Inīeatrice and Virgil, I tried to understand why we tell the stories we do about the Holocaust. Life of Pi, I wanted to understand religious thinking, how it works, what it means. The reason I write the books I do is that I want to understand something. Aesthetics is about beauty, and beauty doesn’t necessarily question things. The premise of philosophy is that you ask questions, whereas the premise of art is effect. None of my books is are explicitly philosophical, but there is a questioning of things. Of course, stories are a way of questioning reality, and I just came to that via philosophy.īut you’ve never written a philosophical novel as such. The kind of questions I ask about meaning and interpretation of reality are quite philosophical, and it has influenced my approach to stories. My approach has always been philosophical. How did your grounding in philosophy shape your fiction? You were a philosophy student in college. In a freewheeling conversation, the Canadian novelist spoke about, among other things, religion, fake news, and what prompted him to send a book every two weeks to his prime minister. Yann Martel, the author of this Booker-winning novel, was in Delhi recently on his way to a couple of literature festivals. Life of Pi, the fabulist tale of a boy from Pondicherry marooned in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. That’s the scale of popularity attained by Most Indian book-lovers are likely to have either read the book or seen the film.
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