Canadian author Yann Martel, the recent winner of the Booker prize, is embroiled in a literary controversy over his novel Life of Pi. A Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar, says the Canadian writer may have plagiarized his 1981 novella Max and the Cats,a Holocaust allegory about a Jewish boy adrift off the coast of Brazil in a lifeboat with a panther.

First, though, Dr. Scliar will have to read Mr. Martel's book.

"In a certain way I feel flattered that another writer considered my idea to be so good, but, on the other hand, he used that idea without consulting me or even informing me," he told a New York Times reporter in Rio de Janeiro. "An idea is intellectual property."

Mr. Martel openly acknowledges that he adopted Dr. Scliar's premise, but he denies that he even read the other man's novella, let alone copied any of the writing.
He read a review of Dr. Scliar's book when it was translated into English in 1990. At the time he thought the premise "brilliant," but he put it out of his mind for several years until the idea resurfaced during a trip to India, when he was feeling "dry and indifferent" about his career as a novelist.

It was on a visit to a hill station near Bombay, "on a big boulder, to be precise," as he wrote in an essay on the powells.com Web site several months ago, "that I remembered Scliar's premise." Suddenly he imagined how he could write a novel about an Indian boy in a lifeboat en route to Canada with a tiger.

"Is it unsavoury to have borrowed a premise?" he asked in an interview from Berlin, where he is a guest lecturer at the Free University. Claiming that he doesn't "feel like a fraud," he said he "would love to have a discussion about where writers get their inspiration," and what constitutes "proper" usage.

"If I am a plagiarist, I am a very slow one," he said, explaining that he spent more than four years writing his novel, which has received enthusiastic reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and was short-listed for the Governor-General's award in Canada last year. It won the £121,000 Man Booker prize last month in England.

His Canadian editor and publisher were both quick to denounce what they termed a literary tempest in an international teapot. "This is just plain silly," said Louise Dennys, publisher of Knopf Canada. "Ideas are the lifeblood of our imagination. We recycle them all the time," she said, adding that it is possible to trace the premise of Martel's novel back to the story of Noah and the animals in the Ark.

"He is a thoughtful, screamingly ethical and very decent guy," said Diane Martin, the original Canadian editor for Life of Pi,pointing out that Mr. Martel had acknowledged in his novel that Dr. Scliar's premise had given "the spark of life" to his own book. Although she thinks it is "always wise" for a writer to thank a wide range of sources for help in writing books, she said that if Mr. Martel hadn't done so in this case, "nobody would be the wiser."

What has rankled Dr. Scliar and his readers in Brazil, where he is an acclaimed and prolific author, is not so much the fact that Mr. Martel used a similar idea but the manner in which he acknowledged his literary debt. "He thinks I belittled him," explained Mr. Martel, "but my book is about the blurring of fact and fiction, and I was trying to find a way to thank him without being too explicit."

The real damage came, though, in Mr. Martel's Web site essay, which has been widely reprinted since he won the Man Booker prize last month. He wrote that a brilliant premise had been "ruined by a lesser writer." Now he says he didn't mean to insult Dr. Scliar and that he has written to his publisher apologizing if his comments were misconstrued.

"I went on to say that it would be even worse if 'not only the premise but also its rendition were perfect,' but that didn't get reprinted in Brazil."

All may well come right for the hapless Mr. Martel. "I am not litigious by nature, and it's not in my plans, but it is not excluded either," Dr. Scliar said.

Mr. Martel will be in New York next week to promote his novel. By chance, Dr. Scliar will be there then to be feted by the National Yiddish Book Centre in New York, which has included his 1980 novel The Centaur in the Garden as one of the 100 best Jewish novels.

Perhaps they can exchange copies of each other's books.