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| Words in the News
Wednesday 23 October 2002
Vocabulary from the news. Listen to and read the report then find explanations of difficult words below.
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Canadian wins the Booker Prize
Summary: The Booker prize for fiction, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the English speaking world, has been awarded to a Canadian author, Yann Martel, for his novel "Life of Pi". The hero of the book is a young Indian boy who is stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal Tiger. Critic Peter Kemp and author Yann Martel describe the book.
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| | The News | |
| | | Peter Kemp: All sorts of major ideas about life and what it is like to be a human being, and stuck here on this particular planet, arise. All that might sound as if it could be slightly irritating, but it isn't at all because it's written with tremendous verve and vigour - really short, fast, vivid, colourful sentences. All sorts of extraordinary things happen, and they're done with such panache that you're carried along with it.
Yann Martel: The message is that faith is a matter of letting go, and so Pi lets go and connects to what is universal to all religions, which is not to say that all religions are the same - they're definitely not - but if you look at all the mystics, for example, it's remarkable how they speak the same language of a personal god, and a god of love.
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| | The Words
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| | | stuck
fixed in place and unable to go
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| | | this particular planet
the earth
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| | | arise
if we say ideas arise in a novel, we mean they appear in the story
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| | | verve
lively enthusiasm (a literary word)
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| | | vigour
energy (spelt vigor in American English)
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| | | panache
if you do something with panache, you do it in a confident and stylish way
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| | | message
the message of a novel is the idea that the author is trying to communicate to readers
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| | | a matter of letting go
involves believing, feeling
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| | | what is universal to all religions
what relates to all religions
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| | | speak the same language
have the same understanding
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| | Read more about this story | |
| | Other Words in the News archives | |
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