14. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002) 319 p.
This book was on my reading list for my creative writing class. I ordered it off eBay, and a few days later – without me having mentioned it to him at all – Chris sent me an email saying:
i want this book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_pi i love it already and i havent even read it
Which was a curious coincidence with no relevance whatsoever. Anyway. It’s a wonderful book.
Life of Pi is split into two very distinct halves, both of them presented as a frame story by a fictitious author. They deal with two phases in the life of Piscine Patel, who nicknames himself “Pi” to avoid taunts from his schoolmates. The first is set in Pondicherry, a French-flavoured Indian city where Pi grows up as the son of a zookeeper. Raised a Hindu, his natural curiousity and unprejudiced piousness attracts him to other religions, and he soon considers himself a Christian and a Muslim as well. This leads to problems with his parents, and all his local priests. Martel’s writing style establishes itself quickly: poetic, eloquent, the kind of man who – along with Michael Chabon, Philip Reeve and Cormac McCarthy – can evoke a scene’s visual beauty with great ease.
The second part of the book, which is the main attraction, covers a sixteen-year old Pi’s bizarre adventures on the Pacific Ocean. His family is migrating from India to Canada, travelling on a Japanese freighter that also carries several animals from their zoo, for transfer to the United States. The ship sinks, and Pi is the only human survivor. He finds himself sharing a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.
The sheer implausibility of this scenario is rendered perfectly feasible by Martel’s writing. As Pi himself says, explaining his story to a disbelieving pair of Japanese investigators while recovering from his ordeal in hospital:
“Tigers exist, lifeboats exist, oceans exist. Because the three have never come together in your narrow, limited experience, you refuse to believe that they might. Yet the plain fact is that the Tsimtsum brought them together and then sank.”
Martel spent a year researching zoos and animals, and it was time well spent. The behaviour of all the lifeboat’s inhabitants – their poses, their fears, their territorial squabbles and their reaction to being trapped in such a tiny space – feels realistic even to a reader without any firm zoological knowledge. The animals are not as dangerous as the average person might believe, but neither are they harmless. Before long only Pi and the tiger remain, and Pi must gather together all his courage and knowledge of the animal kingdom to somehow survive in thirty square metres of space with a creature that could kill him with a single blow.
Towards the end of the book things grow stranger. Pi runs out of food and water, and as his body slowly dies, his faculties begin to dim. Another castaway is met whose plight is suspiciously similar to his own, and they share a brief and cryptic conversation. The tiger speaks to him in the night. A mysterious island that seems both heaven and hell is discovered, yields a terrible secret, and promptly fled from. Whether these experiences are dreams, hallucinations or the truth is difficult to ascertain. In the final chapters, as Pi relates his tale to the Japanese investigators, he implies that perhaps the entire story – even the crowd of animals on the lifeboat, which Martel made so perfectly believable – was just a comforting fable his mind constructed to protect itself from the much darker, disturbing truth of what really happened on the lifeboat. Is this the true story? Or is Pi simply spinning it out in frustration because the investigators do not believe he could have survived for so long with a tiger?
There is a wealth of symbolism, allegories and interpretations that could be taken from this book, and I don’t know where to begin with them all. I will re-read this many times in my life. It’s a beautiful story built on a fascinating premise, one of those few perfect novels where everything comes together and just works. Unless I come across something truly incredible in the next 36 books, Life of Pi will most likely win my pick as novel of the year.
Books: 14/50
Pages: 4450
Grub Street 
8 comments
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March 21, 2008 at 5:21 am
sunrise089
I thought Life of Pi was horrible. I found it by accident when my little sister left her high school assigned book on my bookcase. It seemed to have no redeeming characteristics whatsoever – whatever the literary qualities of the author, the title character was so hopelessly out-of-touch with reality and pretentious in his beliefs that I felt insulted that he was being presented to the reader as plausible.
March 21, 2008 at 11:08 am
grubstreethack
I mean this as respectfully as possible, but does that have anything to do with your own religious beliefs? I’ve heard a lot of bad reviews based on the theory that while the character is very pro-God, the author himself is anti-God and the story serves as an argument against faith.
March 21, 2008 at 1:46 pm
sunrise089
I would say no (although really, how confident can anyone ever be making that allegation…is it merely a coincidence that the most developed villain in End Times is a religious fundamentalist?), because I didn’t find the story to be anti-God (which may have been because I stopped reading at about the point where the Orangutan is killed by the Tiger). I have no problem with anti-God reading materials – I tremendously enjoyed Douglas Adam’s posthumous Salmon of Doubt, which is basically one giant plug for Richard Dawkins. My problem is with characters who supposedly have the whole religious experience of mankind clarified and distilled down to it’s core, and yet somehow hold a view that 99% of actual religious people find to be absurd.
I contend that no boy like Pi would exist – the character is written as wholeheartedly sincere, positive, accepting, understanding, and devoted to three faiths, and yet the author dismisses out of hand the idea that a strict reading of the three faiths might make it impossible to devoutly follow all three. This is the same reason why there aren’t very many evangelists or missionaries from very secularized and non-fundamental religious denominations…why Father Desault wasn’t really interested in converting the characters around him to Catholicism.
I have the same sort of objection to atheists in advanced Religious Studies or Religion programs at University (not classes, but actual degree-tracks). The idea that someone who rejects the basic tenants of a belief system while professing to understand it better than its practitioners is simply arrogant. I’m not a militant feminist…but I would never dream to take a feminism class, announce on the first day that I have a one-paragraph explanation for “what their problem is” and then consider myself equally qualified to speak to the issue as a lifelong supporter of the cause.
Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not talking historical or technical knowledge – I assume secularized linguists with Harvard PhD’s have a better understanding of Torah scriptures than many ministers…but when we head over into the experience of faith itself (like Pi) and are told that someone can successfully synthesize, understand, practice, have faith in, and actually believe and trust in three great religions like Pi does….well now I’d feel insulted by the author regardless of my beliefs.
___
As an aside, and a contrast, End Times has anti-religious themes. Both brothers are at the very least skeptical of religion. The priest is an apostate. New England is described as a virtual Spanish Inquisition (and the nuance, well presented, is that it has PRACTICAL benefits, not spiritual ones). There is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Souls themselves can be created at will.
After all of that however, I’ve never felt insulted, because I’ve never felt talked down to. I’ve felt like the narrators may view my beliefs as wrong, but not that they insist they understand them better than I do. I received a very different impression from the book under discussion here.
March 22, 2008 at 11:10 am
chris
ummmm the hyena killed the orang-utang… just thought i would fix that up :D
March 22, 2008 at 2:02 pm
grubstreethack
Quiet, Chris, the adults are talking.
Sunrise – The only thing that somewhat bothered me about Pi was that one of his faiths followed a completely different pantheon from the other two. I could understand somebody personally reconciling Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but Hinduism isn’t going to fit with any of them because it features completely different gods.
But I didn’t really have too much trouble believing it. Obviously, following three faiths requires one to ignore some pretty major requirements of each faith – but then, there are Christians and Muslims and Hindus that do that every day, just in different ways. Very few people adhere to every strict law laid down in the Bible. Pi is a person who originally followed several faiths because he found them all equally fascinating; as he grew older, he reconciled this with his general faith in a God, understanding that most religious practitioners would find his beliefs wrong, but confident that he was doing the right thing both for himself and for God. He’s forging out his own path of faith, and while you might believe that’s the wrong way, he believes it’s fine. That’s what faith is all about, I suppose (I’d be the least qualified person to know).
I also think it’s important to be able to separate the story from the message (see also: 50 Book Challenge #7, The Alchemist). I loved this book not for its religious discussion (which, granted, I enjoyed anyway) but because it tells a fascinating story about a kid who spends 227 days in a lifeboat with a frigging TIGER, taking a disturbing and mysterious twist in the final chapters.
March 25, 2008 at 6:08 pm
chris
that was a REAL and IMPORTANT mistake so FUCK you!
March 25, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Smiley
I know that the general premise of this book is different, but the remark about the fictitious author brings to mind Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a book written by a fictitious author about a fictitious documentary. The plot of the documentary itself was really quite compelling — a house that measured larger on the inside than on the outside — but the book itself was mostly written in a dry academic tone and sometimes weird formatting, interspersed with footnotes from a fictitious editor which occasionally turned into page-long diatribes about his life, so it was a struggle to get through.
I also have Danielewski’s next effort, Only Revolutions, laying around unfinished somewhere; according to the inner flap it’s supposed to be about two immortal teenage lovers or something, but it’s written in tedious stream-of-consciousness. Really, I can’t tell if he’s a terrible author or if I simply can’t grasp his work.
January 20, 2010 at 11:34 pm
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