“In both stories the ship sinks, my entire family dies, and I suffer.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“So tell me, 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 animals or the story without animals?”

“That’s an interesting question?”

“The story with animals.”

“Yes. The story with animals is the better story.”

“Thank you. And so it goes with God.”

Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel grows up in Pondicherry, India, deeply interested in religion and spending a great deal of time at the zoo operated by his father. In the mid-1970s, during a time of political unrest, his family decides to sell the zoo and the animals and move to Canada. One week into the journey, the boat sinks and Pi is stranded on a 100 sq ft lifeboat with a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan, and a 450-pound adult Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. We know that Pi survives for the next seven months until he is rescued, but how?

The structure of Life of Pi reminded me quite a bit of  Robinson Crusoe. There’s some opening set-up, then the primary portion where the main character is alone and fighting for survival, closing with a final sequence telling of the main character’s return to civilization. Like  Robinson Crusoe, that middle portion of the novel is a catalog of trials, and tales of hardship survived. Some of it is really interesting, full of imagination and magical realism, and some gets a bit tedious. I found the opening chapters, when we learn of Pi’s exploration of different religions, and the strange connections he makes between animals and people, to be more interesting.

Entering the final pages, I was honestly planning to give Life of Pi two stars. I didn’t care much for the story, and only even read the novel because it seemed the best choice to satisfy the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge task to read “a book with a tiger on the cover or ‘tiger’ in the title.” But I really liked the book’s ending, when Pi’s fantastical story of survival is met with skepticism by the world he returns to. It was a surprisingly powerful ending that hit me hard in my own deep well of cynicism. So while this novel heavy on magical realism wasn’t really my cup of tea, I’d still recommend giving it a try. It’s really popular for a reason. Recommended.

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