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If ever a breakout novel deserved to be
illustrated, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Harcourt, $29.95)
is it. Published in 2001 and dedicated to Brazilian author
Moacyr Scliar, from whom Martel subconsciously cribbed an angle
of the fantastical plot, the story sinks a Canadian-bound ark of
a cargo ship and leaves alive in a life raft a 16-year-old
Indian boy, a cowardly hyena, a lame zebra, a motherly orangutan
and one very large and ferocious Bengal tiger.
That the
orangutan is named Orange Juice and the tiger is named Richard
Parker (after the eaten cabin boy in Poe’s The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) adds more than mere color to
the story; that the boy named Pi (nee Piscine Patel) practices
elements of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam adds much depth.
Whether or not you believe the creatures really represent a
sailor, a cook, a boy and his mother (as Pi later tells
the investigating authorities) is all about how you see allegory
— and how you envision Martel’s incredibly visual tale of
survival and belief.
This is
not the first time Pi’s gotten visualized (the publisher
Canongate came up with a rather fetching interactive feature to
hype the book’s initial unveiling), nor will it be the last,
since French fabulist Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen,
Amélie) has signed on to lens it for 20th Century Fox.
But,
here, we’re concerned solely with this illustrious new
illustrating and how it came to be, which, come to think of it,
is as fantastic as the tale itself.
See,
back in ’05, the Edinburgh-based Canongate launched an
international competition to find an illustrator who could best
render Pi into new shape. Entries came from far
(Philippines) and wide (Canada), and they came in the hundreds.
The judges — Martel himself, Jamie Byng of Canongate, the artist
Marc Quinn, cartoonist Peter Brookes (The London Times),
Erica Wagner (the Times literary editor), and
representatives from Canada’s Globe and Mail and
Australia’s The Age — had a task, all right, but when
they set eyes on the work of Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac,
they also had a winner.
Drawn
like the novel in first-person perspective, Torjanac’s digitally
enhanced oils not only complemented Pi, they gave it a
whole new vision, one born not so much from the mind of a
hallucinatory writer, but from the hands of a hallucinator.
Oh, not
that Torjanac’s work is in any way hippie, mind you, but to get
where he gets with image and reveal, it’s a cinch he’s gotta see
things no one else sees. The charm is that he then brings them
all to larger-than-life. That the keen Croat could do so in the
first place is a wonder; that he could do so in such a
collaborative manner is testament to his vivid gift — a gift
that, of course, began giving when a man named Yann wrote this
wild and wondrous fable for our time. Martel claims his is “a
story that will make you believe in God,” and even the staunchly
agnostic must be tempted to concur. Concur with the part about
belief, anyway. Imagine believing in belief. Not the suspension
of belief (though to get to the magic of the magical realism you
might wanna start there), but the embracing of all that belief
believes believable. Seems limitless, doesn’t it?
Kinda
like the Life of Pi.
Yann
Martel and Tomislav Torjanac discuss the creating of the
illustrated Life
of Pi at 8
p.m. Friday, Nov. 2, at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave. in
Coral Gables. For more information, call 305-442-4408. |
