Life of Pi by Yann Martel Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.75 You Save: $4.24 (47%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.75 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Life of Pi
Book Review: Good writing, but still an atheist I'm afraid!
Summary: 3 Stars
I found the begining of the 'Life of Pi' more enjoyable than the end. The colourful description of the zoo at Pondicherry was engaging. However, I had real trouble relating to Pi himself and found his earnest dedication to all three major religions slightly annoying. Once shipwrecked I found the description of life on-board the lifeboat interesting but not compelling. For me, the author got caught up in the detail of the story, ensuring that the plot maintained plausability. This resulted in me finding myself thinking about how well researched the book was, but hampered me in fully engaging in the plot. Saying this, the book is well written with some vivid descriptive passages.
Book Review: Well written, but less than compelling
Summary: 3 Stars
Pi is well aware how good his life is in the Pondicherry Zoo owned by his father. He can see a multitude of wild animals everyday as he sets off to school. Each animal accepts the boundaries of their enclosures and lives side by side in harmony. An order that Pi appreciates and is mirrored in his keen desire to understand the world through religon. He is a Christian, a Muslim and a Hindu [as Ghandi once said of himself].
Pi's faith and sense of order is challenged when he is shipwrecked while emigrating to Canada. He finds himself sharing a lifebout with an orang-outang, a hyena, a zebra and a tiger.
I found the story of Pi's Pacific struggle interesting, well written but not compelling. Although I understand one of the messages of the book is that attention to detail will keep you alive, I found myself a bit bogged down by so much of it. I also found Pi a bit too earnest and hard to empathize with. I did find Pi's relationship with his tiger interesting. They kept each other alive, despite being foes for much of their voyage.
The book is original, well written but not a page turner.
Book Review: What a relief! No irony!
Summary: 4 Stars
I think the reader from Luton (UK) did not get the point. That's is what the whole book is about: do you go with Pi's story or not? And why would you believe it? I think Yann Martel succeeds brilliantly in letting the reader make this choice. I found great relief in the tone of the story as well: finally a grown-up author who is not selfconscious about his authorship and does not ironically distance himself from what he wants to say. He is not hiding and is not scared to show that he believes in the values of storytelling.
The beauty of "Life of Pi" lies in its honest, almost naieve simplicty. A great read.
Book Review: It's the Pi of the Tiger!
Summary: 5 Stars
The winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize is an extraordinary book. A boy, with a name that sounds like an obscenity, is the sole (soul) survivor of a shipwreck - along with a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan, and a Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker.However, it takes about a hundred pages before Piscine Molitor Patel (he was named after a swimming pool), is cast adrift in the swells of the Pacific Ocean, after Mrs Gandhi has invaded his family's comfort zone and forced them to flee to Canada. Before that happens, we learn a bit more about Pi's extraordinary childhood. He's lucky in that he has a mother who reads widely, and Pi is allowed to dip into her library, with only the ruder bits of literature being censored. In short, Pi would appear to be on a perpetual quest, always discovering new things. In comparison with his brother Ravi, who is the captain of the local cricket team, Pi is a bit of a loner, but a series of serendipities ensure his survival. The Patel family is secular, but Pi finds glory in religious practice(s). An encounter on the esplanade with three wise men leads to the discovery that Pi is a devout Hindu, Christian, and Muslim. As his brother Ravi observes, if Pi converted to the Jewish faith, then he would need only find three other religions to have a day of rest for every day of the week in perpetuity. Along the way, he finds two Mr Kumars, one a devout Muslim, and the other a devout atheist science teacher. Pi only reserves his scorn for Agnostics, the eternal doubters. It would appear important that Pi has such an abundance of faith. What else could get you through living with a ferocious tiger called Richard Parker on a small lifeboat?
Mamaji says that Pi's story could make you believe in God. There's no doubting the power of Yann Martel's novel, but I cannot say that it gets me to believe in God. No, the importance of Life of Pi for me was the insistence on choosing a "better story". I'm sure this, more than anything else, must have helped sway the Man Booker judges to plump for this book. Even the Man Booker webpage accidentally plumped for this book when it erroneously announced Yann Martel as the winner the week before. It's the way a story is told, true or not, that earns its immortality. True, there are some improbable moments in Life of Pi, where our faith is tested, but Yann Martel is an excellent fisher of readers: we are on his hook, we may try to fight back with all our might, but in the end, all of us will have to admit that it is he who is in control throughout.
At first sight, we seem to learn more about psychology rather than religious faith or God in this book. We see very little of Pi being sustained by religious faith - we are told about it, but we do not see it actually feeding him, except maybe in that bizarre anti-Eden of algae. No, this book seems more like an impassioned plea for the values of fiction itself. As the author of Life of Pi himself writes, "If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams". This sounds like a call to arms, and it's a call that I take up willingly (even if the narrator, like Holly in Rider Haggard's Gothic Romance She, would appear to be a fictional device, he does have an authentic tone).
But if you do happen to dive beneath the surface, you will find that there are quite a few religious concepts alluded to in the course of this novel. "Tsimtsum", for instance, is a term derived from Jewish mysticism, related to God's withdrawal or sinking from the universe. There are references to the various flood myths (like Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, this novel delves in Jewish mysticism from the Kabbalistic Zohar branch). I believe that the concept of Tsimtsum also plays a major role in how Yann Martel has structured Life of Pi. There is something very circular in telling Pi's story in exactly 100 chapters. Also, when Pi uses pi to work out the circumference of that strange anti-Eden he lands on, you can't help but acknowledge that there is some great deal of thought in Yann Martel's naming of Pi, since pi is synonymous with circles. When God creates his vacuum, one can only imagine a circular shaped hole. Galaxies certainly resolve around black holes. Markandeya is also mentioned - he, like Pi, was also 16 when he was saved by his faith. When Pi is on the phone ordering Pizza, he says that his name is 'I am who I am' (in the same manner that God answers Moses' question about his identity).
Yann Martel has set this novel in a series of real locations that add a great deal of authenticity to this far out tale. I have created an in-depth web page that goes 'behind the scenes' of the Life of Pi, explaining all the references. Interested readers can contact me for details of this webpage - go armed to your readers group armed with all the facts! You can ever hear how 'prusten' sounds like, or just how unlucky it is to travel with someone called 'Richard Parker' (there was even a 'Clifford Richard Parker' on the Titanic!)
Book Review: Not completely Emperor's New Clothes
Summary: 3 Stars
Surely the most hyped book of the last year - and the problem with hype is that it's really difficult to live up to it.All the reviews tell you that LOP is virtually a new genre in itself, that the story-telling sets new standards and that it's incredibly life- and God-affirming.
Well it's a decent yarn, but I really can't go any further than that. It's all written in a strange, chapati-English style, which never feels comfortable to the reader. In terms of story-telling skills, Martel is barely in the wake of William Boyd, and while the tale is reasonably interesting, it barely stretches to 300+ pages.
It's not trash fiction, it's clearly-told and well-crafted, but if you really feel it's going to change your life, you need to get out more!