Life of Pi by Yann Martell

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From Goodreads.com:  Life of Pi is a masterful and utterly original novel that is at once the story of a young castaway who faces immeasurable hardships on the high seas, and a meditation on religion, faith, art and life that is as witty as it is profound. Using the threads of all of our best stories, Yann Martel has woven a glorious spiritual adventure that makes us question what it means to be alive, and to believe.

Growing up in Pondicherry, India, Piscine Molitor Patel - known as Pi - has a rich life. Bookish by nature, young Pi acquires a broad knowledge of not only the great religious texts but of all literature, and has a great curiosity about how the world works. His family runs the local zoo, and he spends many of his days among goats, hippos, swans, and bears, developing his own theories about the nature of animals and how human nature conforms to it. Pi’s family life is quite happy, even though his brother picks on him and his parents aren’t quite sure how to accept his decision to simultaneously embrace and practise three religions - Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.

But despite the lush and nurturing variety of Pi’s world, there are broad political changes afoot in India, and when Pi is sixteen, his parents decide that the family needs to escape to a better life. Choosing to move to Canada, they close the zoo, pack their belongings, and board a Japanese cargo ship called the Tsimtsum. Travelling with them are many of their animals, bound for zoos in North America. However, they have only just begun their journey when the ship sinks, taking the dreams of the Patel family down with it. Only Pi survives, cast adrift in a lifeboat with the unlikeliest oftravelling companions: a zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Thus begins Pi Patel’s epic, 227-day voyage across the Pacific, and the powerful story of faith and survival at the heart of Life of Pi. Worn and scared, oscillating between hope and despair, Pi is witness to the playing out of the food chain, quite aware of his new position within it. When only the tiger is left of the seafaring menagerie, Pi realizes that his survival depends on his ability to assert his own will, and sets upon a grand and ordered scheme to keep from being Richard Parker’s next meal.


Back on some lazy Sunday in November, I saw a preview for this movie during a football commercial.  I wasn't fast enough to get the sound on, but the imagery intrigued me.  I knew it was based off a book, but that was it.  Luckily for me it was available as an audiobook!

A beautifully written book about life, religion, and the meaning of religion and life as seen through the eyes of Piscine Molitor Patel, a young Indian boy.  I've studied some Hindu philosphy through the course of my yogic training, and I have to say, the way Yann Martel explained it made was the best I've heard yet.  It made sense.

But the book is more than Hindu philosophy.  It's a rich weaving of life, belief and survival.  What it means to believe, to have those beliefs questioned, and to question those beliefs.  What it is to survive under some of the harshest conditions while coping with incredible loss.  The writing pulls the reader along with wit, imagery, and not-so-subtle lessons.

The author does not shy away from the graphic discussion of the base instinct for survival, which had me wincing more than once.  The sometimes brutal description of the fight to live was almost incongruous with young Piscine's personal quest in the first part of the book to be closer to God.  A dichotomy of an internal struggle and then later in the book, an external struggle. Oddly, these two opposites worked.

A couple complaints with the book:  in the second part, where Piscine is adrift at sea.  The flow and wonder that pulled me along in the first section became bogged down and almost as becalmed as a ship stuck in the doldrums in the self same ocean.  Ruminations and observations were borderline repetitive.  Had I been reading this as a physical book, I probably would have started skipping pages. 

My other complaint was the the emphasis on Piscine's religious development and ruminations rather went by the wayside once he was adrift at sea.  He mentioned praying once and he mentioned Gideon's bible a second time.  Compared to the first section, the second section felt very bereft of spiritual ruminations - given how Piscine had thrown himself into religious studies, I would have liked to have seen more overlap.

However, overall a delightful read.  To say more would not do the book justice.  Recommended.



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