A poignant, preposterous novel
Written: Mar 30 '04 (Updated Jul 20 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Well written, character of Pi well developed, much to think about after reading
Cons: The cover
The Bottom Line: Go out and read this book! It's wonderful!
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| Fargust's Full Review: Yann Martel - Life of Pi: A Novel |
I saw Life of Pi sitting in the bookstore for a long time before I finally got to it. I had heard nothing but good things about it, but I guess I thought it was safer to stick with the stuff by authors I knew, often stuff that I had already read. This is not an odd thing for me or for anyone, I think, but it's disappointing to me that I can allow myself to be so limited at times. Friends had told me that it was a good book, but I didn't get around to read it until a well-worn and battered copy was thrust into my hands by a friend of mine who wanted someone with whom to discuss it.
Piscine Molitor Patel, a native of India, was named after a pool in Paris, and there begins the strange tale. Because his name sounded somewhat like "P*ssing" and he got teased a lot, he decided to call himself Pi Patel from the age of 10 or so. Pi Patel was born a Hindu, but on a trip once he discovered Christianity and fell in love. Consequently he became a practicing Christian. On another trip he discovered Islam and similarly became a practicing Muslim. These three coexisted peacefully in his own mind, but not in anyone else's when they found out. The holy men were incensed, arguing amongst themselves about how their religions were incompatible in one of the book's more amusing scenes. Pi just sat idly by and waited for them to be done and continued his own personal religious beliefs.
When he reached the age of 16, Pi and his family decide to move from India to Canada, and they decide to sell all of the animals from the zoo that Pi's father owns. On the trip across the ocean with a great number of zoo animals, the ship (the Tsimtsum, a word replete with Jewish symbolism) crashes for reasons unknown to our narrator, and Pi survives in the lifeboat along with 4 of the animals: a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger. So begins the 227 day long voyage of Pi Patel across the sea.
There are a number of interesting passages concerning the animals, the number of which is eventually winnowed down, as you might imagine. Pi's ingenuity and experience in the zoo help him survive his journey, and he and the tiger develop a relationship of grudging respect. Pi feeds the tiger, and the tiger stays away from Pi. The lifeboat drifts along through the ocean and through many odd occurrences, none of which I'll ruin here, but rest assured, they're very odd.
The unbelievable quality of most of the novel would be a problem for a lot of people, I think, but the book is well-written enough to make up for it. It's hard to get into, but once we get past the shipwreck it picks up. Martel doesn't rush up to the shipwreck but rather lets the story move at its own pace, and that may seem slow to many. But the story is fantastic and wonderful, almost a fairy tale if there wasn't so much realism in it as well. If the unbelievable is likely to put you off, you'll be happy to know that everything is given good explanation in the end.
There's a lot of circle imagery used in Life of Pi, which is fitting considering the name of the main character. Even the length of his journey, 227 days, seems almost like a shout-out of sorts to the fact that 22/7 is very close to the number Pi. The religious symbolism still baffles me a bit, but I haven't thought about it as much as I'd like to. At the very least, even if you don't want to look into what it all means, the religious aspect of the novel lends it a depth that most books don't have. We feel by the end of the book that we know Pi, that we understand him in a way that we don't understand most other characters we've read. Life of Pi is a wonderful read, and you won't be sorry you picked it up.
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Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Fargust
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Member: Timothy Fargus
Location: Morristown, NJ
Reviews written: 37
Trusted by: 28 members
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