I like tigers.

Big Bois.

Everyone's heard of them. The Libraries are full of them. But are they worth it?

Click the link for my video review of the big bois in my life.

The Written Review:

The beginning is rough.

It's all like - Why do we keep going on and on about religion? Where's the boat? Where's the tiger?

Stop and enjoy the roses.

The book will get to the tiger part when it wants to.

Young Pi ( Piscine "Pi" Patel ) spends the first part of the book joining the Christian, Muslim and Hindu faiths.

It's not a matter of he can't choose a religion - it's that he is able simultaneously believe in all of them.

The philosophical musings and religious prose provide an extremely interesting insight on how these religions intersect:

n  If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.n

And then...you get to the tiger part!

Pi Patel's life quickly shifts from one of religious philosophy and animal care (at his family's zoo) to one of great uncertainty.

His family is closing their Indian zoo and they need to travel by boat to a new county. Whatever animals they couldn't sell or trade are on the ship.

Only, something goes wrong.

Very. Wrong.

The ship is capsizing and it looks like neither human nor animal will make it out alive.

Soon, Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with a menagerie of animals and within an adventure he will surely never forget.

n  Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.n

Note:

Was I the only one who was upset with the ending?

I was so mad that we were given the two scenarios at the end of the story. It was like the rug was being pulled out from under me.

According to Pi, either we are to believe the tiger adventure happened or it was the alternate version: cannibalism and watching his family die in the boat.

I felt cheated and turned what was a huge triumphant moment into a truly giant downer.

Four stars because I have a selective memory and overall enjoyed the book.

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2004 review: I've always remembered this book leaving a deep lasting impact on me; appearing from the start to be one thing, and being by the end something completely different! My naïve younger self labelled this as a horror read, which I understand - but this a lot more than that.

Yann Martel's expert and peerless mix of fact and fiction, and of adventure and magical realism, is a joy to behold. Ultimately this book has one of those ideas, that some readers may struggle with - that only you can decide what really happened on Pi's journey, but it works really well for me. One of my must-read top 100 books. My stuck-up younger self only gave this an 8 out 12, but I'm sure a re-read will right this wrong one day.
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The ending of this book put me into a bit of a mental crisis.

The first 2/3 of the book are beautiful, sad, brutal-ish, and oddly filled with hope? While that ending does a full 180 and makes it more tragic, more real, and forces your head to be filled with too many thoughts to comprehend. I'm obviously not an expert on Classics but I believe this is exactly what a classic is supposed to make you feel.

“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can.”

I definitely do not recommend watching the movie before reading this. The movie is okay but this book brings so much more to the table. Plus the movie removed one of my favorite scenes soo...

“You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.”

I will say, at first there were some points where I thought about dropping the book but (thankfully) I couldn't because at the time this was a mandatory read for one of my classes. It's hard to enjoy a book you're forced to read in school but I ended up liking this one quite a bit, even if I did struggle through the beginning. I was literally yelling "Come on!!! Just get stranded already!!!". Seriously though, don't let that lengthy start discourage you from continuing the book.

I'm not a religious person but at times even I was touched by his faith, since it was the only thing he really had out in the sea. Also, this is kind of irrelevant, but the tiger was cute... Dangerous, yes, but cute. I might have gotten a little attached to him.

A cleverly disguised criticism of religion and the magical thinking associated with religious belief systems, Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" was an engaging fantasy-adventure novel about a young boy shipwrecked on the high seas on a life-raft with a Bengal tiger.

This is one of those books that requires careful reading, as the narrator is, as one discovers over the course of the novel, extremely unreliable. But is his unreliability purposeful or is it a necessary and involuntary self-defense mechanism to a traumatic event that he is unable to deal with? It's up to the reader to decide.

Beautifully written and thought-provoking, "Life of Pi" was made into a decent film. The book was better.

Life of Pi was a fairly engaging story in terms of plot and character, but what made it such a memorable book, for me at least, was its thematic concerns. Is it a "story that will make you believe in God," as Pi claims? I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I would recommend it to people who enjoy thinking about the nature of reality and the role of faith in our lives.

To me, the entire thrust of the book is the idea that reality is a story, and therefore we can choose our own story (as the author himself puts it). So if life is a story, we have two basic choices: we can limit ourselves only to what we can know for sure - that is, to "dry, yeastless factuality" - or we can choose "the better story." I suppose in Pi's world the "better story" includes God, but he doesn't say this is the only meaningful possibility. In fact, Pi calls atheists his "brothers and sisters of a different faith," because, like Pi, atheists "go as far as the legs of reason will carry them - and then they leap."

Pi's point, in my opinion, is that human experience always involves interpretation, that our knowledge is necessarily limited, that both religious belief and atheism require a leap of faith of one kind or another - after all, there's so little we can know for sure. For Pi, then, we shouldn't limit ourselves only to beliefs that can be proven empirically. Instead, we should make choices that bring meaning and richness to our lives; we should exercise faith and strive for ideals (whatever the object of our faith and whatever those ideals might be). Or, as Pi says in taking a shot at agnosticism: "To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

In the end, however, I didn't necessarily read this book as an invitation to believe in God. Instead, I saw it as a mirror held up to the reader, a test to see what kind of worldview the reader holds. That is, as Pi himself says, since "it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without the animals?" Or, as I took it: Is it my nature to reach for and believe the better but less likely story? Or do I tend to believe the more likely but less lovely story? What view of reality do I generally hold?

Another equally important question is this: How did I come by my view of reality? Do I view the world primarily through the lens of reason? Or do I view it through the lens of emotion? For Pi, I think it's safe to say his belief comes by way of emotion. He has, as one reviewer noted, a certain skepticism about reason (in fact, Pi calls it "fool's gold for the bright"). Pi also has what I would call a subtle but real basis for his belief in God, namely, "an intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and ultimate purpose." But belief still isn't easy for him. Despite his trusting sense of purpose, Pi acknowledges that "Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer." So it's not that a life of faith is easier, in Pi's opinion, it's that for him belief is ultimately more worthwhile.

This is not to say, however, that Pi holds a thoroughly postmodern view of God or that he believes as a matter of art rather than in a sincere way. True, Pi suggests that whether you believe his story had a tiger in it is also a reflection of your ability to believe in something higher. And of course it's easy to read Pi's entire story as an attempt to put an acceptable gloss on a horrific experience. Still, there are a number of clues throughout the book that give the reader at least some reason to believe Pi's story did have a tiger in it (for instance, the floating banana and the meerkat bones).

As such, Pi's two stories could be seen as an acknowledgement that both atheism and belief in God require some faith, and therefore it's up to each of us to choose the way of life that makes us the happiest. He's not necessarily saying that the truth is what you make it, he's saying we don't have unadulterated access to the truth: our imagination, personalities, and experiences unavoidably influence the way we interact with the world. But that's not the same as saying whatever we imagine is true. I think Pi, for instance, knows which of his stories is true. It's not Pi but the reader who is left with uncertainty and who therefore has to throw her hands up and say "I don't know," or else choose one story or the other. And to me, this isn't too far off from the predicament we all find ourselves in.

And that's what makes Life of Pi such a challenge to the reader: Pi's first story is fantastic, wonderful, but hard to believe. Yet there's some evidence that it happened just the way he said it did. And Pi's second story is brutal, terrible, but much easier to accept as true. Yet it's not entirely plausible either, and it leaves no room for the meerkat bones or Pi's "trusting sense of presence and ultimate purpose." If the reader personally dismisses the tiger story out of hand, I suppose that's another way of saying the reader, by nature, tends to believe the more likely but less lovely story. In the same way, if the reader gets to the story's payoff and still believes there was a tiger in the boat, the reader is probably inclined to believe the more emotionally satisfying story. But it should be born in mind that Pi doesn't definitively state which story was true, something which only he can know for sure. All we can really be sure of, in Pi's universe, is that he was stuck on a lifeboat for a while before making it to shore. So which story do I believe? I struggled with that question for a long time. But after thinking about it for a couple of days, I'll end this review with the final lines from the book: "Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal Tiger."

A visual of me everytime I looked at this book on my shelf before I started reading it:


Definitely absolutely not my cup of tea.

n  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.n

This is a review I've been putting off writing. I read it almost two months ago, and I'm still not quite sure what to say about it that hasn't already been said. It has been on my radar for years, and then I saw the movie when it came out (knowing that I was committing a huge book nerd party foul since I hadn't yet read it) because it was just so beautiful, and that TIGER! Oh god, that tiger was amazing.

I read this book at the request of my friend who knew I was going through some stuff. She promised me that I was not going to be disappointed. And I most definitely was not. Oh no. I read this during a time in my life when I seriously needed to believe in something. Anything. And this book will make you believe in something. I believe now more than ever in the power of words. Art. Storytelling. Because this book may be about a lot of things. An Indian Boy named Pi. A tiger named Richard Parker. Survival. Desperation. Loss of innocence. Fear. Hope. Faith. God. But above all, this book is about stories, and how humans have this innate need to tell them, hoping that some kind of wisdom or truth may be passed along with them from generation to generation. We humans have this pressing need to be heard.

The first 100 or so pages of this novel can be interpreted as dull. Bland. Boring. This is the clinical side of Pi, the detailed and descriptive part of him. The part that desperately needs us to understand him. He tells the reader about his journey to find God. He first falls in love with the Hindu god Krishna, then the Christian Jesus, and finally the Muslim Allah. He embraces all three gods and all three religions as if they are one. His family and friends do not understand him, and think him odd, but Pi has this absolutely beautiful peace about him that even I, as only a reader, envied. Once Pi finds god, he goes on and on about his father's zoo, and more specifically about the science of zoology. What motivates different species to behave the way they do, how they interact with other species and each other. It was this part that I found the most intrusive and cumbersome, but honestly, it was only a small fraction of my reading experience. This clinical approach to his writing style comes into play much later, and I understood Yann Martel's decision to write in this way in the beginning. As you can find out for yourself by reading the back cover, Pi travels to Canada with his family and several animals after his zookeeper father decides to sell the zoo and leave India when the ship sinks and Pi is left as the only survivor. Well, the only human survivor.

Pi's journey has now begun, and in his telling of his beautiful story, a story which will make you believe in God, all of the clinical backstory of the first hundred pages begins to make sense. It is this knowledge of animals that sets Pi apart and enables him to survive with a 450 pound adult Bengal tiger on board a small lifeboat in the ocean for months. He understands how and why they behave, and this knowledge not only saves his life, but creates a certain bond with the beast, as much of a bond as these two different species can have. This relationship becomes truly beautiful, and I hungrily read page after page, waiting for it to develop. Pi became such a strong and memorable character for me, and never once was I bored in reading this. Martel weaves some beauty and magic in this telling of Pi's story, and I realized just how perfect this story was for me during a crazy time in my own life. The movie was breathtakingly beautiful, but words...words bring it to life.

Without being spoilery, I will say that at the end of the novel, the reader is faced with a choice of what to believe. We humans do tend to color our stories differently depending on our audience. Sometimes, two stories are colored differently, but the outcome is still the same. If the outcome is the same, does it matter how we get there? Just as art is an exaggeration of life, shouldn't words be the same? Isn't storytelling just another art form? Why shouldn't words express a more colorful world than the one the truth might offer? Pi Patel beleived in three different gods from three different religions equally. Each god has their own stories, their own myths, their own beliefs, values, and meanings. But really, in the end, all three are God. Sometimes it is the story of how we got here that makes us keep telling stories. And really, what are religions but a bunch of stories that teach us how to live? Did they happen exactly as they are told? Does it even matter? I got to the end of this beautiful book and realized that it doesn't matter what choice I've made and what it is that I believe. Both choices are the same, just colored in different ways.

4.5 stars.

هي رواية للأديب الكندي "يان مارتل", وحصدت جائزة "Man Booker" الأدبية في عام 2002؛ وهي جائزة ذات مستوى عالي تُقدَّم سنوياً لأفضل رواية كتبت باللغة الإنجليزية لأديب من دول الكومنولث أو من الجمهورية الأيرلندية, ترجمة لأربعين لغة وإلى العربية عام 2006



مقدمة الكتاب تخبرنا عن سر النهاية لو كنت أعلم لقرأته بعد الانتهاء من قراءة الرواية , لكن وبالرغم من معرفتنا لأحداث النهاية إلا أن الرواية لذيذة بشكل خرافي أحببتها حد أنني لم أستطيع الكتابة عنها بالرغم من مرور أكثر من أسبوعين على قراءتي لها , أغرق أنا في التفاصيل الكثيرة التي تسحبني للعيش داخل الرواية وكأنني حاضرة في كل لحظاتها ,

يتحدث يان عن نفسه في البداية يقول بأنه سافر إلى الهند من أجل أن يتفرغ لكتابة رواية عظيمة ويلتقي بشخص في أحد مقاهي الهند يدله على باتيل ( بطل القصة ) فيسردها على لسان البطل , حيات باتيل في الهند بحثه عن الله باعتناقه ثلاث أديان ( الإسلام , المسيحية , الهندوسية ) ويفسر ذلك بقولة :
أريد أن أحب الله ,
كان حديثه عن الأديان جميل جداً ويدعوا للتأمل,التفاصيل الصغيرة في الرواية تحبس الأنفاس وتسرب لذة خاصة خصوصاً بأن تلك التفاصيل مليئة بالمعلومات عن عالم الحيوان تفسير لتصرفات الحيوان يقدمها باتيل نتيجة لـــ قربه وخبرته بحياتها لأنه يسكن حديقة حيوان في الهند والده يعمل مدير لها, نتيجة لتردي الأحوال السياسية في الهند ,تتخذ العائلة قرار وكان هذا القرار فاصل في حياة "باي باتيل".
الرواية لو فهمناها بطريقة مباشرة آسرة وحتى لو أسقطنا معانيها على الحياة عموماً فهي ذات مغزى , الرواية تحرض القارئ على التفاعل مع تفاصيلها والتساؤل بين كل منعطف وآخر ( ماذا سيحدث ؟ ) ,
من أجمل ما قرأت عشرة نجوم :)


من الرواية :
*سبب التصاق الموت بالحياة إلى هذا الحد ليس الضرورة البيولوجية بل الغيرة ,فالحياة رائعة إلى حد أن الموت واقع في غرامها ,غرام استحواذي غيور يتشبث بكل ما يمكنه الحصول عليه , لكن الحياة تتغلب على النسيان بكل خفه ,خاسرةً على الدرب تفصيلاً أو اثنين تافهين أما الكآبة فليست سوى ظل غمامة عابرة .

*يبدو أن ثمة قدرٍ من الجنون في كل الكائنات الحية يحركها بطرق غريبة وغير مفهومة أحياناً هذا الجنون يمكن أن يكون عامل إنقاذ أحياناً إنه جزءٌ من القدرة على التأقلم من دونه لا يمكن لأي جنس الاستمرار بالعيش .

* صلينا معاً وأنشدنا الذكر , كان حافظاً للقرآن عن ظهر قلب ويرتله بصوت خفيض وبسيط لم أكن أفهم اللغة العربية لكنني أحببت إيقاعها تلك المقاطع الصوتية الطويلة التي تتدفق من الحنجرة كجدول رائع حدقت طويلاً في هذا الجدول ومع أنه لم يكن عريضاً فقط صوت رجل واحد لكنه كان بعمق الكون .


* لا يدرك هؤلاء أن الدفاع عن الرب يكون من الداخل لا من الخارج وإلا لوجهوا غضبهم إلى ذواتهم , ذلك أن الشر الظاهر ليس إلا شراً ينبعث من الداخل أرض المعركة الأساسية من أجل الخير ليست في المجال العام المفتوح , لكن في تلك الفسحة الصغيرة داخل كل قلبٍ بشري , في الإثناء يرزخ الأرامل و المشردون تحت وطأة قدر شاق وينبغي أن يسارع الأشخاص للدفاع عنهم لا عن الله .

*ماجدوى العقل إذا يارتشرد باركر , ؟ أوظيفته الوحيدة تدبير الأمور العملية فحسب ؟ تأمين الطعام والثياب والمأوى لماذا لا يقدم العقل أجوبة أكبر ؟ ولماذا الأسئلة التي نطرحها تفوق الأجوبة دائماً لماذا الشبكة كبيرة إذا كانت الأسماك قليلة إلى هذا الحد ؟

* فكرة الموت المحتم رهيبة في الحد ذاته ,لكن الأسوأ منها بلا ريب أن تعيش منتظراً الموت حيث تروح تستحضر بجلاء تام كل صور السعادة التي عشتها وتلك التي كان يمكن أن تعيشها ,تدرك فداحة الخسارة فيسبب لك ذلك لوعةً عميقة , لا توازيها قوة السيارة التي على وشك تصدمك أو المياه التي على وشك تغرقك إحساس فادح حقاً كلمات ...أبي أمي رافي الهند واينيبج أخذت تلسع فمي



* إذاً تريدان قصة أخرى ؟
آه لا نريد معرفة ما حدث حقاً ,
أليس إخبار شيء ما يصبح دائماً قصة ؟
ربما الإنجليزية لكن في اليابان القصة يكون فيها دائماً عنصر متخيل نحن لا نريد أي ابتداع نريد الوقائع المباشرة كما يقال في الإنجليزية
أليس استعمال الكلمات لأخبار شيء ما سواء كانت هذه الكلمات إنجليزية أو يابانية أمر فيه اختراع أساساً أليس النظر في هذا العالم أمرٌ فيه اختراع ؟
ه��مممممم !
العالم ليس كما هو , بل كما نفهمه أليس كذالك وفي فهم شيء ما نضيف شيء إليه أليس كذلك ألا يجعل هذا من الحياة قصة.

Excellent story. Pi is a great character. Growing up
in India at a zoo his father managers. Pi decided to worship Hinduism, Islam and Christianity to the perplexity of his parents. Set during the 1970s where India was ruled by Mrs Gandhi during the emergency. His father sells the zoo and they emigrate to Canada on a rust bucket.

The story follows the sinking of the ship and Pi with a Bengal tiger, hyena, Orangutan and zebra are all on a lifeboat. The next 227 days are how he survived through taming the tiger, surviving the elements and getting food and water. This allegorical fantasy is spell binding and at the end you question reality and truth. Which of the two stories are true that he tells to the representatives of the ship trying to find out how the ship sank. One is with the animals and the other brutal and about the inhumanity of desperate people. I know which one I want believe.

Richard Parker Is Unforgettable

Very rarely does a character stay with you for life. But this story is one that I will carry with me.

Life of Pi starts in India with a boy named Piscine Molitor Patel, also known by his nickname Pi. His family historically has operated a zoo but decides to relocate to Canada. Things don’t go quite as expected when the ship carrying them to Canada sinks.

Pi spends 227 days searching for land with a tiger named Richard Parker.

Parallels to Real Life

Did you know that Jose Salvador Alvarenga was adrift for 438 days at sea? He went fishing off the coast of Mexico on November 17, 2012. After drifting for more than a year, he spotted Marshall Islands and swam to shore.

Deep Questions

There were some really interesting questions that are raised in the Life of Pi:

What gets you up in the morning? What wakes you up out of your bed and inspires you to put one foot in front of the other, to make this existence meaningful and worthwhile? What is your tiger?

Why are the stories that we tell ourselves important?

Book Versus Movie

As someone who has both read the book and viewed the movie, I would recommend reading the book before watching the movie. However, both are excellent, and I really enjoyed the vibrant, rich colors in the movie.

Overall, an unforgettable book that will always make me think twice before boarding a boat. Now, I just need to find a cat to adopt and name him Richard Parker…….

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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Richard Parker: A True life incident and a major spoiler:



In the summer of 1884, four English sailors were stranded at sea in a small lifeboat in the South Atlantic, over a thousand miles from land. Their ship, the Mignonette, had gone down in a storm, and they had escaped to the lifeboat, with only two cans of preserved turnips and no fresh water. Thomas Dudley was the captain, Edwin Stephens was the first mate, and Edmund Brooks was a sailor—“all men of excellent character,” according to newspaper accounts.

The fourth member of the crew was the cabin boy, Richard Parker, age seventeen. He was an orphan, on his first long voyage at sea. He had signed up against the advice of his friends, “in the hopefulness of youthful ambition,” thinking the journey would make a man of him. Sadly, it was not to be.

From the lifeboat, the four stranded sailors watched the horizon, hoping a ship might pass and rescue them. For the first three days, they ate small rations of turnips. On the fourth day, they caught a turtle. They subsisted on the turtle and the remaining turnips for the next few days. And then for eight days, they ate nothing.

By now Parker, the cabin boy, was lying in the corner of the lifeboat. He had drunk seawater, against the advice of the others, and become ill. He appeared to be dying. On the nineteenth day of their ordeal, Dudley, the captain, suggested drawing lots to determine who would die so that the others might live. But Brooks refused, and no lots were drawn.

The next day came, and still no ship was in sight. Dudley told Brooks to avert his gaze and motioned to Stephens that Parker had to be killed. Dudley offered a prayer, told the boy his time had come, and then killed him with a penknife, stabbing him in the jugular vein. Brooks emerged from his conscientious objection to share in the gruesome bounty. For four days, the three men fed on the body and blood of the cabin boy.

And then help came. Dudley describes their rescue in his diary, with staggering euphemism: “On the 24th day, as we were having our breakfast,” a ship appeared at last. The three survivors were picked up. Upon their return to England, they were arrested and tried. Brooks turned state’s witness. Dudley and Stephens went to trial. They freely confessed that they had killed and eaten Parker. They claimed they had done so out of necessity.