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  • A well told story with an intriguing ending

    

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• ― Kevin Kuphal said on Jun 3, 2008 about the Others edition| Add your feedback

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  • This book was really slow. I can't believe I kept reading and didn't just give up. I thought the end was really good though, so it was worth it!

    

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• ― Julie said on Apr 13, 2008 about the Others edition| Add your feedback

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  • Unlike most people i have talked to i just didn't get into this book too much. I thought that the book could have been cut in half and still gotten the same message across.

    

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• ― Dave Sanders said on Feb 24, 2008 about the Others edition| Add your feedback

• 0 of 1 person find this helpful

  • Seems like for a while everyone was talking about it ... so I feel like I have to add it to my list.

    

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• ― Nathan Rein said on Feb 27, 2008 about the Others edition| Add your feedback

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  • I've read quite a few survivalist books in my life, but this one is definitely unique. I still can't quite figure out what to make of the ending though. I listened to the audio version and it was great. The whole book was read in a thick Indian accent. I thought it would drive me nuts, but it de ... Continue

    I've read quite a few survivalist books in my life, but this one is definitely unique. I still can't quite figure out what to make of the ending though. I listened to the audio version and it was great. The whole book was read in a thick Indian accent. I thought it would drive me nuts, but it definitely added more to the character than I thought it would. It actually made certain parts of the book pretty funny when I would have just skimmed through it if reading.

    

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• ― Rice Cooker said on Dec 4, 2007 about the Audio Cassette edition| Add your feedback

• 0 of 1 person find this helpful

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  • To me, the book gets kind of past the mid-point of the story, in direct relation to the fact that life on a small boat with only a tiger as your companion must be dull. Perhaps that's just the way it should be.

    This is in fact another book that tricks me into buying by having a beginning that ... Continue

    To me, the book gets kind of past the mid-point of the story, in direct relation to the fact that life on a small boat with only a tiger as your companion must be dull. Perhaps that's just the way it should be.

    This is in fact another book that tricks me into buying by having a beginning that's drastically different from the main part of the story. But somehow I feel less "betrayed" than in the case of South of the Boarder, West of the Sun. Don't know why.

    

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• ― pthow said on Apr 11, 2007 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

Life of Pi is a masterful and utterly original novel that is at once the story of a young castaway who faces immeasurable hardships on the high seas, and a meditation on religion, faith, art and life that is as witty as it is profound. Using the threads of all of our best stories, Yann Martel has woven a glorious spiritual adventure that makes us question what it means to be alive, and to believe.

Growing up in Pondicherry, India, Piscine Molitor Patel -- known as Pi -- has a rich life. Bookish by nature, young Pi acquires a broad knowledge of not only the great religious texts but of all literature, and has a great curiosity about how the world works. His family runs the local zoo, and he spends many of his days among goats, hippos, swans, and bears, developing his own theories about the nature of animals and how human nature conforms to it. Pi’s family life is quite happy, even though his brother picks on him and his parents aren’t quite sure how to accept his decision to simultaneously embrace and practise three religions -- Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.

But despite the lush and nurturing variety of Pi’s world, there are broad political changes afoot in India, and when Pi is sixteen his parents decide that the family needs to escape to a better life. Choosing to move to Canada, they close the zoo, pack their belongings, and board a Japanese cargo ship called the Tsimtsum. Travelling with them are many of their animals, bound for zoos in North America. However, they have only just begun their journey when the ship sinks, taking the dreams of the Patel family down with it. Only Pi survives, cast adrift in a lifeboat with the unlikeliest of travelling companions: a zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Thus begins Pi Patel’s epic, 227-day voyage across the Pacific, and the powerful story of faith and survival at the heart of Life of Pi. Worn and scared, oscillating between hope and despair, Pi is witness to the playing out of the food chain, quite aware of his new position within it. When only the tiger is left of the seafaring menagerie, Pi realizes that his survival depends on his ability to assert his own will, and sets upon a grand and ordered scheme to keep from being Richard Parker’s next meal.

As the days pass, Pi fights both boredom and terror by throwing himself into the practical details of surviving on the open sea -- catching fish, collecting rain water, protecting himself from the sun -- all the while ensuring that the tiger is also kept alive, and knows that Pi is the key to his survival. The castaways face gruelling pain in their brushes with starvation, illness, and the storms that lash the small boat, but there is also the solace of beauty: the rainbow hues of a dorado’s death-throes, the peaceful eye of a looming whale, the shimmering blues of the ocean’s swells. Hope is fleeting, however, and despite adapting his religious practices to his daily routine, Pi feels the constant, pressing weight of despair. It is during the most hopeless and gruelling days of his voyage that Pi whittles to the core of his beliefs, casts off his own assumptions, and faces his underlying terrors head-on.

As Yann Martel has said in one interview, “The theme of this novel can be summarized in three lines. Life is a story. You can choose your story. And a story with an imaginative overlay is the better story.” And for Martel, the greatest imaginative overlay is religion. “God is a shorthand for anything that is beyond the material -- any greater pattern of meaning.” In Life of Pi, the question of stories, and of what stories to believe, is front and centre from the beginning, when the author tells us how he was led to Pi Patel and to this novel: in an Indian coffee house, a gentleman told him, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” And as this novel comes to its brilliant conclusion, Pi shows us that the story with the imaginative overlay is also the story that contains the most truth.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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• audiobookfictionMysticalDramaFavoriteFantasyPhilosophypopularcontemporaryreligion
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