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.
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