Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

For you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can, and this is bookworm. Today I'm

happy to have as my guest, Jan Martel. He's the author of Life of Pie. It's published in America

by Harcad Brace, and we're celebrating its publication in paperback.

It's the winner of the Booker Prize, which means that a lot of people have been paying a lot of attention to it.

And what delights me about it is, in a way, it's a kind of novel that you expect to be very complicated and is in fact

very simple. It has the qualities of a fable. It moves as quickly as you can dream. And, you know,

it doesn't seem to need to ask its writer to know more or much more than he's put on the page.

That is to say, it doesn't feel like a researched book.

And you mentioned in the introduction that for a novel to be alive, you need to know certain things

about the foods, people eat, the places that they go.

And there's some beautiful stuff throughout about animal behavior, about religious studies. Which stuff is your own away from

the desk? What comes naturally to you?

I'd say that this book started for me when I went to India and I lost myself in India.

That sounds negative, but I meant it in a positive sense.

If the book feels unresearched,

I'd say it's because it was a good idea.

And in a good idea, everything comes together in a marvelous synthesis.

So people have pointed out what to them is the oddity of having this mix of the theological and the zoological.

...