I just finished reading Life of Pi upon Eric’s suggestion. Unfortunately for myself, I thought I had more to read this morning so I only brought the one book with me on the bus and it turned out that I only had three pages left. Woops?
Life of Pi is written by Canadian author Yann Martel. It is mainly a novel about the life of Piscine “Pi” Molitor Patel who is a boy from India whose father is a zookeeper. At one point, they all pick up and move to Canada but along their way the ship they are on sinks and Pi is left along in a lifeboat along with a Bengal Tiger.
The majority of the novel revolves around how Pi survived his voyage at sea with this tiger for 227 days which is insane when you think about it. He had to figure out how to live off the sea and not disturb the tiger who was in the boat with him. You know he survived because in the beginning of the novel the author talks with a ‘future Pi’ who is living in Toronto.
I found the beginnings of his journey very interesting in that he explained what happened in the first days (it’s all told from a first-person perspective) and how he dealt with the huge tiger in his boat and how he took care of himself during the time. The rest of the novel gets a little tiresome as you KNOW he survived the ordeal so when you read about his thoughts of life at sea and the pain and hardship he went through, it got a little boring knowing that the biggest event of all (someone saving him) was right around the corner. I definitely found myself speed reading through some aspects of the book (like when he spoke about the skies and the seas…come on, get to the good stuff!)
However, I must admit that I am pretty upset right now as I had thought this book was non-fiction! The tale was very gripping thinking that this actually happened to someone! It was quite the page-turner at some points. For those of you who have read the book, I am hoping you can see how easy it was to feel that it was real, considering the author interviews Pi in Toronto! Now that I know it’s fiction…meh. I don’t know…I guess it’s still a good read. The ending is quite amazing actually.
In the end, I did enjoy this book. It had a very interesting section regarding religion and how Pi took it upon himself to be a practicing Christian, Mulsim and Hindu, reasoning that he loves God in all forms. It was interesting to see how the figureheads of the religions came down on this 8 year old boy and told him he couldn’t that but in the end they left bewildered and wondering if they had it all wrong. I’ll have to reflect on it some more I suppose…it was a page turner but I am wondering if I would felt differently if I knew it was fiction.