Life of Pi

I love this book because of its reference to a higher reality and to the idea that life itself and all its details can be read as symbolic metaphors for reality.

After the boat carrying Pi’s family and their zoo animals from India to Canada sinks. Pi floats adrift for 277 days before he’s rescued from his lifeboat, where he experiences extreme distress and fear for his life.

When he presents two different versions of his experience to his rescuers, who must write an official report, his rescuers must assess which of his versions contains the “truth” in the same… show more.

Again, I chose a book that is given in the first-person point of view. Rather than using a variety of first persons to tell a story, Martel takes the main character, Pi, and uses him in back-and-forth narrations from various ages – young and in the moment, and older, looking back. As well, he uses Pi as a general narrator overall in the storytelling. This gives the illusion that perhaps the other characters are not so important, or rather they are not the point of the story. 

Even after seeing the extraordinary film based on the novel, I found this book to be a fantastic story, with a simple and soulful philosophy of life, and is enriching even if you’ve already seen the film. It’s a survival tale about a sixteen-year-old boy on a lifeboat with a tiger and it is true to life in the beginning, then veers off into the surreal. As a writer, I was in awe of his details and specificity. His lengthy description of hyenas, for example, hyenas being an animal I’ve never had much interest in, was absolutely fascinating, though who… show more.

This book is about the power of story. The protagonist believed three different religions at once because he saw power in all their stories. All of us are free to choose the stories we live by, in mind, body, and spirit.
The story features animals and makes some incredible animal/human interactions believable. It promoted respect for animals, while making me question if it should make any ethical difference anyway, whether the animals adrift on the ocean with Pi were really humans or not. Humans are animals too, aren’t we? Life deserves the same respect whatever species we happen to be.… show more.

In the bestselling novel Life of Pi, a boy survives 227 days at sea in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Or does he? That’s why I am always intrigued by this multi-layered story that explores the relativity of belief. The author is asking me, the reader, to decide what’s real and what isn’t. Do I accept the more unbelievable yet uplifting tale of surviving in a lifeboat with a tiger and other zoo animals, or should I conform to the world as I know it and default to a more mundane version without the animals?… show more.

Pi, an Indian zookeeper’s son, is marooned in a lifeboat with an orang-utan, a crippled zebra, a hyena, and a tiger. The tiger eats the hyena who polished off the zebra and orang-utan, and the relationship between Pi and the tiger, representing two sides of the protagonist, becomes a tale of endurance and survival shared by man and beast, turning mystical when they disembark on a floating carnivorous island. The prosaic beginning and ending, after the tiger vanishes into the Mexican jungle, link the reader with the real world, and enhance what is a deeply spiritual story. 

Readers enjoy being put in the shoes of the protagonist. It is the job of the author to make readers wonder what’s coming next, to challenge them as they do their characters. Imagine sixteen-year-old Pi Patel, bobbing around in the middle of the unforgiving Pacific on a lifeboat, trying to survive the depredations of a hyena who wants to eat him. Pi has already watched his fellow shipmates, a zebra and orangutang, fall to this predator.

Add to this equation Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. I can feel a William Blake shiver coming on. But this tiger does not… show more.

Don’t be fooled…this literary work seems like just another fantastical adventure, but it is so much more. That’s why I love this novel. This story is rich with alternative meanings that help us to go deeper within and learn about ourselves—our belief systems, our view of a world full of uncertainty, and of our spirituality from which we cannot escape. Just the fantastical adventure alone makes for a unique and extraordinary read, but Yann’s artful arrangement of words is beautiful and magical and that leads the reader to see what Pi is seeing. Growth, survival, and making sense of our… show more.

Theology, science, love, fear, and death are delicately blended in this remarkable tale. The author, Yann Martel, urges the reader to hold sadness and joy in their hands at the same time and, in this particular story, you can’t have one without the other. Life of Pi is the perfect metaphor for ultimate sacrifice and courage, and how humans are capable of dealing with the deepest sorrow one can imagine.

When a 16-year-old Indian boy finds himself shipwrecked on a small raft with only a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger on board, what could possibly go wrong? That question obviously seems ridiculously easy to answer; nearly everything! In this inspiring tale, Yann Martel has created a nearly unbelievable situation which seems extremely unlikely to happen, and yet his tale weaves the story into such a believable set of circumstances that the reader cannot help but get drawn into the chaos. Colorful, imaginative, and inspiring, the Life of Pi is an ocean adventure unlike any other. 

This… show more.