Magic realism at work
Tanveerul Haque is bowled over by a story
Life of Pi by Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize in 2002. It became a literary blockbuster success which soared on to bestseller lists after it was published in the United States in 2002 and sold more than 185,000 copies in hardcover. In paperback it sold nearly two million copies. It won the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award, in November of that year. Bizarre and astonishing storytelling. At times you don't know whether to put down the book in absolute disgust or to go on reading, hoping to be rewarded with something more plausible. One has to suspend disbelief to be able to complete reading the book. Surreal, phantasmagoric, an affront to your intelligence yet spellbinding. A difficult book to review or to explain, even to describe but an experience quite out of the ordinary, nevertheless. Macabre, zany, hilarious. Made me retch and almost throw up a number of times. Life of Pi is an implausible story of a 16 year-old boy Molitor Piscine Patel, who is shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on his family's migratory trip out of Pondicherry, India, to Toronto, Canada. His name, a tongue twister in itself, is truncated to the more manageable but mathematically enigmatic Pi. Reminds me of Phillip Pirrip being reduced to Pip in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Pi's father runs the Pondicherry Zoo with its menagerie of typical zoo inmates where Pi and his brother are having a quite typical and enjoyable upbringing. Financial misfortunes lead to the closing down of the Zoo when Pi's father decides to give away the animals to various zoos around the globe and to migrate with his wife and two sons to Toronto, Canada. In fortuitous circumstances Pi's family and some of the Zoo animals being sent off to other destinations board the Tsimtsum, a Japanese owned rust bucket, on their ill-fated journey. An accident which remains an enigma causes the swift break-up and sinking of the Tsimtsum, leaving Pi, a Royal Bengal tiger, an orangutan, a zebra and a hyena the only survivors on board a lifeboat. The story is a wonderful rollercoaster ride that can only be born of the mind of a hallucinatory writer. Philosophical, poignant, comic, uproariously hilarious at times it keeps the reader's attention riveted. Magic realism in the narration of the improbable, hypothetical and fantastic story keeps the reader spellbound. Life of Pi has become a hugely celebrated novel the world over, a book that has appealed to readers of all ages and will almost certainly continue to do so for decades to come. A resplendent new hardback edition with 40 images by Tomislav Tojanac was published in September 2007. This has helped reinforce its status as a modern classic and drawn further readers into Pi's remarkable story, "a story that will make you believe in God." While saying what constitutes a literary novel is hard enough, identifying what makes one a big popular hit is even harder. The book raises questions in the reader's mind (certainly in mine) as to what caused it to be a runaway best seller as also why it won such a prestigious literary award. What does it take to write a Booker-winning novel?
Martyn Goff, who ran the award for 35 years, says the key is literary tourism - taking the reader somewhere they are not familiar with. "Yes, there should be a strong plot. But also there should be a description of something that most of us don't know anything about - Rushdie with India as it was, that sort of thing. People are very taken with that." "The working definition of literary fiction is fiction that is not just concerned with story, but with how it's told as well," says American-born writer Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With A Pearl Earring. Novelists and publishers fantasise about international success to match Ian McEwan's Atonement, Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong or Louis De Bernieres' Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Seven years after publishing Life of Pi Yann Martel has sold a manuscript for his follow-up for around $3 million. Martel's third novel, as yet untitled, is to be published in the United States sometime next year. Like Life of Pi, the new book is an allegory this time about the Holocaust involving animals. It relates the story of an encounter between a famous writer and a taxidermist who is writing a play that features dialogue between a donkey and a monkey, both imprinted on a shirt. Hmmm. Now, does that sound interesting! Yawn.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments