Yann Martel lands cameo in Life of Pi

Ang Lee’s film version of Life of Pi isn’t due in theatres until late next year, but anticipation is running high. In a feature interview in today’s Globe and Mail, author Yann Martel – who is scheduled to speak with one of the film’s stars, Bollywood actress Tabu, in Vancouver on Friday – discusses his involvement in making the film, which recently wrapped after 100 days of shooting.

Martel didn’t write the screenplay but says he was “kept in the loop” as the project cycled through directors. He also expresses his approval of Oscar winner Lee, who shot the film in 3-D.

Martel tells reporter Marsha Lederman:

“[Lee] is a perfect director for this kind of story…. He’s good at both the emotional detail but also he’s very adept at making complicated movies that demand special effects. So he’s good at the tight angle and the wide shot…. And I like that it wasn’t someone who had the bluster that some American directors might have brought to the project.”

…

Martel says that under Lee’s direction, he expects the technology will contribute to, rather than overshadow, the storytelling. “The danger of 3-D would be I guess that it looks spectacular, but it feels hollow. That’s why I was happy to have someone like Ang Lee, who is too sensitive a director and too ambitious to want to do something that just looks good but is clunky and has no heart.”

Martel also discusses the surreal experience of appearing as an extra in the film, and of meeting actor Tobey Maguire, who plays the role of a journalist who records the story of Pi, a 16-year-old boy who spends 227 days on a raft with a Royal Bengal tiger. Maguire had grown out his curly hair and scruffy beard to resemble the famed Saskatoon-based author when the two met in Montreal.

“It seemed unreal that this is what’s become of a story that I wrote when I had no money. I mean two years before I finished Life of Pi, my declared income was $6,000. I was way under the poverty line. … But every morning my office had a tiger in it and I had to keep it alive and that was my main concern.

“So I was flabbergasted at the extravaganza of the production,” he continued. “It’s delightful. It’s amazing that a product of my mind should 10 years down the road lead to this.”

Book biz round-up: the latest links

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Borders lays off 310, closes Tennessee distribution centre
• Salon publishes new Yann Martel story about a man who spends the night in a septic tank
• Unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel banned in Canada and U.S., available everywhere else
• “Man of letters” and former TLS editor John Gross dies at 75
• Tickets for the Authors at Habourfront Centre’s Forest of Reading fest go on sale today

Books of the Year 2010

There’s no formula for choosing the books of the year. Some break ground, some tackle familiar themes with new energy. Some represent the best work from established authors, some introduce us to important new voices. And some are simply in-house favourites we feel deserve a little more attention. Together, these 20 books made the biggest impact in 2010.

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Books of the Year 2010: Fiction and Poetry

There’s no formula for choosing the books of the year. Some break ground, some tackle familiar themes with new energy. Some represent the best work from established authors, some introduce us to important new voices. And some are simply in-house favourites we feel deserve a little more attention. Here are the Fiction and Poetry books that made the most impact in 2010.
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2010 Saskatchewan Book Awards shortlists

The shortlists for the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Awards have been announced. Winners will be revealed at a gala ceremony in Regina on Nov. 27. The nominees are:

BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD:

• David Carpenter, A Hunter’s Confession (Greystone Books)
• David Carpenter, Welcome to Canada (The Porcupine’s Quill)
• Dave Margoshes, Dimensions of an Orchard (Black Moss Press)
• Phyllis Nakonechny, Vidh: A Book of Mourning (Hagios Press)
• Alexandra Popoff, Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography (Free Press)
• Dianne Warren, Cool Water (HarperCollins Canada)

FICTION AWARD:

• Byrna Barclay, The Forest Horses (Coteau Books)
• Sandra Birdsell, Waiting for Joe (Random House Canada)
• David Carpenter, Welcome to Canada (The Porcupine’s Quill)
• Yann Martel, Beatrice & Virgil (Knopf Canada)
• Kathleen Wall, Blue Duets (Brindle and Glass)
• Dianne Warren, Cool Water (HarperCollins Canada)

NON-FICTION AWARD:

• David Carpenter, A Hunter’s Confession (Greystone Books)
• Heather Kuttai, Maternity Rolls: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Disability (Fernwood Publishing)
• Phyllis Nakonechny, Vidh: A Book of Mourning (Hagios Press)
• Alexandra Popoff, Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography (Free Press)

FIRST BOOK AWARD:

• Chris Clinton, Next Year Perhaps (Olympia Publishers)
• Amy Jo Ehman, Prairie Feast: A Writer’s Journey Home for Dinner (Coteau Books)
• Dianne Greenlay, Quintspinner: A Pirate’s Quest (iUniverse)
• Phyllis Nakonechny, Vidh: A Book of Mourning (Hagios Press)
• Bernadette Wagner, this hot place (Thistledown Press)

YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE AWARD:

• Arthur Slade, The Hunchback Assignments (HarperCollins Canada)
• Arthur Slade, The Dark Deeps: The Hunchback Assignments II (HarperCollins Canada)
• Alice Kuipers, The Worst Thing She Ever Did (HarperCollins Canada)
• Beverley Brenna, Something To Hang On To (Thistledown Press)

AWARD FOR POETRY:

• Tracy Hamon, Interruptions in Glass (Coteau Books)
• Don Kerr, The dust of just beginning (Athabasca University Press)
• Dave Margoshes, Dimensions of an Orchard (Black Moss Press)
• Andrew Stubbs, Endgames (Thistledown Press)

(For the remaining categories, go to the Saskatchewan Book Awards website)

Daily book biz round-up: gay YA; Gaiman YA; and more

Quiet out there today:

• Charles Taylor Prize taps original jurors for 10th anniversary
• Department of unfortunate word choices: “Jewish people don’t own the Holocaust” – Yann Martel
• The growing popularity of gay-themed YA
• Neil Gaiman wins Carnegie Medal
• Lee Siegel says that fiction has become “culturally irrelevant.” Discuss.

Daily book biz round-up: Yann Martel heads to Europe; Harry Potter heads to Orlando; and more

Scoops! Lots of ‘em!

• On the eve of Yann Martel’s European tour, the Guardian runs a not-so-nice account of the genesis of Beatrice and Virgil
• Meanwhile, Martel gets moral support from author of The Boy in Striped Pajamas
• Evaluating Canadian publishers’ websites
• Heather Reisman dons black robe, joins secret society of rich and powerful
• London mayor wants Harry Potter theme park to be built in his city, not in Orlando
  
• Steve Jobs unveils the iBookstore-ready iPhone 4
• Apple’s iBookstore sales numbers not particularly meaningful
• Forget about books on phones – now you can get books on vinyl!
• Joe Schuster Award-winners announced

Martel’s musical flight of fancy

Yann Martel is no doubt a busy man: not only is the Man Booker Prize–winning author of Life of Pi a new father, he’s also promoting his latest novel, Beatrice & Virgil, and fending off a slew of negative reviews. Yet the Montreal native has also found time to engage in a bit of classical music–inspired whimsy. On Tuesday, at a performance by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Martel supplied an original text to accompany some ballet music by Beethoven. The piece, called The Parole Hearing of Prometheus, took the form of a courtroom drama and was performed in French by Quebec actor Michel Dumont.

From The Gazette:

Trial-by-jury is not an original motif, but it got the piece up and running. Prometheus stood accused not simply of stealing fire and giving it to mankind but of enabling the despoliation of a planet the gods had been treating rather well. “Even Lord Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith, says he does not need so much heat and fire,” thundered Dumont the prosecutor in one of Martel’s more inspired flights.

According to Gazette classical music critic Arthur Kaptainis, the evening was “mostly good fun” despite the “earnest Al Gore undercurrent” of Martel’s accompanying script. Still, following the lead of book critics in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, Kaptainis couldn’t help taking a dig at Martel:

Dumont’s delivery, comic and robust, was entirely in French. Undoubtedly the language of Molière is well suited to courtroom grandiloquence. The English as printed seemed less witty and less literary. This is a significant observation: Martel wrote the text in English and had his parents prepare a translation.

Meanwhile, The Globe and Mail described Martel’s text as a “mere bagatelle compared with the grandeur” of the music, complaining that the story, which touched on melting ice caps and oil spills, was “a tad preachy.”

Martel fans can make up their own minds: a recording of the performance will eventually be released on CD.

Daily book biz round-up: Yann Martel needs saving; Chuck Palahniuk takes beating; and more

The wheels of the news bus go ’round and ’round:

• Yann Martel’s U.S. publishers beg indie booksellers to save them
• Octopus Books USA to close
• “I Am Chuck Palahniuk’s New Novel” (or, “Palahniuk Takes a Beat Down”)
• Washington library mistakes theft of 1,300 books for increased circulation
• 54% of iBooks library is fiction
• Maud Newton looks back on eight years of blogging
• More shocking, appalling, bad behavior from anonymous Amazon reviewers

Life of Pi to be filmed in 3-D

More details have emerged about director Ang Lee’s planned film adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and it looks like it will be shot in 3-D. From indieWIRE:

[Fox 2000 producer Elizabeth] Gabler and the filmmakers are lining up a big budget well north of $70 million for a 3-D magical fantasy adventure crammed with visual effects. There’s a shipwreck, the ship sinks, and a teenage boy is launched overboard and climbs into a life raft with a zebra, hyena, and a tiger. There are many CG animals (whales, fish, meercats) plus ocean and atmosphere. “It has a gigantic visual effects component,” says Gabler. “You can’t put a live tiger in a boat with a child. It has elements of Castaway, when the kid is alone in the boat. You don’t need language to convey what’s on the screen. We need to make the movie for the whole world.”

Hollywood producers don’t tend to invest $70 million in a movie without having some marquee names tied to it, and since the lead is a young Indian boy, should we anticipate Morgan Freeman and Ben Stiller and others as talking animals?