of the magical, something which has been lost in the secular West which views religion with increasing suspicion or even contempt. But when their Japanese cargo ship meets with disaster on the Pacific, only Pi and a group of animals survive.
Soon, given the carnivorous nature of the curiously named tiger Richard Parker, only he and Pi remain. In meticulous detail, Pi describes his life on a small lifeboat. In long hallucinatory passages he retells the story of the shipwreck. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees and is never seen again.
Rescued by the authorities, Pi soon meets with representatives of the Japanese Government who want to know what happened to their ship.
He tells them two stories: the one we know, and another, much more conventional, version. The reader is left to muse upon which version might be the truth; there is of course the possibility that the story we have been told is nothing more than a fantasy elaborated by Pi as a coping strategy. The four stories in the collection, all extremely moving meditations on such issues as grief, the extremities of war, pain, death and illness, are full of fresh and exuberant writing and formal experimentation.
The book has, like The Life of Pi , the feel of the fantastical, there is the touch of Italo Calvino, a sense of boundary-pushing. In the title story, the tale of a young man dying of AIDS who, along with a friend, tells the history of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, melds into the insanity of 20th century history. His fascination with this object draws the reader into reflecting upon the power our possessions exert over us, the memories they hold, the life-force they seem to possess.
It is a dazzlingly original means of exploring subject matter that has been dealt with exhaustively, both in film and literature. Ostensibly about an year-old boy, who, in the course of an overnight Kafkaesque transformation, becomes a woman, only to morph back into masculine form in his mids, Self is an acute study of sexual orientation and identity.
0コメント