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Tammy Zdunich photo<\/p>\n
Yann Martel\u2019s Son of Nobody was inspired in part by Homer\u2019s The Iliad.<\/p>\n
Harlow Donne is an academic from the Canadian Prairies who specializes in Greek translation and lands a scholarship at Oxford. He discovers an ancient text about a man named Psoas, a Greek foot soldier in the Trojan War (and constantly referred to as \u201cson of nobody\u201d), which he translates and names The Psoad. That epic poem takes up the top half of the pages of Martel\u2019s latest.<\/p>\n
Pages are split in half by a horizontal line running through the middle; the bottom half is taken up by footnotes, which offer historical insight into the Trojan War and Homer\u2019s works, as well as a window into Harlow\u2019s disintegrating marriage and his yearning to see his daughter Helen.<\/p>\n
The idea for Son of Nobody came shortly after the publication of The High Mountains of Portugal, when Martel\u2019s wife, author Alice Kuipers, suggested he read Homer\u2019s The Iliad.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t what I expected,\u201d says Martel from Toronto, where he had just landed after book launches in the U.S. and U.K. \u201cUnlike other books where you read them, they might stay with you, but it doesn\u2019t mean you pick up a pen. I just started getting ideas right away \u2014 the question was if I could do something with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martel was surprised by the anger that runs through Homer\u2019s epic poem.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first word of The Iliad is \u2018rage\u2019 \u2014 I knew it was about anger, but I didn\u2019t realize it was so focused on that single emotion of anger and its consequences,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In doing research while writing Son of Nobody, Martel visited Troy, in what is now Turkey, and was surprised how uninspiring the site is today versus how it is portrayed in Homer\u2019s works.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t want to meet your heroes \u2026 you don\u2019t want the material reality,\u201d he says. \u201cOne of the points of these mythical stories is that they are myths, and so they should remain myths because then they speak to you and they\u2019re malleable.<\/p>\n
\u201cTroy is a dumpy place, with little worn bricks \u2014 no height. It\u2019s nearly laughable, and yet it is the birthplace of this legendary city in story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Writing The Psoad portion of Son of Nobody saw Martel working in the style of the Greek classics, albeit outside of dactylic hexameter, the typical poetic meter of texts such as The Iliad and The Odyssey.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a writer that\u2019s attached to syntax, punctuation, sentence and ultimately meaning, not rhythm \u2014 I guess, in that sense, I announce myself as a non-poet,\u201d he says, laughing. \u201cTo me, the music of a language is a music of meaning. And I guess the music of sound, but in the sense of things like alliteration, the actual sounds of the words, not necessarily their metrical musicality \u2014 which, to be honest, I\u2019m totally tone deaf to.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why The Psoad is free verse, although I\u2019ve limited myself to 10 to 12 syllables \u2014 no line is fewer than 10, no more than 12.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Martel, writing within those constraints proved invigorating \u2014 particularly once the split-page structure with the footnotes at the bottom took shape.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Son of Nobody<\/p>\n \u201cIn some ways the restrictions were actually freeing. The conventional way of telling the story would have been full-page prose with the present invoking the past on a platter,\u201d he says. \u201cHarlow invoking The Psoad at his convenience in flashbacks or something would be really tiresome. Splitting up the page right away gave the past its own space. I could comment on Homer and comment on The Psoad and then have Harlow talk about his life in dialogue, and that could be side by side, cheek by jowl.\u201d<\/p>\n As the book progresses, the similarities between the plight of Psoas and Harlow become ever clearer. \u201cI wanted to parallel the present. And what better parallel for a war than a couple falling apart? In a sense, Harlow looks at the disaster of Troy, and it echoes the disaster in his own life,\u201d Martel says.<\/p>\n And while the footnotes dominate at the outset of the book, they become more sparse as Son of Nobody progresses, with The Psoad taking over in longer, deeper stretches.<\/p>\n \u201cInitially it\u2019s about Harlow, not necessarily in a positive way \u2014 right away, he\u2019s accounting for difficulties with his wife, he\u2019s missing Helen, but nonetheless there\u2019s this purpose,\u201d he says. \u201cBut then I wanted The Psoad to assert itself, so the passages get longer \u2014 Harlow\u2019s disintegrating life gets shorter and shorter shrift in the footnotes.<\/p>\n \n\t\tWinnipeg Free Press | Newsletter\n\t<\/p>\n \t\t\tDish<\/p>\n Every Second Friday<\/p>\n The latest on food and drink in Winnipeg and beyond from arts writers Ben Sigurdson and Eva Wasney.<\/p>\n \t\t\tSign up for Dish<\/a><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t \u201cI wanted the past to reassert itself: \u2018Hey, we\u2019re still here, and you still are children of us. You can\u2019t forget us, and you will eventually become us.\u2019 A footnote will eventually become the narrative upstairs.\u201d<\/p>\n Martel sees stories such as Homer\u2019s epic poems persevering in a way more fact-based historical texts rarely do, the powerful nature of these fictions gripping each reader differently.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Psoad is a fiction I created, but so was Homer\u2019s The Iliad. Myths tend to propagate, to spread, to talk, to echo. That\u2019s their very nature, unlike history, which can be forgotten, literally entirely. Entire civilizations have no history, and others get forgotten because there are so many stories.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I say in the book, we\u2019re all footnotes to a greater story.\u201d<\/p>\n winnipegfreepress.com\/bensigurdson<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t Ben Sigurdson Ben Sigurdson is the Free Press\u2018s literary editor and drinks writer. He graduated with a master of arts degree in English from the University of Manitoba in 2005, the same year he began writing Uncorked, the weekly Free Press drinks column. He joined the Free Press full time in 2013 as a copy editor before being appointed literary editor in 2014. Read more about Ben<\/a>.<\/p>\n In addition to providing opinions and analysis on wine and drinks, Ben oversees a team of freelance book reviewers and produces content for the arts and life section, all of which is reviewed by the Free Press\u2019s editing team before being posted online or published in print. It\u2019s part of the Free Press\u2018s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press\u2019s history and mandate<\/a>, and learn how our newsroom operates<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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Literary editor, drinks writer
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