![]() ![]() The inescapable fact about the book, Martel's long-awaited follow-up to Life of Pi, is that it has not been very well received. I'd only finished his book the night before – reaching its dramatic denouement in the bath, if you must know – and feel at something of a disadvantage in talking about it, since he spent eight years labouring over it. Martel, the Canadian author who won the Booker prize for the outrageously successful Life of Pi in 2002, takes all this more or less in his stride, though he is a little put out by my incompetence and fractiousness – I rather rudely insist that the young woman who is steering him round the UK and Ireland on the publicity tour for his new novel, Beatrice and Virgil, absent herself from the room while we talk. ![]() I have no idea how to turn it off, and eventually have to ask the concierge to dispose of it. There is an additional problem that my new BlackBerry keeps ringing. I am conscious of the fact we may be speaking too loud. A woman packs up and moves to the other side of the room at Yann Martel's first mention of genocide. ![]() T alking about the Holocaust at nine in the morning in the elegant lounge of a trendy boutique hotel in central London is not ideal. ![]()
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