The first evening session on Friday was with Yann Martel, author of the bestseller Life of Pi. After reading a friend’s review of it back in October, I’ve been meaning to pick it up, but haven’t had a chance to yet. Hearing Yann talk about why and how he wrote it made me want to read it first chance I get.
The first thing I have written in my notes, and I can’t remember if this is how Yann started his talk or if it was from the person introducing him, is “We gather tonight to look at God’s creation and remember our place in it.”
Yann began by talking about his love for books, for reading, and said “I clearly remember the first time I cried over a character in a book, when I was ten years old.” He said he went into the bathroom so no one else would see him crying, since he didn’t know why he was. And, “One of the great things about art is that it gives you more lives. Every time you read a novel, you live another life.”
On writing, he said, “As far as I can tell, we start writing because something is not right in our lives.” But there is a danger there, that we can rely on our writing to give us our confidence and self-assurance, our self-worth. “You have to have people in your life who love you unconditionally, even if you write really bad short stories and novels.”
The impetus for writing The Life of Pi came when he thought “what if I wrote a novel where the central character had faith?” Living in India at the time, seeing what life was like ‘on the ground’ and the religious practices of those around him, he said “Since I was not going to a church or temple or synagogue to find reasons to hate being there, a whole new world was opened to me. The person who is religious is someone who is committed to searching out the mysteries of life.” And so, he made Pi, the titular character, a practitioner of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam.
The book opens by declaring that the story of Pi “will make you believe in God.” Expanding on that, Yann Martel in one sentence summed up what I felt was one of the dominant themes of the festival, probing into why we have and need art. “God is not in the story in the Pacific. God is the reason there are stories.”