Author’s note
It starts with an exciting note that the book came out when the author was hungry. My hopes for the book built with it! He bemoans about his second novel, ‘Self’ which deals with a traveller turning into a female on his eighteenth birthday when HE wakes up from sleep (faint resemblance of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’?) and reverting into a male with a rape. I would say all would – be writers SHOULD read his note. After confessing a novel is a ‘selective transformation of reality’ (I don’t know where these writers catch words that make a symphony when you say it, from thin air) he reaches that inevitable land that every writer should pass: where all your research, efforts go into a waste! When all that haunting themes and dialogue bursts out like soap bubbles.
He comes to India, for the second time right after this sucker punch - "What now, Tolstoy? What other bright ideas do you have for your life?" But this time it’s south: Pondicherry. If you had read ‘One night at the call center’, you would not certainly sit up with a stranger offers up a story for a writer. That too, when the story would make you believe in God! ‘Crap’ was the word that came to my mind. My only hope was that the story should not fall flat as Chetan Bhagat’s. Who wouldn’t want the effort of reading a couple hundred pages to bite the dust?
But it gets better as it goes. You are promised that, it won’t be a stupid story told about God calling just before a car crash and then saving the victims; but a well-researched, fictionalized story. At least that’s what you think until you Google the scenes behind the screen. As a trapeze artist, Yann Martel will truly convince every reader that they are about to venture into the scenes of a ‘true story’. The story had formed in a spontaneous moment (mainly due to the influence of the Indian setting!).
“It was there, on top of a big boulder to be precise, that I remembered Scliar's premise. Suddenly, my mind was exploding with ideas. I could hardly keep up with them. In jubilant minutes whole portions of the novel emerged fully formed: the lifeboat, the animals, the intermingling of the religious and the zoological, the parallel stories.”
-Yann Martel, ‘How I wrote Life of Pi’
With the author who could pull off his imagination so well, I could guess how great the story is going to be! Sorry for blurting this out but it turns to be amazing how the author can trick the readers, just with his words and nothing at all. Pen is, of course, mightier than sword.
P. S: Read the vote of thanks at the end of the author’s note once again and you can feel the sharpness of the stab more profound.
Anyway, the clearing the slate and getting into the story with the very old ‘willing suspension old disbelief’.
