The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them “the truth.” After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional–but is it more true?
Yann Martel’s imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting “religions the way a dog attracts fleas.” Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker (“His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth”). It sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don’t burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat’s sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: “It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I’ve made none the champion.”
An award winner in Canada, Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, “My greatest wish–other than salvation–was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time.” It’s safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a book. –Brad Thomas Parsons
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I Once Caught a Bengal Tiger This-s-s-s Big With over 1250 reviews already registered for LIFE OF PI, I first thought there could be nothing more to say about this marvelous novel. But after scanning the most recent 100 reviews, I began to wonder what book many of those reviewers had read. Had I relied on 98 of those reviews, I would have expected a far different book than the one I actually read.Let’s begin with what LIFE OF PI isn’t. It’s not a Man against Nature survival story. It’s not a story about zoos or wild animals or animal husbandry. It’s not ROBINSON CRUSOE or SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON. It’s not a literary version of CASTAWAY or OPEN WATER, and it’s not a “triumph against all odds, happily ever after” rescue story. To classify it as such would be like classifying THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA as a story about a poor fisherman or MOBY DICK as a sea story. Or THE TRIAL as a courtroom drama, THE PLAGUE as a story of an epidemic, HEART OF DARKNESS as a story about slavery, or ANIMAL FARM as an animal adventure.Martel’s story line is already well-known: a fifteen-year-old boy, the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, India survives a shipwreck several days out of Manila. He is the lone human survivor, but his lifeboat is occupied by a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, an injured zebra, a hyena, and an orangutan. In relatively short order and true Darwinian fashion, their numbers are reduced to just two: the boy Piscene Molitor Patel, and the tiger, Richard Parker. By dint of his zoo exposure and a fortuitously positioned tarpaulin, Pi (as he is called) manages to establish his own territory on the lifeboat and even gains alpha dominance over Richard Parker. At various points in their 227-day ordeal, Pi and the tiger miss being rescued by an oil tanker, meet up with another shipwreck survivor, and discover an extraordinary algae island before finally reaching safety.When Pi retells the entire story to two representatives of the Japanese Ministry of Transport searching for the cause of the sinking, they express deep disbelief, so he offers them a second, far more mundane but believable story that parallels the first one. They can choose to believe the more fantastical first one despite its seeming irrationality (Pi is, after all, an irrational number) and its necessary leap of faith, or they can accept the second, far more rational version, more heavily grounded in our everyday experiences.LIFE OF PI is an allegory, the symbolic expression of a deeper meaning through a tale acted out by humans, animals, and in this case, even plant life. Yann Martel has crafted a magnificently unlikely tale involving zoology and botany, religious experience, and ocean survival skills to explore the meaning of stories in our lives, whether they are inspired by religion to explain the purpose of life or generated by our own psyches as a way to understand and interpret the world around us.Martel employs a number of religious themes and devices to introduce religion as one of mankind’s primary filters for interpreting reality. Pi’s active adoption and participation in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity establish him as a character able to relate his story through the lens of the world’s three major religions. Prayer and religious references abound, and his adventures bring to mind such Old Testament scenes as the Garden of Eden, Daniel and the lion’s den, the trials of Job, and even Jonah and the whale. Accepting Pi’s survival story as true, without supporting evidence, is little different than accepting New Testament stories about Jesus. They are matters of faith, not empiricism.In the end, however, LIFE OF PI takes a broader view. All people are storytellers, casting their experiences and even their own life events in story form. Martel’s message is that all humans use stories to process the reality around them, from the stories that comprise history to those that explain the actions and behaviors of our families and friends. We could never process the chaotic stream of events from everyday life without stories to help us categorize and compartmentalize them. Yet we all choose our own stories to accomplish this – some based on faith and religion, some based on empiricism and science. The approach we choose dictates our interpretation of the world around us.LIFE OF PI bears a faint resemblance to the movie BIG FISH, also a story about storytelling and how we understand and rationalize our own lives through tales both mundane and tall. Martel’s book is structured as a story within a story within a story, planned and executed in precisely 100 chapters as a mathematical counterpoint to the endlessly irrational and nonrepeating value of pi. The book is alternately harrowing and amusing, deeply rational and scientific but wildly mystical and improbable. It is also hugely entertaining and highly readable, as fluid as the water in which Pi floats. Anyone who enjoys literature as a vehicle for…
Definitely Worth A Read 0
The Unbelievable Truth That Pi is the nickname of the main character and narrator of this tale is only the first little tidbit to digest in this delicious smorgasbord of a novel. Pi the number, you see, goes on to infinity, so Pi the person, it can be reasonably assumed, does the same. But there’s so much more than this, it’s almost impossible to get your mind around it.As everybody already knows, the plot has to do with Pi, a sixteen-year old Indian boy who practices three religions, and who gets shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean on the way to Canada with his emigrant family. He is the sole human survivor, but unfortunately–or fortunately as it turns out–not the sole survivor. On the lifeboat with him are a 450 pound tiger and several other animals, and within a day or so, a 450 pound tiger. The bulk of the novel has to do with the story of his survival, not only from the catastrophic wreck, but from the almost surreal horror of being confined in a ridiculously small space with one of the most dangerous animals on the earth.For the rich thematic nature of this novel come into bloom, this aspect of the story must be entirely believable, and I’m here to tell you, it is. This is no Tom Robbins nonsense in which all living things get along simply because they are too cool for reality, this is nail-bitingly realistic, and nothing is left out. In fact, if you’re in this for the pure adventure of it, you can’t do much better.Young Pi has a lot of things to think about. First, there is the fact that his family has suddenly disappeared forever. Then, there is the food and water problem. Finally, there is, well, the tiger problem. Should he try to kill it? How? With a knife, a rope, a flare gun? What if he only wounds it? Can he make it go away? Can he somehow live with it? He manages, in a clever way, but just barely. His relationship with the tiger can be described as no better than uneasy even on the best days.His survival at sea, from the food and water he must meticulously procure, to the sharks he must avoid, to the storms he must suffer through, to the eruption of boils on his body, and many, many other tribulations, are carefully and realistically portrayed. As are his emotions, which range from terror, loneliness, sadness, despair . . . and hope. The experience he relates is nothing less than fascinating, and there are a multitude of surprising–and entirely credible–revelations. He endures this for 272 days before he finally washes up in Mexico.But here is where it really gets interesting. See, nobody believes the business about the tiger, which unceremoniously took off the moment it and Pi hit the beach. Oh, they believe he’s a sixteen-year old Indian boy who somehow manages to be standing on the coast of Mexico after being shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean somewhere between Manila and Midway–they have to believe that, he’s standing there–but that there is a 450 pound tiger at loose and undetected in the jungles of Mexico? No way! Can’t be!So Pi tells them another story. One that is more believable. Far more believable, in that it involves men only, and even better, men acting brutally towards one another. But neither story can be proved, one way or the other.What we have, therefore, is a treatise on the nature of truth, and on a far deeper level, the nature of faith. Don’t go back and look for clues in order to figure out which of Pi’s stories are true: you won’t be able to. The point is this: it is a matter of choice. One can choose to believe either one. Just as one can choose to have faith. Or choose not to.Pretty heavy-duty, no doubt about it, but there is a whole lot of other great stuff, too, and you’ll find yourself twirling the possibilities around in your brain for days. By its end you realize that just about everything in the novel is symbolic of something, seemingly, although there are not always clear answers. The tiger, for example, might be God, but I’m not absolutely sure about that. Arguably, he saved Pi, in that he kept his mind occupied and off the horrible contemplation of his fate. Also, there is the nature of it, which is beautiful, undeniable, and under the circumstances, all-powerful. Of course, it must also be fed, perhaps, or sacrificed to. If not, both man and beast will die.The boat, I think, orange and white, represents Hinduism. Pi could not have survived the elements without the boat, but over time it becomes weather-beaten, and he knows he can’t live on it forever. The island, green, represents Islam. Pi finds great succor on the island and is brought back to life by it, but discovers that unless he conforms to its laws strictly, it will kill him. Christianity, I think, is the blue ocean, unfathomably deep, mysterious, and teeming with life, but loaded with deadly, dangerous creatures. His survival depended on all three, a point which is…