Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj  | Sulaimani, Iraq | 08 May 2026 

In Life of Pi author Yann Martel’s latest book, Son of Nobody, he takes on the mythology of the Trojan War through the eyes of a Canadian academic, highlighting the parallels between now and then. 

But instead of comparing the Trojan War and a modern war, Martel draws connections to the smaller-scale, everyday disagreements that can feel just as gutting. 

“The thing that really rips at one's heart is a romantic, a personal relationship, that falls apart,” Martel said on an episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach. 

“There's a degree of cruelty that can be in those. So I wanted the parallel between the Greeks and the Trojans to be between Harlow and his wife, Gail, who just don't get along.”

In Son of Nobody, Harlow Donne decides to leave his daughter and troubled marriage behind when he's offered the opportunity to study rare papyrus fragments at Oxford. 

One of them contains an undiscovered account of the Trojan War from a Greek commoner, known as the "son of nobody," which Harlow translates and interprets, dedicating the epic poem to his daughter. 

As he dives deeper into the ancient text, the themes ring true thousands of years later and cause Harlow to connect with the work in a powerful way. 

Martel joined Roach on Bookends to reflect on his past work, his interest in mythology and why humans should create, no matter what. 

I want to start off by talking about Life of Pi, which is the work that introduced me to you and perhaps the defining work of your career. What do you think about Life of Pi and its legacy 25 years on? 

It's still a source of joy. I wrote it expecting very few people would read it because after all, it features animals, which traditionally belong to children's literature, and this was an adult novel. 

Also, it's a novel that tackles religion, and I figure your average novel reader in Toronto is not religious, so I'm taking on two subjects that are basically jails. So I didn't expect it to do well. I loved it myself. And then lo and behold, we're talking about it 25 years later. 

All my books are like my children.- Yann Martel

I'm glad that it connected with so many readers, but you know what? All my books are like my children. I love them all equally. One just happens to have done better than the others. But every one of them I involved myself in, every one of them answered a question that I had. This one, the answer was just heard more clearly.

What interested you as a novelist in returning to this subject matter of the Trojan War in Son of Nobody?

I think it still speaks to us in many ways. First of all, The Iliad is literally the West's first book. It's the first book that the Greeks wrote down when they reinvented writing for the second time in around the 8th, 7th century B.C. The first thing they wrote down was this one. So if only because it was mentioned in that book, it would still be remembered. 

But also, there's certain peculiarities about the Trojan War that still make it relevant. One, it was primarily a siege, so we're used to war being all action, and it can be quite thrilling, but also quite mindless, whereas waiting tends to make you think, sometimes in negative ways. Resentments build, wild ideas grow. But when you wait, you can also converse, you can exchange ideas. And The Iliad, in fact, is a very chatty kind of war. 

Also, a key thing is that the Trojan War was fictional. There is no historical evidence of an actual 10-year war. All the characters that we still know to this day, Helen of Sparta, Helen of Troy, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, Ulysses, Hector — all these people that still live. They're all fictional. 

Our roots are completely fictional.- Yann Martel

There's no trace of it and yet it is the foundational myth of the Greek people who are then the foundational people of the West. We are children of the Greeks just as we are children of the Gospels and yet these stories define us. So I was struck at how, despite being this incredibly technologically high achieving civilization, our roots are completely fictional. They evaporate for lack of facts and yet these stories still move us and challenge us. 

This book is titled Son of Nobody. It is playing with this idea of legacy, of making one's name and to what extent our worth as a person is tied up in work. How do you conceive of that in your own life? 

If you look at Life of Pi, which I wrote with no money in Montreal, with roommates, way under the poverty line, you might say, “Oh, so worth it. Come on, Life of Pi is still being read, Booker Prize …” Well, that's Life of Pi.  

What about the person who works just as hard as me and whose book may not even be published? When we look at art, when the going is good, it's like, “Hey, you want to be in a rock band? Yeah, if it's U2 or The Beatles, that's a great life.” 

Those artists, the hugely successful ones, and the ones who can't make $10 on the streets, they feel the same. There's a sort of rapture when you involve yourself in art. This feeling that you're creating out of nothing, something. It's a deeply quasi-divine sort of feeling of creating something. 

So when people ask me, “What advice do you have about writing?” I say, “Turn your back on the world.” 

The world will definitely tell you it's not worth it. We don't need another poem or another song from you. So just get a job. No, turn your back on the world and nurture that little flame. It's not all about winning the Booker. Creating something out of nothing is something beautiful.

Creating something out of nothing is something beautiful.- Yann Martel

I remember my grandmother, who died a number of years ago. One of the things I have left of her is a little painting she did of a shell. Now is that going to end up in the Louvre? No, but it's in the Louvre of my heart. It moves me. It does exactly what the arts should do. Its social contract has been fulfilled with just one viewer, me. So whether it's for a million people or one person and you've still done something. Whereas most people don't create at all and are entirely forgotten.

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