Yann Martel was born on June 25, 1963,
in Salamanca, Spain, to Canadian parents. When Martel was a young boy,
his parents joined the Canadian Foreign Services, and the family
moved frequently, living in Alaska, France, Costa Rica, Ontario,
and British Columbia. Martel went on to study philosophy at Trent
University in Ontario, where he discovered a love for writing. After
graduating in 1985, Martel lived with his
parents and worked a number of odd jobs while continuing to write
fiction. He published a collection of short stories, The
Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, in 1993 and
a novel, Self, in 1996,
but neither book received much critical or commercial attention.
In 2002, however, Martel’s international
literary reputation was sealed with the publication of Life
of Pi, a runaway bestseller that went on to win the prestigious
Man Booker Prize (awarded each year to the best English-language
novel written by a Commonwealth or Irish author) and had since been
translated into thirty languages. Fox 2000 pictures
bought the screen rights to Martel’s novel, and a feature film is
expected in 2008.
Life of Pi is set against the tumultuous
period of Indian history known as the Emergency. In 1975,
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty of charges related
to her 1971 election campaign and was ordered
to resign. Instead—and in response to a rising tide of strikes and
protests that were paralyzing the government—Gandhi declared a state
of emergency, suspending constitutional rights and giving herself
the power to rule by decree. The Emergency lasted for eighteen months
and was officially ended in March 1977 when Gandhi
called for a new round of elections. The historical legacy of the
Emergency has been highly controversial: while civil liberties in this
emerging democracy were severely curtailed and Gandhi’s political
opponents found themselves jailed, abused, and tortured, India’s
economy experienced a much-needed stabilization and growth. In Life
of Pi, Piscine (Pi) Molitor Patel’s father, a zookeeper in
Pondicherry, India, grows nervous about the current political situation.
Speculating that Gandhi might try to take over his zoo and faced
with depressing economic conditions, Pi’s father decides to sell
off his zoo animals and move his family to Canada, thus setting the
main action of the novel into motion.
Though only a relatively brief section of Life
of Pi is actually set in India, the country’s eclectic
makeup is reflected throughout the novel. Pi is raised as a Hindu
but as a young boy discovers both Christianity and Islam and decides
to practice all three religions simultaneously. In the Author’s
Note, an elderly Indian man describes the story of Pi as “a story
that will make you believe in God,” and Life of Pi continuously
grapples with questions of faith; as an adherent to the three most
prominent religions in India, Pi provides a unique perspective on
issues of Indian spirituality. India’s diverse culture is further
reflected in Martel’s choice of Pondicherry as a setting. India
was a British colony for nearly two hundred years, and consequently
most of the nation has been deeply influenced by British culture.
However, Pondicherry, a tiny city in southern India, was once the
capital of French India and as such has retained a uniquely French
flavor that sets it apart from the rest of the nation. Perhaps reflecting
Yann Martel’s own nomadic childhood, Pi Patel pointedly begins his
life in a diverse cultural setting before encountering French, Mexican,
Japanese, and Canadian characters along his journey.
Life of Pi can be characterized as a
postcolonial novel, because of its post-Independence Indian setting
as well as its Canadian authorship. Like many postcolonial novels,
such as those of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez, Life
of Pi can also be classified as a work of magical realism,
a literary genre in which fantastical elements—such as animals with
human personalities or an island with cannibalistic trees—appear
in an otherwise realistic setting. Martel’s novel could equally
be described as a bildungsroman (a coming-of-age tale) or an adventure
story. Life of Pi even flirts with nonfiction genres.
The Author’s Note, for example, claims that the story of Piscine
Molitor Patel is a true story that the author, Yann Martel, heard
while backpacking through Pondicherry, and the novel, with its first-person
narrator, is structured as a memoir. At the end of the novel, we
are presented with interview transcripts, another genre of nonfiction
writing. This mixing of fiction and nonfiction reflects the twist
ending of the novel, in which the veracity of Pi’s fantastical story
is called into doubt and the reader, like Pi’s Japanese interrogators,
is forced to confront unsettling questions about the nature of truth
itself.
Many critics have noted the book’s resemblance to Ernest
Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea. Both
novels feature an epic struggle between man and
beast. In The Old Man and the Sea, a fisherman
struggles to pull in a mighty marlin, while in Life of Pi, Pi
and Richard Parker struggle for dominance on the lifeboat. Both the
fisherman and Pi learn to respect their animal counterparts; each pair
is connected in their mutual suffering, strength, and resolve. Although
they are opponents, they are also partners, allies, even doubles.
Furthermore, both novels emphasize the importance of endurance.
Because death and destruction are inevitable, both novels present
life as a choice between only two options: defeat or endurance until
destruction. Enduring against all odds elevates both human characters
to the status of heroes.
Another, less flattering comparison has been drawn between Life of
Pi and acclaimed Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar’s 1981 novel Max
and the Cats. In a 2002 interview
with Powells.com, Martel discusses reading an unfavorable review
of Scliar’s novel in the New York Times Book Review penned
by John Updike and, despite Updike’s disparagement, being entranced
by the premise. As was later reported, no such review existed, and
John Updike himself claimed no knowledge of Scliar’s novel. The
similarities between the two novels are unmistakable: in Max
and the Cats, a family of German zookeepers sets sail to
Brazil. The ship goes down and only one young man survives, stranded
at sea with a wild jaguar. Martel claims never to have read Max
and the Cats before beginning to write Life of
Pi. He has since blamed his faulty memory for the Powells.com
gaffe and has declined further discussion on the topic. Scliar considered
a lawsuit but is said to have changed his mind after a discussion
with Martel. Whatever the real story, Martel mentions Scliar in
his Author’s Note, thanking him for “the spark of life.”
