Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #782 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.com
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 (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), 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

From Publishers Weekly
A fabulous romp through an imagination by turns ecstatic, cunning, despairing and resilient, this novel is an impressive achievement "a story that will make you believe in God," as one character says. The peripatetic Pi (ne the much-taunted Piscine) Patel spends a beguiling boyhood in Pondicherry, India, as the son of a zookeeper. Growing up beside the wild beasts, Pi gathers an encyclopedic knowledge of the animal world. His curious mind also makes the leap from his native Hinduism to Christianity and Islam, all three of which he practices with joyous abandon. In his 16th year, Pi sets sail with his family and some of their menagerie to start a new life in Canada. Halfway to Midway Island, the ship sinks into the Pacific, leaving Pi stranded on a life raft with a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After the beast dispatches the others, Pi is left to survive for 227 days with his large feline companion on the 26-foot-long raft, using all his knowledge, wits and faith to keep himself alive. The scenes flow together effortlessly, and the sharp observations of the young narrator keep the tale brisk and engaging. Martel's potentially unbelievable plot line soon demolishes the reader's defenses, cleverly set up by events of young Pi's life that almost naturally lead to his biggest ordeal. This richly patterned work, Martel's second novel, won Canada's 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. In it, Martel displays the clever voice and tremendous storytelling skills of an emerging master.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Named for a swimming pool in Paris the Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel begins this extraordinary tale as a teenager in India, where his father is a zoo keeper. Deciding to immigrate to Canada, his father sells off most of the zoo animals, electing to bring a few along with the family on their voyage to their new home. But after only a few days out at sea, their rickety vessel encounters a storm. After crew members toss Pi overboard into one of the lifeboats, the ship capsizes. Not long after, to his horror, Pi is joined by Richard Parker, an acquaintance who manages to hoist himself onto the lifeboat from the roiling sea. You would think anyone in Pi's dire straits would welcome the company, but Richard Parker happens to be a 450-pound Bengal tiger. It is hard to imagine a fate more desperate than Pi's: "I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me." At first Pi plots to kill Richard Parker. Then he becomes convinced that the tiger's survival is absolutely essential to his own. In this harrowing yet inspiring tale, Martel demonstrates skills so well honed that the story appears to tell itself without drawing attention to the writing. This second novel by the Spanish-born, award-winning author of Self, who now lives in Canada, is highly recommended for all fiction as well as animal and adventure collections. Edward Cone, New York
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

reality and fiction
What holds up in this book, and allows it to rise above the simple "gotcha!" at its conclusion, is that at its heart it concerns the interwoven relationship between fiction and reality. It is about how fiction (in broad terms, a "lie") can become one's salvation from reality. And doesn't that spark some interesting commentary on religion?? A wonderful fable, made better by its refusal to become too pedantic.

Math v religion, the life of Pi
I'm probably really stretching things but I find it hard to believe that Martel would write a whole book and title it The Life of Pi without giving a thought to mathematics. To my mind, Pi's 227 days on the raft (227 is a prime number) represents a struggle to find meaning in religion. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter - and so it is with the life of this boy looking to the world for the meaning of life. In the end, you believe what you want to believe (just as you do with religion) but your life experience, culture, indoctrination, even your language is what shapes your thinking. Ultimately, mathematics can offer far more inarguable constructs to explain our universe than can religion.

First Degree Nonsense and Second Rate Writing
While it is usually considered proper to review a novel based upon its literary merits, the much boasted purpose by some obscure authors for penning their ideas into existence are so odious that it becomes obligatory to focally lambaste the message, as opposed to the presentation of it.

This is certainly the case for Yann Martel's `Life of Pi', an attempt at moralizing that is so bad, it make the meaning of `sententious' redundant.

Growing up in a secular Indian environment, young Pi begins to take a serious interest in religion; so serious that he claims to be a practicing Hindu, Christian and Muslim. The first section of the story revolves around his strange creedal concoction, and his attempts to avoid rationalizing any aspect of it. The second section is where the `action' begins. Through an unfortunate calamity, young Pi ends up stranded on a life boat with a Royal Bengal Tiger. I would give credit to Martel for a fairly interesting, and often rather fantastical, account of this voyage, if it hadn't been `borrowed' from Moacyr Scliar's `Max and the Cats'. The final section deals with Pi's rescue, and his questioning regarding the previous events. At this point, we are we told to accept that everything we have just had shoddily narrated to us as a fabrication. Rather, Pi spend a gruesome few weeks on a boat with deranged fellow shipmates. Of course, as one of Pi's questionaires points out, the animal story was `better'. In a complete misuse of the genius of Pascal, we are invited to either accept the tiger story, or the likely reality. His inquisitors decide to accept the nice tiger story, and Pi declares that belief in God is the same.

Thus, from a sweeping introduction which promised to deliver belief in God, we are informed that while God doesn't exist, it is far sweeter to believe he does. Sorry Mr. Martel, but I prefer to seek the truth, regardless of the feelings it may generate. If Mr. Martel is not attempting to advocate ostrich-atheism, then his premises are based on the nursery-rhyme philosophy that is postmodernism: We can all make up our own truth, and it will be true for us. At times, good literature should be condescending, but never patronising. The latter seems to be quite a skill by Mr. Martel, as also exhibted by the good folk who patronised his silly nonsense with `The Man Booker Prize' in 2006. Evidently, prizes for all...

In terms of Martel's story-telling, his characterisation is hollow and about as developed as Java man. Martel may wish us to perceive his embodiment of youthful zeal as original or in some way inspiring, but all I beheld was a philosophically blinkered, and theologically ignorant, cliché of religious adherents, grossly perverted and equipped with a multitude of platitudes, while clumsily and unforgivably surviving to an overdue conclusion. One really wonders if the protagonist is necessary to Martel's plagiarised plot...

In spite of what one may think, I do recommend reading `Life of Pi'. It does depict the supposed values that are seen in contemporary religious belief, as well as personify the values of postmodernism. But expect to finish with the feeling of being lectured by a bonafide anti-intellectual.