Yann Martel on Son of Nobody
Life of Pi author Yann Martel discusses his new novel Son of Nobody, exploring identity, compassion, and the stories we construct about ourselves.
Why we picked this
Martel's work has always used storytelling itself as the subject, not just the medium. This conversation about a novel called Son of Nobody promises to be as much about why we need stories as about any particular one.
Yann Martel spent years after Life of Pi resisting the pressure to write its spiritual sequel. Son of Nobody is something more unexpected: a novel that turns the question of identity into its central dramatic engine, asking what remains of a person when the stories that defined them are stripped away.
At the Center for Fiction, Martel will discuss the novel’s origins, the philosophical questions that drove the writing, and how his thinking about storytelling has shifted in the two decades since Pi Patel crossed the Pacific. The Center for Fiction is one of the few literary venues in New York exclusively devoted to fiction, and the audience tends to arrive with serious reading lives.
This is a talk worth attending whether or not you’ve read the new book. Martel is one of the more intellectually honest writers working today, and hearing him reflect on craft and meaning in person is different from reading his interviews.