LIfe of Pi (Book)

Yann Martel
Mariner Books (paperback), 2012, 336 pages
Available for Kindle (which is where I read the book)

Sometimes I read books just because everyone seems to be talking about them. Some such reads are to verify what the popular demand is about (Twilight, for example), and some are to check into what critics are raving about (Life of Pi).

The book has been made into a movie now, so the film is getting as much talk as the book did. The movie-makers must have been challenged in turning this talky preachment into a film.

What action there is is fantastic: Sixteen-year-old Pi is on his way to Canada from India with his brother and parents when the Japanese ship they're on sinks off Manila, with all hands and passengers -- except Pi. Pi takes to a lifeboat and survives many months with a Bengal tiger weighing 450 pounds sharing the boat. Plenty of cinematic possibilities there.

Back to fantastic . . .  Pi wants a story, so he tells one, endlessly interrupted by his thoughts on religion and spirituality; all this is preceded by a chatty narrative about his childhood on the grounds of his father's zoo in India.



For me, the first part of the book was the most enjoyable. I learned a lot about animals in captivity, their culture and care, and the planning needed for the enclosures in which the animals live.

I had to skim through much of the cross-Pacific journey to the sweet, puzzling ending on a beach in Mexico. Along the way, Pi fishes with a gaff, somehow keeps the tiger alive and at his end of the boat, encounters a carnivorous island (yes, the island eats living creatures who land there), and eats the eyes, organs, skin, and brains of his ocean catch. It's all colorful, but somehow dull with overly descriptive near-repetitions of the same sorts of challenges (all driven by hunger -- Pi's and the tiger's).

In Mexico, two Japanese investigators, trying to find out why the ship sank, listen to Pi's story, which he then revises so it's more everyday and more palatable to the businessmen. So we come to realize that Pi wants what he said he wanted -- story -- and we must figure out whether the stories are real, and, if real, which life of Pi is true. This is a good puzzlement, but raises questions deeper than the book seems to warrant.

Did I find God, as one character suggests a reader will? Not by a long shot.

P.S. There's a good review on Amazon (by someone named Steve Koss) about how the book is an allegory; this reader saw much more than I saw in Martel's work. The review is well worth reading. Sorry, I can't seem to get a link to work . . .