Prior to Chapter 1, there is an italicized section entitled “Author’s Note.” Throughout the novel, Martel incorporates narrative breaks which appear in italics as isolated chapters. A fictional Canadian author, who resembles Yann Martel himself, narrates these interruptions. The author informs the readers that after the failures of his two previous publications, he went to Bombay, India, on a writing retreat for a new novel about Portugal in 1939. However, after yet another faltering, the author abandons his novel about Portugal and travels to southeast India to the state of Tamil Nadu, where he lands at Pondicherry, a former seaside French colonial city in the self-governing Union Territory. Pondicherry is unique in India’s colonial history as France controlled it, unlike the rest of India, which was colonized by the British.

At an Indian Coffee House, the author meets an elderly man named Francis Adirubasamy. Mr. Adirubasamy tells the author that he has a story “that will make you believe in God” (x). Dubious, the author asks whether the tale takes place in the Roman Empire or seventh-century Arabia. To his surprise, Mr. Adirubasamy informs him that the story took place right there in Pondicherry just a few years prior, and the

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