On page 70 Pi wrote that “There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, “Business as usual.” But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.”

Pi is most certainly right and he also states at the start that this read about his life will make one believe in a god. Me? I don’t believe in superstars organic food and foreign cars I don't believe the price of gold the certainty of growing old that right is right and left is wrong that north and south can't get along that east is east and west is west and being first is always best but then I don’t believe I will be reincarnated as Don Williams either.

I may not be as keen on this fantasy as most. For what was an attempt at a philosophical discussion on belief, it seemed that the writing plodded along far too much at times and got bogged down in its own attempt to be profound. I did however enjoy the Japanese investigators.

Having finished this, I am finding myself feeling thoroughly ambivalent about it. I can't think of anything overwhelmingly positive or overhwelmingly negative to say in this review. It was just alright. I've read lots of books that could be described in the same way, but I expected more from this, particularly since it won the Booker prize.

The beginning - describing narrator Pi Patel's childhood in India, growing up surrounded by exotic, dangerous animals as the son of a zookeeper - is promising. Some of the prose is rather beautiful, and at their best the descriptions evoke the sights and sounds of Pi's environment vividly. However, following this pleasant introduction, the bulk of the book is taken up by a lengthy account of the protagonist's attempts to survive on board a lifeboat after the ship carrying his family to Canada sinks, leaving Pi and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker the only survivors. The excitement of the situation soon abates; once the tiger has dispatched a few other surviving animals and Pi has managed to train him, all that's left is a repetitive series of chapters about how Pi stays alive. I couldn't stomach much of the stuff about Pi killing and eating whatever forms of life he comes across (there are more mentions of drinking turtles' blood than any story could ever need) and skipped the majority of these chapters (there's LOTS of them). The book becomes very monotonous, and while this may indeed represent what struggling to stay alive on a boat in the middle of a vast ocean would be like, it's not an attractive attribute in a work of fiction.

Right at the end, there's suddenly a really good bit which makes you yearn for how good the book could have been. First there's a sequence - possibly a fantasy/dream/allegory - in which Pi disovers a seemingly idyllic island with a sinister secret. Then there's the last few chapters, in which he recounts his tale, alongside an alternative version, to a pair of investigators. This part of the story is intriguing, funny and contains a fascinating twist; I really enjoyed it. It's just a shame I couldn't feel the same way about most of what came before these concluding pages.

Edited 29/12/12 to add... The film is better than the book. I've seen it in the cinema twice now, and it turns out this story is much more enjoyable to watch than it is to read. It's rare for me to prefer the movie version to the original, but this is an exception, it's wonderful!

قصة جميلة، تمنحنا الإيمان حقا كما قال عنها باي في البداية.. تعلّمتُ من هذه الرواية أن أعداءنا قد يكونون سبب تميزنا، وأحياناً، سبب بقائنا على قيد الحياة.
من أجمل الجمل التي قرأتها في الكتاب قول باي: "من مفارقات قصتي هذه أن ما كان يرعبني هو نفسه ما كان يمنحني الطمأنينة". إذا كنتَ تمر في محنة في حياتك، ��إن هذه الرواية هي ما تحتاج إلى قراءته الآن، لأنها ستعلّمك بأن الإيمان بغد أفضل هو الطريقة المثلى للتغلب على المحن، وهو الطريق الأمثل الذي يوصلك لبر الأمان.
ملاحظتي على الترجمة أنها غير دقيقة؛ فلقد اضطررتُ أحياناً إلى قراءة عدة صفحات عدة مرات حتى أستوعب الفكرة.

A beautiful story that gives you hope, as Pi said at its beginning. It's amazing how your opponents can, sometimes, be the reason for your success, or better, for your existence. If you are going through difficult times in your life then this is the story to read. It won't only give you hope, but it will also show you how to contextualize it, i.e. it will help you transform hope from hypothesis to reality.

57th book of 2019.

I read this book in a day and although my original review of this book was 4 stars, and I complained of the ending... I have done some more mulling.



For the Love of Animals

I'd say I'm a pretty serious lover of most animals. Insects don't terrify me. I'm not big on reptiles (snakes being one of the few things that scare me), but animals, on the whole, bring me a lot of joy. I have several favourite animals, admittedly: dogs, whales, sloths, parrots, monkeys, elephants, octopuses, tigers... So you can imagine my delight when I knew this book was about a tiger on a boat, and not only that, but found the first few pages are simply about sloths. And not only interesting facts about sloths, but general musings, in Martel's wonderful, quiet writing:

I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at sloths in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing.

I'd say this book is part (metaphorical) ode to the animal kingdom. There is a lot of beauty and appreciation in this book.

Who Is Richard Parker?

I've never seen the film, but I'm quite aware that its now well known that Life of Pi is about a boy trapped on a boat with a tiger. I'll admit, it's quite the image, quite the poster. Even looking at my edition cover fills me with excitement. A tiger on a boat, with a boy! What a great idea. "What a stolen idea," they say to me. Well, yes. Well, no. Well, I don't know. If you're unaware of the "plagiarism" battle that surrounded this novel you can read about it here. There are the same debates about Rowling robbing things for Harry Potter. There seems to be attacks on most writers. So, without opening up a completely separate debate - I move swiftly on.

Richard Parker is the 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. Pi's boat-friend. However, I will say that, 1. They do not begin as boat-friends, certainly not. And 2. He is not his only boat friend, in the beginning. Before I read this book, having only seen the (and they are beautiful looking) stills from the movie of boy and tiger. But yes, Pi is also graced with having a hyena, a zebra and a female orangutan on his boat, too.

Now this book is classed as a fantasy. The sceptics like to yelp about the unrealistic nature of the plot. "The tiger would just eat the boy." Yes, congratulations, a valid point, if this were a 'realistic' book. Which it is not. That's not to say it isn't believable. The relationship between Pi and Richard Parker is very believable in the scope of the story. In the same way we believe in the Ents in Lord of the Rings, and we believe that men can talk to cats in Murakami. Avoiding the debate aforementioned, then, this book is everything Atwood claimed it to be: A terrific book...Fresh, original, smart, devious, and crammed with absorbing lore. The latter I have mentioned and will mention again, the richness of Martel's writing on animals was stellar, and unlike anything I've read in fiction before. It's partly wrong to compare it to Moby Dick, but in a way, it is comparable to Moby Dick. I'll have to ponder that one some more.

The ending of the book left me cheated. There is a whole part of the book that goes off into the realm of fantasy a little too much, and disbelief does begin to roll in. So ultimately, that means the book is flawed, no? I haven't re-read this, though I would like to one day. But as it stands in my mind (because it does, it often stands in my mind at the front of the crowd, or else it is tall, so can be seen from wherever it stands) the ending has grown on me. Maybe I am now realising it isn't a cheat. It's the classic "leave it up to the reader" ending. My original review of this referred it to as a "I woke up and it was all a dream"-like ending, which I now consider unfair. Open to the reader - does that mean the writer has been lazy? Couldn't pick how to end it so just threw the half-dead body to us so we can decide, is it dead or alive? (A metaphor, no one is left half-dead at the end). Open to the reader is now proving to me that just lets it sit for a little while longer in the mind. This book returns to me, and it returns to me, amazingly as I have not seen the film, but in stills, in images, because of Martel's vivid language.

A Kingdom in a Book

Life of Pi is one of the books that I look at and marvel how so much is held in so little. A 300 page paperback, that's all it is. A single day of my life, is all it took. I'd go as far to say I haven't looked at tigers in the same way since. Maybe that's one of my reasons for ignoring the Internet's sensationalism around Tiger King. You could argue I'm not watching it because it's "popular", well maybe, but I'll stick with saying, no - it's because of Richard Parker.

Richard Parker is my Tiger King, ladies and gentlemen.

A young man, a lifeboat and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Read the book before seeing the movie. As splendid as the cinematography is, the images and themes the novel conjures are richer still.

[Revised, pictures and shelves added 2/28/23]

For years I noticed this book on display, particularly its cartoonish paperback cover. Was it a children's book? This Pi stuff -- was it something about math? (Was it plagiarized? See story at end.)

It's a castaway story and like all castaway and shipwreck stories it's about human endurance, indomitable spirit and man vs. nature. The things that distinguish this story from Robinson Crusoe or Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away, is that the main character (Pi, short for Piscine) is trapped in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.



Pi is Indian and he's multi-religious - a true believer in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. He comes from a family of zookeepers who were transporting their animals by freighter. This is how he wound up with a tiger in his lifeboat.

It's an inspiring book, but drags in spots -- more than 200 days at sea is a lot of fish and storm stories. I kept waiting for the multi-religious theme to play a real role in the story but it did so only peripherally, so the plot seems a bit disconnected from that theme.

In the end, we are offered two stories: one of murder and cannibalism and one of a journey in the lifeboat with animals. A key line comes at the end of the book as a throwaway: 'Which story do you prefer? So it is with God.' It's a decent read and an interesting plot but as I revise this review, with hindsight, I'm downgrading my rating from 4 to 3.

Life of Pi won the 2002 Booker prize and was a huge seller worldwide – 12 million copies and 1.5 million ratings on GR. But here’s a story I came across when I reviewed another book, The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes, by Brazilian Jewish author Moacyr Scliar. Here’s the (paraphrased) story from the NY Times obituary for Scliar in 2011 and from Wikipedia:



Scliar wrote a novel, Max and the Cats, about a Jewish youth who flees Nazi Germany on a ship carrying wild animals to a Brazilian zoo. After a shipwreck the boy ends up sharing a lifeboat with a jaguar. The book achieved fame twice over. Critically praised on its publication in 1981, it touched off a literary storm in 2002 when the Canadian writer Yann Martel (b. 1963) won the Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi, about an Indian youth trapped on a boat with a tiger. Mr. Martel’s admission that he borrowed the idea led to an impassioned debate among writers and critics on the nature of literary invention and the ownership of words and images. Martel admitted he got the idea by reading a review of Scliar’s book but said he never read the book itself. “In a certain way I feel flattered that another writer considered my idea to be so good, but on the other hand, he used that idea without consulting me or even informing me,” Mr. Scliar told The NY Times. “An idea is intellectual property.”

Top image is a still from the movie on npr.org
The author from theguardian.co.uk

I'm sorry. I know there's deep metaphorical meaning in this book. I know it's multi-layered, terribly clever, spiritual, evocative, beautifully written, all that.

I hated it.

No, hang on - I still hate it. No past tense.

I don't even know why I hate it so much, I simply do. Don't take this as a recommendation to read or not read, I'm simply venting my feelings towards the book.

One of those books that sat on my shelf for ages before I finally got around to reading it, and I don't know why I waited so long. This book is an adventure story, but there's so much more to it than that. I loved seeing the world through Pi's eyes, and especially reading his thoughts on things like animals and religion. The writing is sophisticated but easily readable, and the story is a perfect mixture of action and emotional intensity. The ending is amazing and I loved that the author left it up to the reader's interpretation. I know I'm going to be thinking about this book for a long time to come.

A well-known and, in many cases, a much-loved novel.

I struggled with the first 100 pages (as did my buddy reader, Marge Moen) but soldiered on (as did Marge) thinking the detailed theological and zoological passages were skilfully setting up some kind of resolution for the remaining storyline. This didn’t happen for me, or it was obscure, or I completely missed it, therefore such a disconnection was a little baffling.

The element of human survival under duress was strong. There are metaphors and hidden meanings that could be discussed and analysed at length, but the danger of that is to strip away the overall enjoyment of the novel, unless it’s an educative text.

That said, as a whole it was a good read and some of the descriptions of nature in its beauty and fury were breathtaking:
“There were many seas. The sea roared like a tiger. The sea whispered in your ear like a friend telling you secrets. The sea clinked liked small change in a pocket. The sea thundered like avalanches. The sea hissed like sandpaper working on wood. The sea sounded like someone vomiting. The sea was dead silent.”

A 4-star response from me.

Here’s another book I read, but never reviewed. I’m going to give you a glimpse into my “creative process,” if you will, when it comes to reviewing.

First, I have to limber up . . .

n  n

Then I rack my brain for inspiration . . . always making sure it’s super highbrow and spectacularly literary. In this case? This is a book about a boy . . .

n  n

who survives a shipwreck only to find himself adrift on a life raft with an orangutan . . .

n  n

a hyena . . .

n  n

and a tiger . . .

n  n


n  n.

Yep, that’s about as good as it gets. Want to read an actual review? Click over HERE to see what Jess had to say. Her review is excellent and she deserves to be Goodreads Famous!

n  n

It is not so much that The Life of Pi, is particularly moving (although it is). It isn’t even so much that it is written with language that is both delicate and sturdy all at once (which it is, as well). And it’s certainly not that Yann Martel’s vision filled passages are so precise that you begin to feel the salt water on your skin (even though they are). It is that, like Bohjalian and Byatt and all of the great Houdini’s of the literary world, in the last few moments of your journey – after you’ve felt the emotions, endured the moments of heartache, yearned for the resolution of the characters’ struggle – that you realize the book is not what you thought it was. The story transforms, instantly, and forever.

And in those last few chapters, you suddenly realize that the moral has changed as well.

You feel Martel’s words lingering, suggesting, and you find yourself wondering whether you are his atheist who takes the deathbed leap of faith – hoping for white light and love? Or the agnostic who , in trying to stay true to his reasonable self, explains the mysteries of life and death in only scientific terms, lacking imagination to the end, and, essentially, missing the better story?

There is no use in trying to provide a brief synopsis for this ravishing tale of a young boy from India left adrift in the Pacific in a lifeboat with a tiger who used to reside in his father’s zoo in Pondicherry. There is no use because once you finish the book you might decide that this was not, indeed, what the book was about at all. There is no use because, depending on your philosophical bent, the book will mean something very different to your best friend than it will to you. There is no use because it is nearly impossible to describe what makes this book so grand.

Read this book. Not because it is an exceptional piece of literary talent. It is, of course. But there are many good authors and many good books. While uncommon, they are not endangered. Read this book because in recent memory - aside from Jose Saramago’s arresting Blindness – there have been no stories which make such grand statements with such few elements. As Pi says in his story “Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.” It is the same with Martel’s undulating fable of a book about a boy in a boat with a tiger. A simple story with potentially life altering consequences for it’s readers.

As Martel writes, "The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?" Like Schroedinger's cat in the box, the way this book is understood, the way it is perceived affects what it is. There has been some talk that this book will make it’s readers believe in god. I think it’s a question of perspective. To behold this gem of a novel as an adventure of man against the elements (the “dry, yeastless factuality” of what actually happened) is certainly one way to go about it. But to understand this piece to be something indescribable, something godlike, is by far the greater leap of faith.

Oh, but worth the leap, if the reader is like that atheist, willing to see the better story.

t

I did not enjoy this book at all. I wish I read it with a tiger around. I wish the tiger had eaten me. I think the story was bad. I think the writing was worse. The simple sentences were mind-numbing at times. There were so many of them. I just opened to a random page. I counted. The majority of sentences started with “I.” They were also simple sentences. Subject, verb. Subject, verb. This was not one of those “craft mirrors content” things—the monotony of the ocean and the repetition as representative of the day after day afloat on wave after wave. How do I know? I know because the writing was not good enough to be a “craft mirrors content” thing. You might be asking yourself why I think the writing wasn’t good enough. There are many reasons (including the invasive/disruptive suppositions of what the reader is likely thinking).

First, there are the dazzling clichés. “It seemed the presence of the tiger had saved me from a hyena—surely a textbook example of jumping from the frying pan into the fire” (172). “How true it is that necessity is the mother of invention” (175). “You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it” (115).

Then there is the author’s strange fetish for figurative language involving volcanoes. “The laughter was like a volcano of happiness erupting in me” (153). “It had a two-foot-wide hole in its body, a fistula like a freshly erupted volcano” (161). “I felt I was climbing the side of a volcano and I was about to look over the rim into a boiling cauldron of orange lava” (171). “So while I, who wouldn’t think of pinching a tiger’s paw, let alone of trying to swallow one, received a volcanic roar full in the face and quaked a trembled” (278). “There would emerge a short distance away three or four [whales], a short-lived archipelago of volcanic islands” (290).

In the above examples, look how close some of the page numbers are. That emphasizes not that there were only a few bad pages, but that you can’t turn the damn page without being assaulted by tripe.

Of course I can’t forget the actual story. On page 121, the second section of the book opens with “The ship sank.” Good. Now cut out the preceding 120 pages. They are unnecessary, boring, and infuriating. Why infuriating? First because of the sermonizing. Oh, fifteen-year-old Pi Patel, you are so wise in your acceptance three major faiths that you can open the eyes of the holy men of each faith. Oh, fifteen-year-old Pi Patel, how wise of you to explain that “it is on the inside that God muse be defended, not on the outside…For evil in the open is but evil from within let out” (90) and other profound postulations. (This may sound like the bitter complaints of an atheist criticizing a book just because it mentions God; it’s not, I assure you. I’m an atheist who has no problem reading religious texts or about religious characters. It’s the sermonizing that gets me.) While I can live with illogical arguments espoused in religion, the rhetoric used to defend the existence of zoos is what was really infuriating. I’ve never really given much thought to the morality of zoos. I suppose, had I to decide, I would say that confining animals is more wrong than right, but I’m far from starting a protest outside the monkey cages—I’d rather watch those crazy monkeys swing around in their faux habitat. I won’t rehash all of Pi’s idiotic claims about why animals love zoos (just read the beginning of the book, notably chapter 4), but I will scream “Fallacy! Fallacy!” to each of his points. Again, it’s not the actual issue I care about; rather, it’s the abysmally half-witted logic used to defend the issue.

The plot doesn’t redeem the writing any. I planned to rant and rave over certain absolute absurdities (a man-eating island, a random bought of blindness precisely when another blind castaway should appear), but the end of the book precludes my making that long rant. In fact, the final 25 pages or so were the most enjoyable.

The characterization stinks. I did not care what happened to Pi at all. In fact, I was hoping Richard Parker would eat his dumb-ass just to end this four hundred page stinker sooner. Pi elicits no emotional connection. When he expresses some emotion, it is clunky and mechanical (due, in part, to the simplistic prose and complete lack of transition). For a book like this to work—a book centered entirely on one (human) character—the reader needs to really care about that character. That character needs to come alive. I suppose I can’t even say I wish Pi had died because for me he was never alive to begin with. I cared more about Tom Hanks’s inanimate buddy Wilson than I did about Pi or Richard Parker.

Finally, maybe I’ve been reading too much Perec and have developed high expectations for carefully crafted structure. Because for me, the following is nearly too stupid for words: “Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. For example—I wonder—could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less?” (360). Why is that so bad? Because it’s in chapter 94! This is the first time giving “meaningful shape” is mentioned. The first time! In chapter 94! How f*ing hard is it at this point to bang out another six chapters?! Especially when any given chapter can pretty much be broken into two or combined with others at a whim! It’s like Yann Martel realized “Holy shit, I’m on chapter 94 already. Hmmm…maybe I’ll make this an even 100 chapters and blow people’s minds. I’m a freakin’ genius!”

That’s it. I’m getting too upset just writing about this shipwreck of a novel.