Most people know Yann Martel from his 2002 novel Life Of Pi, a brilliant fable that begins with a long, rapturous philosophical exploration of topics ranging from zoos to religion, then transitions into a story about a young Indian shipwreck survivor trapped in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. Like Martel's earlier novel, Self, and his short-fiction collection The Facts Behind The Helsinki Roccamatios, it tells a story while delving into the question of why people tell stories, and how they choose to perceive and remember the world around them. Martel recently spoke with The A.V. Club about the lavish new illustrated version of Life Of Pi, his extensive research process, and the most satisfying feeling in the world.
The A.V. Club: How closely were you involved with the new, illustrated Life Of Pi?
Yann Martel: Not very closely. The decision to do an illustrated edition was my publisher's at Canongate—he remembers seeing illustrated editions as a kid of Robert Louis Stevenson, and I remember reading Jules Verne's novels and stories illustrated by Gustav Doré. So it was his idea, and I said, "Oh, what a great idea." So he's the one who came up with the idea of the whole competition. I was involved at the level of the jury. There were about 1,600 submissions, I got involved when there was a long list of 60, and we boiled it down to six, and we chose the winner. After that, my involvement was with the winner, Tomislav Torjanac. We talked over the phone, me in Canada and he in Croatia, to try to find quotes he would use as the basis of his illustrations. A number, he already had in mind. But in an illustrated edition, you need to have the illustrations evenly spaced. So in some places, I just sort of looked for quotes that he would find stimulating. And after that, it was all his work.
AVC: That actually sounds fairly involved.
YM: Oh, okay. I guess it is. But it's just a few conversations here and there. It was actually pretty fun on the jury. For the competition, each artist had to submit one full-color illustration. So while I was in the jury, at one point, I got a package from the UK of 60 illustrations—60 visions of Life Of Pi. All kinds of styles. All kinds of points of views, of techniques. It was more fun than work.
AVC: What about his art in particular drew you?
YM: It was several things. First off, his really neat point of view. In the illustrations, you never see Pi. Everything is seen from Pi's perspective. At most, you see his hands, his arms, his feet, his legs. But otherwise, the reader becomes Pi. And that's a very clever visual device, and very effective, because if Pi were illustrated, people would look at it and say, "Oh, that's not how I imagined him." Whereas no one has preconceived notions, I don't think, of what a tiger looks like, or a hyena, and only fleeting ones in regards to the lifeboat. And in us never seeing Pi, that fits the tone of the novel, which is a first-person narrative very much concerned with looking out, and not very concerned with psychologizing. So I like that. Also, his style. It's very lush, colorful, painterly. You can see the ridges in the swirls of paint. And the compositions are quite brilliant. Once he chose to do Pi, that's one thing. But how he decided to fill up the vertical spaces was often brilliantly done.
AVC: There have been at least some initial attempts to make Life Of Pi into a movie. In a film, presumably he'd have to be onscreen most of the time.
YM: A movie would have to be very different. I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds. So it's hard to visualize James Bond without seeing one of the actors who played him. And it's hard to visualize Harry Potter without seeing Daniel Radcliffe. A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things. With illustrations, at least with good ones, it doesn't have that effect. It's a starting point. You read 10 or 12 pages of text, have certain images, and then this different language, the language of images, complements that, by at most making a suggestion directing you, or showing you something you hadn't imagined, which starts you off in exactly the same way the way that text starts you off. Whereas a movie tends to box you in, at least as far as the aesthetics. You have an incredibly kinetic experience, which is the joy of cinema.
AVC: Are you eager to see a movie version of the book?
YM: Oh, it's in the works, with all the usual fits, starts, stoppages, and uncertainties of Hollywood. But there is very much a movie in the making. And I look forward to that. I love cinema. I think the risk of the aesthetics being fixed is compensated by other advantages. Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.
AVC: What kinds of concerns do you have about Pi becoming a film?
YM: It has to work. The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book. I've read the screenplay, it does do that. But what works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences. Often, things are not finished. And also, whereas in a book, you get the words and you have to imagine the tone and all that, in a movie, it's given to you. So the tone has to be right.
In a movie, you need good actors, whereas in a book, you don't, unless you have a really bad imagination. In a book, your imagination will do the acting for you. Also, the process of revelation is often different. Tension is achieved in a different way. It's just a very different language. There are great advantages, but there are also great risks. It could be visually dazzling but dramatically quite flat, which you often get with complicated movies. The visuals are lush and beautiful, but the story is somehow lost. But as I've said, I read the screenplay, and I'm quite confident that the story is there.
AVC: What's the film's status? Is there actually a director attached at this point?
YM: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director who did Amélie. We're just waiting. It's so complicated, making movies. So many people are involved. Technically, it's a complicated thing, and demands a lot of work. Logistically, it's very complicated. And it's very expensive. All that requires a lot of people getting their act together. So Fox is still in the process of getting their act together. But they're still very keen on making it. I was in L.A. just a few days ago; it was where my tour started. And I was gratified to see that the studio and the producing company are still very keen on making the movie.
AVC: Did you have any involvement with the film version of your story "Manners Of Dying"?
YM: I read the screenplay, and I made suggestions to the director, who was also the writer. But that's as involved as I really want to be. As much as I love movies, it would be presumptuous of me to think that I know how to make one. So I just read the screenplay and made certain suggestions about the language, maybe certain scenes. Other than that, none.
AVC: Have you written anything you'd like to see filmed more than Life Of Pi, or that you think would work better onscreen?
YM: Well, my second book, Self, is an odd story. It's the story of a boy who, on his 18th birthday, while he's backpacking through Portugal, over the course of a week, metamorphosizes into a woman. And he's a woman for seven years, and then he becomes a man again. So it's an interesting character study—sexual identity and sexual orientation, exploring the idea that the body is an environment, and just as we adapt to our outer environment, the body has an inner environment that we adapt to. It could, I suppose, make a movie. It'd be an interesting one, where you'd have to have two actors playing one role. I don't know—I play with words, I write, I express myself through words, I don't need to rush out and see stories adapted into other forms. I have to say, my first book, a book of short stories, The Facts Behind The Helsinki Roccamatios, has been adapted to the stage as a one-man play. And it has a lot of potential. When I have some free time, I'd want to work on it some more. But that has potential.
AVC: After Life Of Pi took off, The Facts Behind The Helsinki Roccamatios was re-released, but remains out of print in the U.S. Are there any plans to re-release it?
YM: It' s a problematic novel. I seem to alternate between books that are easy to write and ones that are very hard to write. So my first book and my third book, The Life Of Pi, were easy to write. Self was very hard to write. With Self, I did a lot of research—sexual identity is very complicated. What it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, is very hard to pin down. We have these generalizations that broadly can apply, but as soon as you get down to the level of the individual, they seem to vanish or become rigid ideologies. It's inappropriate to generalize on the level of the individual. Then, if you add on sexual orientation—why people are gay, why people are straight—it becomes incredibly complicated. It's a terrain full of opinions and opinionated people, and certainties that aren't necessarily certainties. So it was a lot of work to do. And it was also my first novel. I think it's certainly a very interesting book, a hard book, but not in the sense that it is hard to follow, but maybe a bit arduous in some way. After all of the hard work, I'm not sure it did what I wanted it to do. Which isn't necessarily a problem. I tend to be very hard on that book. I've met a number of people who really, really like it. But it requires a particular kind of reader.
And the other thing, too, is that most people take who they are, naturally, as a given, and they're interested in the sexual other, but not in being the sexual other. Most men are interested in women—whether sexually or not is not the question—but they don't necessarily want to be a woman. And most women don't want to be a man. So a story that explores that, what Tiresias did in the Greek myth, does not have broad appeal, I don't think. And I'm not just saying that because it delves into sexuality—the book goes beyond that. It's just not the kind of otherness that most people like exploring. It demands a particular type of reader, an open-minded reader, probably a younger reader, at that stage in their lives when they are still open to the many ways of being.
AVC: There has been some theorizing that Self was inspired in part by Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Is that the case?
YM: Well, I read Orlando, it's a wonderful book. But in Orlando, Orlando is a man for only a few years, and then a woman for 300 years. In fact, I think Virginia Woolf, despite being a genius, was still a woman of her time. And with that switchover that she does, I don't know if she had the political will or the political insight to go quite as far as that story should have led her. It's a good exercise in language—lovely, lovely images—and there is a sort of irony throughout that is instructive, but it doesn't have the hard edge that I think it would have had if she had written it 60 or 70 years later. So I wasn't necessarily inspired by it. It's such an obvious switch; the planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea. So I didn't need Orlando to give me that idea.
Also, the idea of switching is not unique to her. I just mentioned Tiresias, and in that myth, Zeus and Hera were arguing over who had the best orgasm. Zeus said it was women who had the best orgasm, had a better sexual life, and enjoyed sex more. And Hera said that it was men. So they asked Tiresias. Tiresias, as a young man, had seen two snakes interlaced and had struck them with a stick, and was transformed into a woman. He was a woman for seven years. Then the same thing happened, he saw snakes interlaced on a mountainside, he hit them, and he became a man again. So he had sexual experience on both teams. He agreed with Zeus that women enjoyed sex more—when sex was good, women enjoyed it more. Hera was so angry to be proven wrong that she struck him blind. But Zeus gave him foresight. He could see into the future. Most people encounter Tiresias later on, in Oedipus, when Oedipus consults the seer. So there's that in Greek mythology, and other instances of people switching to the other sex. I read Virginia Woolf, but I can't say it had a direct influence. It was part of the background.
AVC: Talking about influences, you've said that Pi was inspired in part by a review you read, of Moacyr Scliar's Max And The Cats.
YM: Yeah. It got me in trouble. I read its review in a New York paper in passing, and forgot about it for years. Then I went to India. And India being crowded with animals and gods, I suddenly remembered that premise. Max And The Cats is a novella of 16 pages that takes place in the Atlantic. The character is in a boat with some animal, a jaguar or a panther. And the tone is very fable-like, not very realistic. It's for a different purpose. But nonetheless, that idea of reducing Noah's ark to one human character and one animal character struck me. So I was in India, and I remembered that, and I took that premise to tell my own story. So there is an influence. I hadn't read the book when I wrote the book. In fact, I read it only afterward, after a scandal broke out. I was accused of plagiarizing Scliar. And I said to people, "How can you plagiarize a book you haven't read?" A Quebec newspaper asked Scliar to read my book, and me to read his. So I read it in November of 2002, after I won the Booker Prize, a full two years after I wrote the book.
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