Yann Martel

of what he thinks is a lost Trojan War, because it mentions this person, Soas of Medea, the son of nobody.

And he latches onto this and he pursues it.

He wants to find these wisps.

It is myth speaking to myths.

You say it was an invention of mine.

I totally agree, just as the Iliad was an invention of Homer.

We are talking myth.

I repeat that line several times in the book.

We are talking myth here.

We are talking inventions that are moldable.

So this is me molding the Iliad, molding that story of which we know nothing but explains everything.

So yes, it is an invention, but based on looking at that air in the Peloponnese, feeling the sand.

But yeah, he's from there and he follows that trail and he manages to stitch together these fragments of this lost epic.

And so they're presented to you as a reader.

I think there is.

The New York Times said it was banal and trite, which still rankles.

But to me, few of us have been to war, and what would be the goddamn point of comparing one war to another war?

That's kind of silly.

To me, you want

to either have a marriage falling apart writ large in a war or take a war and write it small into a marriage falling apart.