Yann Martel

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Yann Martel (2007)

Yann Martel (born June 25, 1963 in Salamanca , Spain ) is a Canadian writer . At the time of his birth, his Canadian parents were in Spain because of his father's doctoral studies.

Life

The son of a family of diplomats and writers grew up in Alaska , Costa Rica , France , Mexico and in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and British Columbia . As an adult, he traveled to Iran , Turkey and India . In 1981 he graduated from Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario. He then studied philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough and during this time worked as a dishwasher, tree planter, scissors washer and security guard.

At the age of 27 - after completing his studies - he decided to work as a writer. His first book, The Facts behind the Helsinki Rocca Matios (German: Aller madness of this being ) published in 1993. In this collection of short stories he covered topics such as illness, storytelling and history of the 20th century. The cover story of this short story collection was filmed in 1994. Then in 2004 the film Manners of Dying was made .

In the spring of 1996 his first novel Self (German: Selbst ) came out in Canada . This book is about sexual identity and orientation. There was no success: Self sold poorly.

In the foreword to his next novel ( Life of Pi ; German: Schiffbruch mit Tiger ) Martel processed his negative experiences with Self :

"In the spring of 1996, my second book, a novel, came out in Canada. It didn't fare well. Reviewers were puzzled, or damned it with faint price. Then readers ignored it. Despite my best efforts at playing the clown or the trapeze artist, the media circus made no difference. The book did not move. Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team. It vanished quickly and quietly. "

- Yann Martel

Martel made his breakthrough in 2001 with Life of Pi . In 2002 he received the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for this book . Martel had spent six months in India to write the novel. He had visited mosques , temples , churches and zoological gardens and then spent a year studying religious texts and stories about castaways . After doing the research, it took him another two years to actually write the book. Life of Pi is the epically portrayed survival story of a shipwrecked man with a religious background. The book was made into a film by Taiwanese director Ang Lee in 2012 under the title Life of Pi: Shipwreck with Tiger .

In 2004 he published the short story collection We ate the children last .

After a long break, the novel Beatrice and Virgil was published in 2010 , in which he considers the possibilities of his generation to write about the Holocaust . The main character alongside the first-person narrator (a successful writer) is a taxidermist . The artful preparation of animals, which he has mastered perfectly, contrasts with descriptions of the senseless and brutal slaughter of animals. He finds these descriptions on the one hand in a story by Gustave Flaubert , the "Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitable". On the other hand, he writes a play himself, the main characters of which are Beatrice - a donkey - and Virgil - a howler monkey . Here the description of the suffering and fear of the two animals plays a central role. The connection between history and the Holocaust is evident. The connection with the animal stories creates a new approach to this topic.

The High Mountains of Portugal was published in 2016 and uses a magical realism that has been broken several times . Three apparently unconnected parts, each with their own staff (Tomás, Dr. Lozora, Peter) and their own temporal dimension (1904, 1938/39, 1981) are held together by the bracket of the suffering of creatures, by magical objects and by events with long-term consequences. The personal narrative situation confronts the reader with perceptions and reactions of characters to the rural catholicity in northern Portugal, which is shaped by belief in miracles, with ironic distance and compassionate closeness being balanced. From the end of the novel, there is a rebalancing in relation to the central theme. The determining protagonists are not the main characters in their temporal affiliation. Instead, the focus is on the golden angel, his early death shrouded in mystery and his supernatural powers, which unfold their effect in the religious community of the village and occupy the entire period of the action. In purely formal terms, the reader's new understanding, including the re-evaluations of plot sequences, would be an aspect of postmodernism , but the text is in no way hybrid. It gains a new dimension and lives from the meeting of new developments in civilization and long-established attitudes committed to life and faith. The crucifix, which represents a suffering chimpanzee as a monstrous accusation and theological conflict material, is identified as Christ by Dona Amélia without any further gain in knowledge, entirely in the paths of traditional religion, which absorbs all appearances of the lifeworld.

Award winner or nomination

  • 1993: Journey Prize for The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
  • 1994: French Prize - Prix 30 millions d'amis
  • 1996: Amazon.ca First Novel Award (nomination) for Self
  • 2001: Governor General's Award for Fiction (nomination) for Life of Pi
  • 2001: Hugh Mac Lennan Prize for Fiction, Canada, for Life of Pi
  • 2002: Commonwealth Writers Prize - Best Book (Eurasian Region) (nomination) for Life of Pi
  • 2002: Man Booker Prize for Fiction for Life of Pi
  • 2003: Boeke Prize (South Africa) for Life of Pi

Works

Radio plays

  • 2017: a shirt of the 20th century. - Director: Jan Buck ( HR )

literature

  • KSA Brazier-Tompkins: Subject: "Animal". Representing the seeing animal in Yann Martel's "Beatrice and Virgil", in Studies in Canadian Literature - Études en littérature canadienne SCL-ELC, Vol. 41, H. 2, University of New Brunswick 2016 ISSN  1718-7850 Link

Web links

Commons : Yann Martel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. The legend of Saint Julian the Hospitable . spiegel.de. Accessed September 12, 2016
  2. "The high mountains of Portugal" - with a chimpanzee . faz.net. 12 September 2016