Book Review of Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Martel Creates a World Where All Readers Will Get Lost Willingly
Jul 22, 2009
The book is set as if it wasn´t a fictional account at all, but the author´s transcription of Pi´s real life. This gives it a very quirky and original outlook, although at first it may be a little dreary and boring.
But readers beware: after 10 pages the book gets hold of one´s mind, and doesn´t let go. Before the reader knows it they´ve read 69, 137, 333 pages, and wont want to stop.
Piscine Molitor Patel
As the title explains this is the life of Pi, who was originally called Piscine Molitor Patel. Piscine was constantly taunted by other children in account of his name, and decided to rename himself as Pi.
Pi was a happy, intelligent and zealous boy in India, where he lived with his parent and his older brother. There, his parents owned a successful zoo, in which Pi and his brother grew up and learnt.
Sadly for Pi by the time he was 16 things in India were deteriorating, and his parents decided to move to Canada.
Moving to Canada
They arranged everything to let go of the zoo, and a great number of the animals were sold to zoo´s in North America. Pi´s family decided to migrate to Canada in the cargo ship that carried all the animals.
As they sailed the Pacific Ocean something went wrong, and the ship began sinking. Luckily, or sadly, for Pi he was able to save himself, but his whole family perished, along with everyone else on the ship.
Richard Parker
If that weren´t bad enough, Pi had other things to worry about: he was on a lifeboat, which was good, but inside of it are a 450 pound Bengal tiger, a spotted hyena, a zebra, and an orangutan.
The spotted hyena took care of the zebra and the orangutan -as in, he ate them- , while Pi hid safely in a part of the boat. Then the tiger, which was called Richard Parker, took care of the hyena. As in, he ate it.
Pi was sure his time had come, but thanks to his intelligence and originality he was able to make himself the Alpha male in the lifeboat, and survive at sea for 227 days.
Pi´s survival at sea was short of a miracle, fueled by his strong will to live.
Not a Children´s Book
Although at first the book could pass as a children´s book, it is quickly obvious that children should be kept away from the book: some of the perfect description of animals feeding on each other will be too much for a child to bear, such as the time the hyena is eating the zebra, while he is eating the entrails of the still alive zebra he falls inside the zebra´s stomach, and simply continues to eat.
A Clever Fable
Even though Martel speaks mostly of animals, at times it seems that the book is about humans. This possibility is exacerbated by the last two chapters of the book, where Martel makes it seem that the majority of the book is written as a fable or parable of what the real character went through in the lifeboat.
This question mark just succeeds in making the book all the more clever.
(Life of Pi by Yann Martel is published by Harcourt books, 2001, ISBN: 0-15-100811-6)
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