Do Canadá

Author's note

This book was born as I was hungry. Let me explain. 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 praise. The readers ignored it.

The fiasco did not affect me too much. I had already moved in to another story, a novel set in Portugal in 1939.

Afinal, não foi sobre Portugal que Yann Martel escreveu. A ideia do romance morreu num manuscrito que o autor enviou para um endereço fictício na Sibéria, com uma morada de retorno imagnária na Bolívia. (Pena...)

Da viagem à Índia nasceu uma outra, a de Pi, um rapaz indiano que partilha um barco salva vidas com um tigre na vastidão infinda do Pacífico. Uma história insólita e cativante, que página a página faz sentir a lonjura do mar e o vagar do tempo. O que o livro desperta é mais do que empatia: é a experiência do desespero e da solidão angustiante, que desafia a fé peculiar de Pi.

Ainda assim, gostava de saber o que teria acontecido em Portugal, em 1939...

I knew very little about the religion. It had the reputation of few gods and great violence. (51)

Look at the world created in seven days. Even on a symbolic level, that's creation in a frenzy. (57)

I can well imagine an atheist's last words: "White! White! L-L-Love! My God! - and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain", and so to the very end, lack imagination and miss thebetter story. (64)

Canada meant absolutely nothing to us. It was like Timbuktu, by definition a place permanently far away. (79)