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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Hi, I'm Claire Nicholls and it's hard to believe that it was 25 years ago that we were all reading that book about a boy, a boat and a tiger with Life of Pi by Yann Martel. That book was a juggernaut. Jan won the Booker and there was an Ang Lee movie adaptation. And now Jan is back with another novel about myth and storytelling.
This one is called Son of Nobody.
Chapter 2: What inspired Yann Martel to retell The Iliad in Son of Nobody?
It retells the Iliad from the perspective of a commoner. But that's not all. There is also a whole other story hidden in the footnotes. I met Jan Martell on Gadigal land for the Sydney Writers Festival. It's great to have you here, Jan.
It's a pleasure being here.
You are kind of known as a man of the world. You've lived and travelled to all sorts of places. What does Greece mean to you?
Greece was actually one of the first countries I backpacked as a young man. I love backpacking. I love travelling. And so I went to Greece and Turkey. And Greece was a known entity. I already knew Greece. And I remember at the time when I was going to Turkey, that was at the time of that story. Remember Midnight Runner? About the kid who did drugs in Turkey and it really destroyed
Midnight Express.
Midnight Express, there we go, sorry. It destroyed tourism in Turkey. So I did both at the same time. And I grew up on Greek myths, so I already knew the Greek myths, so to see the landscape was interesting. But then the real discovery for me at that time was Turkey, which is an incredibly varied society. Interestingly enough, when I was in the northwest of Anatolia,
I didn't bother going to Troy, because I'd already heard from other tourists that it was an incredibly disappointing sight. Instead, I went to Gallipoli. Very impressive sight, Gallipoli. But I didn't go to Troy. 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.
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Chapter 3: How does Yann Martel view the significance of Greece in his life?
Like if you're a young writer, you want to be careful when you read people like Kafka or Hemingway or Virginia Woolf, because you're going to start writing Kafkaesque, Hemingwayesque, Woolfesque stories. You'll be pulled out of your orbit. These big monuments I read between projects. So I read the Iliad after I'd finished my previous book.
And my partner said, oh, I just came upon this really good translation. It was the first time she actually managed to read the Iliad. Because you can get, some of the translations are, I'm sure, very good if you're at university and you have professors to sort of help you. But if you're just reading it for the pleasure of a lecture, of a reading, some are quite deadening.
So it was a Stephen Mitchell translation. He's a wonderful American poet. Terrific, lean, propulsive translation of the Iliad. And I read it and I loved it. It wasn't at all what I expected.
I hate to be very simple here, Jan, but for those of us who have still not read The Iliad, what are the basics? What's the basics of this story that we actually need to know?
So The Iliad is surprisingly not about the whole 10-year war. It's in fact about 52 days in the 10th year of the war. And it's basically a story of failed anger management between angry white men.
That's why it's still current.
It is a quarrel between Agamemnon, the supreme commander of the Greek forces, and Achilles, their greatest fighter. And like petulant, immature men, they squabble over a woman. And so Achilles refuses to fight, and Agamemnon says, I don't care. But in fact, he does, because the Greek forces start to suffer devastating losses as a result of that, until Achilles finally comes back to fight.
So it's a story about literally failed anger management. And it surprised me when I first read it, because I thought, this is literally the West's first book. The Greeks rediscovered writing for the second time. They were born to write, Greeks. And the second time, the first thing he wrote down of any length was the Iliad.
So in all the books of the Western canon, the very first one would be the Iliad. And I thought when I read that for the first time, that it would be a monument to the greatness of the Greeks. It would be basically saying, you know, it's great to be Greek. You should, you know, you should be jealous and be like us. Well, it's not at all. It's a book about failure.
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Chapter 4: What makes Greek myths resonate with readers today?
The gospels are even later. They never met Jesus. There is one source of the gospels called Q, which seems to have been based on witness reports, but they were lost.
Interesting that in the year zero, when there's still a lot of literacy, no one who ever met Jesus, who would have been at the very least extraordinarily charismatic, you know, Brad Pitt with a message, extraordinarily charismatic, no one ever met him and went back home and wrote anything that has survived. which is very curious. Nothing has survived.
He survived through oral tales like the Trojan War. So once again, hardly any facts. There's no reason to doubt that he existed, but very few facts, only these symbolic tales from his birth when he was 12 and forgotten in Jerusalem, and then his ministry. three years later, the last three years of his life, on that emptiness. What historical figure do you not know anything about him for 17 years?
Like let's say Winston Churchill. Maybe past the age of three, we can account for a lot of his time, and there's no way there's 17 years where we know nothing about him. So very few facts, yet an inverted pyramid of stories. And to me, that is extraordinary, because these two stories are foundational to who we are.
But do you think there's something there in that so little facts perhaps make for a better story than we could have if we had more detail? Exactly.
That's the problem in a sense with histories. First of all, history is random. It's whatever happened. There's no order to it. The historians will find patterns, but there's no satisfying order. You know, wars is a perfect example. The tragedy of the Second World War, nothing went like we wanted it to go. Nothing, nothing. Except we won at the end, but the cost, the cost, the cost.
So history is whatever happens. Story is elastic, plastic. You can mold it. which in a sense is a curious thing, because that's the thing that I find with stories with a capital S, these stories that are foundational, like the Gospels, like Troy, which, you know, the Gospels, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the foundational stories of the Greek people.
You have these fictions, these myths that led to the Greek people. They are Greek because of those stories. Same thing with the Gospels. Obviously, the Gospels are the foundation for the Christians.
And if you told both those peoples, you know what, there's no facts to your stories, they're not gonna slap their forehead and say, oh, I no longer believe, I'm no longer Greek, I'm no longer Christian. No, it seems as if the facts don't matter. And that's what's wonderful about stories, with a capital S, is they can travel through time. We find stories very memorable.
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Chapter 5: What are the main themes explored in The Iliad?
these fragments of this verse epic on the top. And at the end you have footnotes that comment on obviously on the text. So it's a novel in verse and footnotes. And that came early on right away. I wanted, because otherwise I'd have to have this awkward thing where in full pages, the academic finds this thing. This ancient epic serves it up on a platter at his convenience.
In other words, the present, the past would be at the service of the present. I didn't want that. I want there be quality. So each one, so the top of the page is the past, the public-facing part of art, let's say, the grand epic. And at the bottom, you have the technical little footnotes. It's a present. We're very technocratic in our age. And they explain, and they're small, and they're modest.
The present has the modesty of a footnote. One of my favorite lines in the book is, we're all footnotes to a greater story. Each one carries a little tiny story that we maybe feel is insignificant, but collectively, we are it. We are our nations, not only our families, but our nation is made up of this tight weave of individual stories, of individual footnotes.
So I wanted that, and that liberated me right away. I could tell the grand epic and these little technical footnotes.
I think I probably am not the only person here who has read a book and sometimes skipped the footnotes. They felt a little bit intimidating.
That would be a mistake in this one.
The fun thing in this book is there is a whole other story happening in the footnotes. How revolutionary and how playful is that to tell a story in footnotes? It was super fun.
And you know where I got it? People keep on bringing Pale Fire to me, Nabokov's book. I tell people, you know, if a poet goes to a woods in Vermont, writes a poem, doesn't mean he's influenced by Robert Frost. He just happened to be in a woods in Vermont and wrote a poem. So Pale Fire, which is in verse and has commentary at the end. I read it afterwards. I'd read other Nabokov.
It's just a coincidence. The one that actually brought, first of all, I don't know if they're totally academic technical, but sometimes they tell other stories. And I like how they piggyback on a main story. The one that really brought footnotes, the grandeur of the footnote to me is The Divine Comedy. another mind-blowing classic and a great translation, John Ciardi.
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Chapter 6: How does Martel's Son of Nobody differ from traditional retellings of The Iliad?
But it's always...
intrigued me as a human monstrous tragedy especially how do you represent it what does the artist do at the gates of auschwitz um then i start doing research so i read about i've always read about the holocaust but i remember the beach's version i just read the victor klemperer diaries this man who survived the whole holocaust in germany because his wife was a gentile and he pretended to be one and he write a daily journal about living under the nazis
So I read that. And so it starts with a question, curiosity, research, which give me more ideas, more avenues of research. And I'm writing tons of notes. So Life of Pi, like 400 pages of random notes that I cut up, printed up, cut up, put in envelopes. So it's very analog system. Envelopes, depending where they fit in the novel. And those would be like the bones of my story.
And I'd open up the first envelope and that would be the elements to make the story. So it's like that. It's a very organic, slow process. I... I don't know anything about writing, to be honest. I just know vocabulary and sentences. I write at the level of sentences. I love punctuation. I love the skeleton structure of punctuation. I like words. I like spelling.
I remember, maybe because my first tongue was French, and English spelling makes no sense. But I always take pleasure in how disappear has one S and two P's. For some reason, I always noticed that, and I can never spell family. I remember we used to write writer, written writer. It makes no sense that pronunciation, that the double constant would affect the pronunciation of the vowel before that.
It shouldn't be after. So I remember when I start writing, occasionally I wrote down that I'm a writer, and I wrote writer with two Ts, which always lowered people's expectations. So I like spelling and I like sentence structure. And through that, I feed it by doing all my research and I construct sentences and they somehow come to life.
And I know traditionally you would finish a book like Son of Nobody and you'd have a bit of a break before you'd start something else. But you've actually already written your next project. Oh, yes. And I know you're excited about this one.
So am I. Yes, I had, the publishing world is very slow, very sloth-like. And so I had six weeks in which to, I had nothing to do and I happened to be in Mexico. And I thought of my, I was in Mexico without my family for one week. And I thought of my mother who's 85 and has Alzheimer's. And she's been like that for years. So I'm familiar with it as a dutiful loving son.
But for the first time I thought of her in terms of as an artist. What is this loss of memory, this loss of chronology? How can I respond to it? Exactly like when I was at the gates of Auschwitz. Here I'm at the gates of Alzheimer's. And so what I did is in six weeks, I've never written something so quickly. I wrote an entire other book.
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