Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Tim Bidermas. There's something special about books with footnotes. I'm thinking about works like Juno Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wow, or David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. In those books, footnotes aren't really for reference, but rather are part of the narrative itself. Enter Son of Nobody, a new novel by Jan Martel. It uses footnotes to tell two stories that are distinct, but linked. The Book of Prize-winning writers spoke about it with weekend edition host Scott Simon. Do you love pop culture? Hate some of it too? You're in good company. Pull up a metaphorical chair to Pop Culture Happy Hour, the podcast that breaks down the best and some of the most questionable moments in pop culture. We'll tell you what's great, what's interesting, and break it all down with debates that'll have you yelling at your speakers, but in a good way. Listen to NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour by finding us wherever you get your podcasts. How does a certain life become an epic? Jan Martel's new novel, Son of Nobody centers around the scholarly efforts and family life of Harlow Dunn. He's a Canadian classicist who comes across a pottery shard that leads him to a lost epic tale of the Trojan War. Unlike many epics, it's not about a king or a demigod. It's about the commoner, so as of Midas. If I could ask you to read, Mr. Martel. Prologue. Muse, have you forgotten him? So as was his name. Is he to stay in the gloom of Hades never more to see the honey light of the world? What did he do to deserve this chill fate? Let me sing his song. Then we'll see where he should stay, whether in the soaring cave called the mortal mouth, whence a flood of the tongue will give him glory, or in that dank, dark place, silent and bone-chilling, where unhappy creatures move about like shadows. So as I say, was his name, and he was my friend. And Jan Martel, author of the worldwide bestseller and booker prize winning novel Life of Pi, joins us from the studios of the CBC in Saskatoon. Thanks so much for being with us. It's a pleasure. Novel is presented in two tracks of half pages. Now above the line are fragments of the document, the so-ad, the lost epic, and below footnotes and scenes from the family life of Harlow Dunn. Why the two-track storytelling? Just because it was finally the best way to tell the story, I didn't want to anchor in just one time frame, the present with incessant flashbacks to this lost epic that would very much put it in the background. I wanted each to have its own space, exist on its own terms. So I thought of this device of having the top half of the page with these lost fragments, fragments of this lost epic tradition, and in the bottom half footnotes. I like the idea of giving a footnote a starring role, because as I say at one point, we're all footnotes to a greater story. Our little lives finally add up to great lives collectively. And just very simply, it was the easiest way to tell the story. It allowed me to have the so-ad exist on its own terms 3,000 years ago, and at the bottom half of the page to have commentary on it from a modern perspective. Is there a class consciousness in the so-ad, the second of the Trojan War that's less visible, say, in Homer? Absolutely. One thing that's striking when you read Homer's Iliad is that everyone, with one exception, everyone who speaks is some blue blood, is either a king, a queen, a god, or a goddess, a prince, or a princess. Only once does a commoner speak, and that's their cities. And he, in a more violent way, does what Achilles does. He questions the social order. He rails against Agamemnon, saying, why are we here? What do we common people, common soldiers, have to gain from this? We've been here for 10 years at an enormous loss of life, and for what gain? And instead of all the soldiers saying, yes, you're right, let's get out of here, Odysseus comes over and promptly beat him, and inexplicably, everyone else cheers along. And their cities is vilified as being the ugliest man in the Greek army. He's sort of a caricature, but a modern reader makes complete sense why, indeed, would a common Greek soldier, spend 10 years at war all this to save one man's wife? We also today are ruled by elites that care nothing for us, that are governed by greed and predatory behavior, i.e. Jeffrey Epstein, for example. And what should we do? Surely we should rise up like their cities, or like so as, and rail against these elites and take back the narrative. Harlow Dunn gets an offer from Oxford to pursue his life-making project, but there's a cost to his family, isn't there? Yeah, the point of looking into the past is to get illumination onto the present. So I wanted to establish this parallel, because it's very pertinent between this Trojan War, this siege, where people are endlessly waiting and ruminating on that waiting, and today's world, and today's, and so the best parallel to me between a war and today would not be another war, would be, but in fact, war writ small, which is a couple falling apart. So the Trojan War featured the Greeks and the Trojans, and in the modern parallel you have a couple, Harlow Dunn and Gale, who are falling apart, and their daughter's name is Helen. So I wanted a parallel there, just as the Greeks leave Greece and fight at Troy, Harlow leaves Canada to go to England to, in a sense, fight his own war, and hopefully have a quick win. Whatever he gains is at a tremendous cost, just as with the Greeks, they allegedly putatively won the war against the Trojans, but at an enormous cost that finally led to the Mycenaean civilization collapsed, and the Greek Dark Ages started, which lasted for 300 years. Family emergency brings Harlow and Gale together in loss, but it also sharpens their split, doesn't it? It does. Harlow has his fellowship at Oxford and is driven by this passion. It's not necessarily an obsession, it's this passion with this discovery. Imagine you're Howard Carter, and you've just discovered King Tutankhamun's tomb. Would you then, you know, you might likely be late for supper that evening, because you're so taken by this amazing discovery. In the same way, he's discovered this lost Trojan War tradition, of which there were many. So he's so drawn by it, but he's also reminded of his daughter. And so in a sense, he dedicates his work to her. So yes, there's a tension, a divide, and a loss, but he clings to this thing because it's a gift to her, and there's nothing you can do about what happens to her, like with the Greeks who die, but hope to have glory in a sense he's hoping to bestow glory on his daughter. Does Sohas come to like Ward? Does it give him a sense of purpose? Well, you certainly get that in the Iliad. You have people who are raging to fight when Achilles returns to the battle after the death of Patroclus. Yes, he's raging to fight, but war makes you go mad. You see that with Alexander the Great, just on the side who eventually got, went insane with the violence. Sohas clearly does that, and in his war we were madness. He decides to take on a Prince of Troy, one of the 50 sons of Priam. He decides to fight him, which would make no sense at the time. As a common soldier, he'd be poorly equipped, poorly trained, but in his sort of madness to get things over with. So has takes on Prince Mester of Troy. There's a scholarly discussion at one point where someone observes there's a good reason why ordinary people are forgotten by history. We are all hopeful and humdrum. Is there such thing as an ordinary person? When I say ordinary, I include myself as that. I'm a child of middle class parents. They happen to be diplomats. So we saw the world, but they were civil servants. They worked for the government, had average salaries. I went to public schools. I very much feel that those footnotes are the essence of life. The grand epic is collectively built just exactly as Homer's Iliad was recounted not by one single genius, let's say like Dante's Divine Comedy, which was the part of a single mind. Greek epic is the result of hundreds and hundreds of bars who collectively, you know, gathered all those footnotes and built something grand, put something grand on this pedestal called, in this case, the Iliad and the Odyssey. But it's all those accumulation of those quieter voices. I very much believe in those quieter voices. I think that's where the richness of the human experience has to be found. Jan Martel, his new novel, Son of Nobody. Thank you so much for being with us. My pleasure, Scott.
