SOURCE: Mishra, Pankaj. “The Man, or the Tiger?” New York Review of Books 50, no. 5 (27 March 2003): 17-18.

In the following review, Mishra discusses Martel's treatment of the theme of religious faith in The Life of Pi.

Halfway through Yann Martel's first novel, Self (1996), the young first-person narrator abruptly decides to write a novel that will “address this matter of God.” This sounds a bit whimsical at first. It appears to be part of the same impulse to startle the reader that makes Martel leave some pages blank in Self, or fill several of them in his collection of stories, The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (1993) with nothing more than the words “blah-blah-blah-blah.”

But this matter of God turns out to be very important to the narrator of Self, who, like Martel himself, was born to French-Canadian diplomat parents in the early Sixties, spent a nomadic childhood in several countries...