Yann Martel

It took many years later to go back.

But what Greece meant to me, you know what, when you know the Greek myths and you go to Greece, it looks as if time, it's not that it hasn't moved, but all of time is in one place.

It's in the rays of sunlight and the grays of sand and the softness of the Aegean.

there's something immemorial about that landscape.

Sort of like when you go to Jerusalem, there's something about the light and the landscape that seems to date from the beginning of time and still carry all that past with it.

So it's a very powerful landscape.

Whereas Troy still, I finally did go to Troy for Son of Nobody, it still remains a very disappointing archaeological website where

It doesn't carry anything.

It's basically just a bunch of red bricks.

And the most impressive thing is this Trojan horse that the tourism authorities built.

And that's probably the most impressive thing at Troy itself.

Well, two things, they're entertaining, they're vivid, and they do have a moral point.

Despite the fact that we have a sense of the Greek religion, which is what it was before it was called the Greek myths, it was the Greek religion.

So despite the fact that the Greek gods are extraordinarily arbitrary compared to written gods later, there still is a sort of a moral framework to them.

So each of the myths

often have a point of not only will you be entertained, but you better learn from this, because otherwise you're going to be like Sisyphus or you're going to be like Tantalus.

So they're both educational, but in a very engaging way.

And they're just so vivid.

They're just so extraordinarily vivid.

So, yeah, I grew up on those.