AVC: And what was your impression when you did read it?
YM: It's a very different book from mine, in that it is mainly a political fable. As far as I can remember, it's a book about authoritarianism. It starts in Nazi Germany, and Max's father is a taxidermist. So the stuffed animals represent Nazism. In the Atlantic, I forget what it represents. And in Brazil, they were under a dictatorship. So the various incarnations of the cats represent oppression, totalitarianism, and how one accommodates or escapes those. The book, especially when they are in the Atlantic, is very fable-like. There is no concern with details. It's a story for the mind. It was imaginative. I liked it. It was for a very different purpose. I couldn't get it in Canada. When I got it, it was sent to me by that newspaper in Montreal. It's funny—in the wake of Life Of Pi, Max And The Cats was reprinted in Canada, or published there for the first time. And copies of the book would say, "The book that inspired Life Of Pi."
AVC: What responsibilities, if any, do you have to a writer who inspires you?
YM: I have the responsibility to acknowledge him. So in Life Of Pi, in the authors note, right from the start, I say, "I am indebted to Mr. Moacyr Scliar, for the spark of life." The only reason I didn't say "Mr. Moacyr Scliar and his novel" was that I wanted to blur the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Because just as art brings you to another place, so does religion—and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction. I wanted people to be unsure whether the story was true. So I used "spark of life," because it's a little more tenuous. That was right from the start. I always told people where that book came from. But people who want to cut you down will take whatever they need to.
AVC: Life Of Pi begins with a fictional account of how somebody in India told you this story, claiming it would make you believe in God. Did the decision to begin the book that way come out of this desire to raise the question of truth vs. fiction?
YM: Well, only part of it is fiction. It's mostly, factually true. I was in India, I was working on a novel set in Portugal, I did meet a man named Mr. Adirubasamy, I am thankful to the Canada Council for the Arts. You're asking me the question everybody asks me, under the guise of asking about the introduction: You're asking me whether the book is true. You know, truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts. Life is an interpretation of a series of facts, and that interpretation is really what life is about. So the division between non-fiction and fiction has a certain logic, but it's a very limited one. And by and large, it isn't helpful.
I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making. You know, the history of the United States is not just a series of flat facts: "George Washington was the first president. John Adams was the second." That's not it. The history of the United States fleshes those out in ways that are necessarily ways of storytelling. And any good novel is true in the sense that it's emotionally true, psychologically true, aesthetically true, and factually true, and when they aren't, it's because they are spiritually true. Take George Orwell's Animal Farm. It was totally true to Soviet Russia under Stalin, it captures the essence of what happened there. But it's not only not true as it relates to Russian history, it isn't even true to the way farms operate in England. But it's absolutely true to that human event called Stalinism in Russia. So this thing of "Is it true? Is it not?", I think people are basically asking if it's factually true, which has its validity if you are some scientist, if you're a logician, if you're a technician. But existentially, it is quite limited. And I'm not saying that just to obfuscate. I can tell you right now what was factually true or not throughout the book. But I think once you have those answers, it tends to reduce the story instead of making it something greater. And that attitude, expressed constantly, reduces life. And we get a whole series of people, the alienated people of the West, who having reduced and scoured anything marvelous about it, are finally left with nothing.
AVC: The book has been published in more than 40 countries. Have you talked to people around the world about the book?
YM: Oh, yes. I toured for two years. For two years, I enjoyed the success of Life Of Pi. I toured from Iceland to Greece to Hong Kong to San Francisco—everywhere. I traveled a lot and talked to a lot of people. I loved it.
AVC: How does reaction to the book vary by country? You were talking about the West's reaction to imagination, and the dearth of it. Is it different elsewhere?
YM: The reactions were on an individual basis—there was no difference nationally. Individuals in Greece and Turkey and Iceland and Finland, whether they liked it or not, it came down to who they were as individuals. The book did very well in English-speaking countries—Canada, the U.S., England, the Commonwealth. Probably because it was written in English, and because I won a big, fat prize well-known in English-speaking countries. But in more foreign environments, I'd say it did exceptionally well in countries where there is still a tradition for trusting the imagination. Countries like Ireland—well, they do speak English. But Poland, countries that are very Catholic, even though it has nothing to do with Catholicism. Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality—you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it. But in those that have it, the novel did very well. It did very well, as I said, in Poland and Ireland. But it also did well in South Korea, and I have no idea why. Perhaps because it's culturally so distant that they read my book and added on incredible layers. It did well enough in France, so-so. The French are notoriously Cartesian—perhaps it leapt a bit too far for them.
AVC: Did religious culture make a difference, given that the main character identifies as a Christian, Muslim and Hindu simultaneously?
YM: Well, as I said, in countries that have traditionally been Catholic, the book has done well. And then, I'm not sure. It was published in Turkey, and there is an Arabic edition, but the Arabic world, for whatever reason—I guess, economically they aren't as wealthy—are by and large oral cultures. I've had no echo of how the book faired with Muslim readers. In India it did well, but mind you, the kinds of people who read in India are the kinds of people who are in the upper middle class, who speak English very well, and who wouldn't necessarily be native and wouldn't necessarily be Hindu. The comments I've gotten from Indians, who were by and large secular, was that they liked the story but could point to a few factual mistakes, some of which were intentional on my part. But they weren't necessarily acting as Hindus.
AVC: So you don't find on that individual level you mentioned, people of any one faith are more accepting or open to the book than people of another faith?
YM: No. But if I project, Christians—part of this is based on my personal experience, and part of it is based on my intuition—don't read fiction. The Bible is enough for them. Jesus is enough for them. That otherworldliness of the Bible stimulates their imagination enough. Ardent Christians are not novel readers. Now, having said that, I did receive letters from Americans who were very Christian. I remember one man liked the novel, liked the story, but didn't find the fact that Pi practiced more than one religion all that amusing. He said "I've been put on this earth to spread the word of Jesus, and Jesus is the only truth, and to claim to be Christian and do something else is to be muddled and lose your way." I haven't received any equivalent letter from a Hindu or a Muslim. I would very much doubt that Hindus who were novel-readers would react in that way, if only because Christianity has tended to be exclusive. Christianity has tended to believe that it has the truth, and if you're anything else, you're going to be in limbo or in Hell.
The Hindus have a different approach—everything is an incarnation of the divine, whether it has a Hindu name on it, or whether it's called Jesus, Buddha, or Allah. To them, everything is a manifestation of Rama. So they tend to be inclusive. In other words, everything is a metaphorical expression of Hinduism. You'll often see in India, Hindus who will step into churches and make an offering to a statue of Mary or Joseph, figuring that this might be another avatar of Vishnu. It's not necessarily thought-out, but their instinct is not to disclude, but rather to include. Which isn't necessarily theologically any better than what Christianity does. Whereas Christianity discludes in a way that's quite narrow, Hinduism includes in a way that denatures the original religion. But nonetheless, the reaction of the Hindu would not be to feel threatened.
I suppose a Muslim would probably react in the same way as the Christian. Islam is more tolerant, not many people know that, in theory—in the word, in the Koran. It is actually quite tolerant of other ways of getting to God. There's an entity called the dhimmi. It means "the people of the book." Muhammad had met Christians and had met Jews, and he respected them. So the dhimmi are people who get to God through other ways. According to Islam—"Allah" just means "The God," by the way, it's not a proper name, like Joe or Frank—Muslims pray to the same God as Jews and Christians. So to them, Jews and Christians are praying to the same God in a different way, so they are to be respected. Not that that has been put into practice, due to other considerations. But I do imagine a Muslim reader might be slightly more open than a Christian, but not as open as a Hindu.
AVC: You said that your next book is almost finished. Do you have a sense of when we're going to see it?
YM: I would think, the fall of 2008. It's two things, the next one. It's a novel and an essay. The reason I did that was that as I was writing the novel, I had certain questions and approaches and things I wanted to discuss which didn't fit in the genre of the novel. They'll be published back-to-back, upside down, what the trade calls a flipbook. In other words, a book with two covers. And they'll have the same title: A 20th-Century Shirt. They share the same fundamental metaphor to do with the shirt and to do with the laundry, and they both have to do with the Holocaust.
AVC: Pi sort of came in two sections. There's the pre-trip section and the trip section. Self is divided into two parts, too. Do you see that as a motif in your work?
YM: No, I never thought of that. Well, Pi comes in three parts. There's some preliminary, then there's a trip, and then there's the investigation. In Self, you are right, there are two chapters. One is 300 pages, and chapter two is half a page. So it is roughly divided into two unequal parts. But that is two parts. I don't think—well, I hope I don't think in terms of dualities. It's just happenstance. There is a before and an after.
AVC: You said you tend to alternate books that are easy to write with books that are difficult. By that logic, 20th-Century Shirt would have been hard to write. Is that the case?
YM: Yeah, the Holocaust one is tough to write, if only because I had to do a lot of research. The point I make in my essay is that I am not so much interested in the Holocaust itself—well, I am interested, just not in this book—as its representations. As soon as a historical event has passed—and it's passed the second it's gone by—what we are left with is our representations of it. And in the essay, I discuss how the nearly singular representation of the Holocaust is always in the same mode, and that mode is historical realism and social realism. We don't allow other, more metaphorical representations of the Holocaust. It's unlike, let's say, war, which easily subjects itself to metaphor, so that we can take the reality of war and easily turn it into a comedy, or a romance, or a thriller, or a documentary drama. We can set it anywhere—so a drama about the Second World War could take place in Kansas, in Bolivia, in Samoa, or in the Arctic. It can be translated to another planet, and become a science-fiction movie that is a metaphor for the Second World War. War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable. Whether it's true to the reality of war is something else. But even if it isn't, we find it acceptable that art and war can mix. And we feel that through all its incarnations, the overall result will be a sounder understanding and appreciation of war. Whether that's true is something else.
We don't allow ourselves that liberty with the Holocaust. You know, a Holocaust Western, a Holocaust science-fiction movie, a Holocaust comedy, a Holocaust set in Bolivia, all of these feel like oxymorons to us. So in the essay, I discuss many things, but one of them is "Why do we limit our representations of the Holocaust so much? Why must a Holocaust story necessarily feature Jews and Germans and be set between 1939 and 1945? Why is it so historicized?" That's very unusual among historical events. We have no problems looking at Napoleon historically and then doing something else with him. With the Holocaust, we're very, very attached to doing nothing but the historical. And I discuss the problems with doing that. If something feels historical, it will feel more and more like something of the past. And the fact is, we clothe the Holocaust in very old clothing. We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews. We know very well-known fixed places like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, and Beltzec. Instead, war can live in a couple having a spat, when we say, "That was a real war." We very rarely have the Holocaust live in the terms of today. And I think that's a problem, because it becomes ancient history.
History has to become story, and the Holocaust hasn't. I discuss that in the essay, and then in the novel, I try to do a non-historical representation take on the Holocaust. It's a story featuring a monkey and a donkey, and it's set on a shirt. And the shirt is both a shirt and a country. So it's a very far cry from your standard Holocaust story.
AVC: It seems odd that you said Life Of Pi was easy, though years of research went into it. It seems like you're going through a similar process with 20th-Century Shirt. What's your research process like?
YM: Well, for Life Of Pi, it was fairly organic. It was easy to write, because it was so fun. For Life Of Pi, I did a lot of research on religion, on animal behavior, on zoo biology, on shipwrecks. All of which are really, really interesting. So I did two, two and a half years of research, writing notes as I was going along. It helped me with fleshing out the story, giving me new directions to explore in. And it took me two years to write it. And it was just a joy, a joy to explore the behavior of wild animals, to explore the transcendental, to see how people have suffered in shipwrecks and what they have done to get by. And it all came together; all the bits sit together very well. They snapped into place like puzzle pieces. It was very satisfying to see that picture emerge. The Holocaust one was a bit harder. On the one hand, there is so much information out there on the Holocaust. But also, it's quite repetitive. It explores the same terrain, the same characters, the same narrative arc, over and over. Over and over, you hear the date 1933, you hear the name Adolf Hitler, you read the word Berlin, you hear the word Auschwitz, you hear the rumbling of trains. The narrative arc is ceaselessly the same. It really does become like a narrow corridor where you have no choice but to go down it. And you have very few exits. So it was hard in a very different way from Self. Self is a very nebulous terrain about sexual identity. With the Holocaust, you enter a very narrow corridor. It's difficult for that reason.
AVC: In the end, do you think you enjoy the writing more or the research more?
YM: That depends. I couldn't imagine writing without research. I don't know anything. And I don't like books that look inward; I like books that look out. So I enjoy both. I wouldn't do a book whose research I didn't enjoy. To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive. And I love the writing too. I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it. There is nothing more satisfying than having a sentence fall into place in a way you feel is right, and then adding another one and then another one. It's extraordinarily satisfying. It contradicts King Lear. "Nothing will come of nothing"? Well, in art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
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