Yann martel life6/27/2023 ![]() ![]() The story it made possible for Martel was Life of Pi, his 2002 Man Booker prize-winning novel, adored around the world, which has now, he tells me, sold nearly 13m copies. ![]() I started attending masses, pujas and Friday prayers.” India was not only “where gods and animals abound and rub shoulders”, but a place “where all stories were possible”. I camped near cows and observed them at length. Confronted with gods and animals for the first time, he “took both of them seriously … I bought a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and of the gospels. In the temples he visited, he “became aware of the many animals of Hinduism: Hanuman the monkey, Ganesha the elephant-headed, Nandi the bull, Garuda the eagle, and so on”. In India, they were everywhere, “not just the obvious sacred cows … or the loudly cawing crows, or the tribes of monkey”. His discovery of faith was bound up with another awakening – to the wonder of animals. ![]() He enjoyed visiting Hindu temples, but found himself absorbed in other religions too: “Round the corner from where the Hindu gods lived there was always a church or a mosque or a temple of another faith.” Martel’s upbringing had been non-religious, but in India he realised he was “tired of being reasonable” it was leading him nowhere. ![]() At the end of 1996, as a hard-up writer with two little-known books to his name, he backpacked to the Indian subcontinent and was, he says, “dazzled”. Y ann Martel can pinpoint the moment when he rejected a secular worldview and “fell in love with faith”. ![]()
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