LIFE of PI

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go, Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. For some reason that children’s rhyme popped into my mind as I started to read this tale of survival. It  involves a 16 year old Indian boy, and a 3 year old, 450 pound Bengal Tiger marooned together on a lifeboat for 227 days in the Pacific Ocean. Wow, what a tale spun by the Man Booker Prize winner, Yann Martel. Oh, I forgot to mention that initially there was also a zebra, a rat, a hyena, and a orangutan on board. You can imagine how long they lasted with a furious tiger aboard. Did I like this novel? Yes, but I’m not sure it was worthy of the “Booker” award. It has the strength of an unusual story, but lacks the strong finish to knock the reader out. I did like Martel’s easy to understand prose, and I also enjoyed the font changes that let the reader know who was narrating the story. It’s a difficult novel to rate because of the long and sometimes tedious middle, and then the seemingly abrupt ending. Yet it was so entertaining. Do you see my dilemma? I must recommend this novel by virtue of it’s original and exhilarating story, even though some say that it was similar to Moacyr Scliar’s Max and the Cats .
 

The first part of the story introduces the reader to our protagonist, Piscine (self changed to Pi, because of people mispronouncing his name as ‘pissing’) Molitor Patel. He lives with his father, mother, and brother Ravi in Pondicherry, India. The family owns a prominent zoo during the turbulent reign of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the mid 1970s. Pi is going through a confused time in his life were he is unsure if he is a Hindu, a Catholic, or a Muslim. This is one part of the book that I didn’t think was relevant to the story. Anyway, Pi’s father has had enough of India’s politics and decides to sell his wild animals to various zoo’s in America and elsewhere. He boards his family and animals on the Japanese cargo ship, Tsimtsum with the ultimate destination of Canada, and a fresh start in life. But guess what? The ship sinks several days out of port, resulting in the loss of Pi’s family and everybody else, except for Pi and a few animals treading water.

As the ship sinks, Pi has been tossed into a lifeboat by crew members. He sees the tiger ( Richard Parker ) struggling in the water. Pi throws a roped lifebuoy to the tiger and starts to haul him in, and then realizes that he is dragging a wild tiger to his boat! Pi says “ Let go of that lifebuoy, Richard Parker! Let go, I said. I don’t want you here, do you understand? Go somewhere else. Leave me alone. Get lost. Drown! Drown!” Too late, the tiger pulls himself aboard. You might wonder how a tiger got the name Richard Parker. Well, when the tiger was young, he was captured by a hunter named Richard Parker. The hunter saw the tiger drinking a lot of water, so he named him “ Thirsty “. However when they went to the ticket booth for the train ride to the zoo, confusion ran amok, and the names on the tickets got reversed, and the hunter became Thirsty, and the tiger became Richard Parker. At the zoo, Pi’s father thought it was amusing and kept the unusual name for his tiger. Most of the remaining novel is about survival at sea, or man versus beast for seven months on a 26’ by 8’ lifeboat. Who wins? Can Pi train the tiger on the boat? Will the tiger try to eat Pi? Can Pi catch enough food to keep Richard Parker happy? These are a few of the questions that will be answered, as you read this daring fantasy tale. This novel is well worth the effort, I suggest you add it to your books-to-read list.

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: Man versus ocean beast novels have interested all genres of reader for years, not that Richard Parker is an ocean beast. But who can forget the hunt for the white whale in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick , or the Nautilus’s battle with the giant squid in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea , or Peter Benchley’s modern classic, Jaws . As in Pi’s plight, being shipwrecked has also spawned some classic novels; such as, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , shipwrecked on a Caribbean island for 28 years, or Johann Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson , a family trapped on a deserted island.

Yann Martel has seven published works, and has been involved in three movies. According to Wikipedia, he was influenced by... “Martel has said in a number of interviews that Dante's Divine Comedy is the single most impressive book [he has] ever read. In talking about his most memorable childhood book, he recalls Le Petit Chose  by Alphonse Daudet. He said that he read it when he was ten years old, and it was the first time he found a book so heartbreaking that it moved him to tears.”

And to ponder some notable quotes from Yann Martel: “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.”

From Pi, in the Life of Pi: “I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.”

And lastly: “I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”