Pi Pictured

You may remember the competition that was held some time back to find an illustrator for Yann Martel's Booker winning The Life of Pi.

The winner was Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac, and you can view his illustrations for The Illustrated Life of Pi on the Guardian website.

Beautiful!

Reading List for Politicians

Think a certain politician is ignorant? Want to make a protest? Provide a reading list or better still send them a book or two!

Kam Raslan told me in an e-mail that he was much tickled reading about how Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul gave front-runner Rudy Giuliani a reading assignment, suggesting a list of foreign-policy books to back up his contention that attacks by Islamic militants are fueled by the U.S. presence in the Middle East.

Kam goes on to say:

And I thought, what about reading lists for people who want to do something or other? There's a great book called A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne about the Algerian war of independence from the French in the 1950s. The author sent a copy to Rumsfeld and was politely told to sod off. Bush apparently read the book and then drew completely the wrong conclusions. Oh well.

The book protest story I like best though is this one I came across on Nury Vittachi's blog:

Our old friend Yann Martel has started the world's smallest book club - one member. He's sending a book he likes to the Prime Minister of Canada every two weeks, to encourage more funding of the arts.

Booker prize winner Martel vows to send Stephen Harper an inscribed book every two weeks accompanied by a letter. So far there have been four books and four letters which you can read here. There is as yet no response from Harper saying how he has enjoyed Martel's choices, which range from Tolstoy to Agatha Christie.

All this of course begs the question, which books would you like to send to which politician? (Home-grown or international?)

Holy Plagiarised Madonnas!

Now Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code interests me not at all, and I'd happily go along with The Visitor's assessment of its literary merits. But I have been watching the press for news of the plagiarism trials against the author, because the issues raised are important to all fiction writers who use information from other published sources. At what point does using become plagiarism?

Last August, Brown appeared at the District Court in New York to defend himself against the claims of writer Lewis Perdue that he had lifted elements of the Da Vinci Code from two of his novels, Daughter of God, (2000) and The Da Vinci Legacy (1983). Purdue said he felt violated, like somebody had broken into his head. The judge concluded that:

Any slightly similar elements are on the level of generalised or otherwise unprotectable ideas ...

- a line that was used by Dan Brown's defence in the current hearing at London's High Court where two historians Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are suing Brown over his plagiarism of their earlier work The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

As copyright lawyer David Hooper says in the Guardian:

If people were able say that's my idea, that's my theme, it would make the whole creative process incredibly difficult. ... It's one thing if somebody has picked up somebody else's book and copied large chunks of it, but how on earth do you know if somebody's taken too much of somebody else's theme?

Anyway, it's interesting to make comparisons with another case that came to light some years back. The following from Moby Lives:

You've got to admit, it's an unusual premise for a book: a little boy survives a shipwreck and winds up sharing a lifeboat with a large, predatory cat. Sound familiar? ... Well, if you're thinking it's the premise of one of the most talked–about novels of the year, "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel, last month's winner of the Booker Prize, you're right. But it also turns out to be the plot of book called "Max and the Cats," by esteemed Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar ... which was published in 1981.

Scliar decided not to sue, although he certainly had a case. Purdue intends to appeal against the New York court's decision. I don't hold out much hope for him, but at least the publicity should be good for his book sales.

The Versions of Pi

Back in November I mentioned that the Times were holding a competition to find a new illustrator for Yann Martell's Booker winning Life of Pi. You can check out the finalists here. Each one now has to submit three more illustrations for the books before a winner is chosen.

The standard is very high. But I must confess that I like the illustration by Victor Tkachenko best of the bunch:

Time for a Tiger (in a Lifeboat)?

Yann Martel is looking for an illustrator for a new edition of Life of Pi to be published by Canongate Books next year. And hey, it could be YOU!

Do you find illustrations an enhancement or a distraction? I love them and think it's a shame that so few books for "grown-ups" are illustrated. Maybe that's why I appreciate Mervyn Peake and Edward Carey so much?

Times cartoonist Peter Brookes ponders the relationship between illustrations and text.