Martel received a Canada Council grant to write Self, and while the book was shortlisted for the Chapters/ Books in Canada First Novel Award, it did not sell. Martel implies that Self did not get good reviews, and that at the time he was not sufficiently important to draw attention to his own work. Martel’s speaker narrates the process whereby the book attempts to gain value though book reviews and author tours. Although the preface blurs the line between fact and fiction, the implied “second book” is Martel’s 1996 title Self. To place this introduction into the terms of cultural capital, the speaker is saying he wrote Life of Pi at a time when he had little economic or social capital because his second book was not a success with readers. Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row playing baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.

Despite my best efforts at playing the clown or the trapeze artist, the media circus made no difference. Reviewers were puzzled, or damned it with faint praise. In the spring of 1996, my second book, a novel, came out in Canada. In the Author’s Note, Martel’s speaker goes out of his way in his creative preface to establish himself as a writer with minimal cultural capital: Blending fact and fiction, the Life of Pi Author’s Note traverses the ethics of authorship and appropriation. An author or publisher with a previous record of success has what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital,” that is cultural prestige that can be translated into actual money. Used with permission by Random House.īooks acquire value in diverse, complicated ways.

Moacyr scliar life of pi