Product Description

Like its noteworthy ancestors (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the Ancient Mariner and Moby Dick) Life of Pi is a tale of disaster at sea. Both a boys' own adventure (for grown-ups) and a meditation on faith and the value of religious metaphor, it was one of the most extraordinary and original novels of 2002. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16 year old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1036 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 348 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Some books defy categorisation: Life of Pi, the second novel from Canadian writer Yann Martel, is a case in point: just about the only thing you can say for certain about it is that it is fiercely and admirably unique. The plot, if that’s the right word, concerns the oceanic wanderings of a lost boy, the young and eager Piscine Patel of the title (Pi). After a colourful and loving upbringing in gorgeously-hued India, the Muslim-Christian-animistic Pi sets off for a fresh start in Canada. His blissful voyage is rudely interrupted when his boat is scuppered halfway across the Pacific, and he is forced to rough it in a lifeboat with a hyena, a monkey, a whingeing zebra and a tiger called Richard. That would be bad enough, but from here on things get weirder: the animals start slaughtering each other in a veritable frenzy of allegorical bloodlust, until Richard the tiger and Pi are left alone to wander the wastes of ocean, with plenty of time to ponder their fate, the cruelty of the gods, the best way to handle storms and the various different recipes for oothappam, scrapple and coconut yam kootu. The denouement is pleasantly neat. According to the blurb, thirtysomething Yann Martel spent long years in Alaska, India, Mexico, France, Costa Rica, Turkey and Iran, before settling in Canada. All those cultures and more have been poured into this spicy, vivacious, kinetic and very entertaining fiction. --Sean Thomas

Review
The premise of this novel is so bold that only an immensely confident and imaginative writer would try to pull it off. A 16-year-old boy is emigrating with his family from India to Canada when their ship sinks and he is cast away on a lifeboat, the sole survivor. Or at least, not quite. Pi's father runs a zoo in India, and when they emigrate, they have to take some of the animals with them so they can be re-housed in a Canadian zoo. Although Pi is the only human survivor of the shipwreck, some of the animals survive: a zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena and a Bengal tiger with the unlikely name of Richard Parker. At least two-thirds of this 300-page book tell the story of Pi's seven-month ordeal on a lifeboat with no human company. For any writer, producing a novel that has very little interaction between human beings, and, for large chunks, no dialogue, is a fairly considerable challenge. Instead, we learn all about Pi and how his strong survival instinct sees him through the ordeal. This involves a combination of practical skills that help him find food and water (although a practising Hindu and vegetarian, he has to eat raw fish), mental cunning that enables him to tame the tiger (the other animals don't last very long); and spiritual strength (he is, oddly, a devotee of Islam and Christianity as well as Hinduism) that gives him the will to live. The amazing thing is that it works. Although the story is utterly implausible, Martel has clearly done huge amounts of research that make it convincing, at least on a literary level. Pi himself is a likeable character - a young boy who is mature enough to devise a sophisticated survival strategy and recount his ordeal with humour. It is, he says, the tiger who saves him. By the end he regards Richard Parker as a friend - but the feeling isn't mutual. 'I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. The pain is like an axe that chops at my heart.' This book is quite an accomplishment. For anyone weary of semi-autobiographical novels, this is one that springs entirely from an author's fertile imagination. (Kirkus UK)

Guardian, 25 May, 2002
This enormously lovable novel is suffused with wonder. It[probes] the imaginative realm with scientific exactitude, twisting reality to 'bring out its essence'.

Customer Reviews

Mixed thoughts
Well, it certainly didn't make me believe in God, though I wasn't expecting it to.

Life of Pi was a reasonably interesting, if at times slow and tiresome read about the sinking of a ship which leaves a handful of survivors left to share one lifeboat.

Only one of those survivors is human; he must contend first with the savagery of a hyena that threatens to devour everything, and then with the constant danger of a Bengal Tiger that he must either tame or be eaten by.

Pi does all that and more - he manages to keep himself and the tiger alive by using the lifeboat's rations and fishing (often with extremely gory and unnecessary details given on what Pi eats and how he kills things), rain catching, a lot of patience, and bumping into a floating island of sweet, edible algae that turns out to be a rather horrifying carnivorus mass.

Sounds implausable? Well, yes, it is. But it's fiction, so we don't have to let it worry us too much. However, the theme of the book with regards to Pi's experiences and the many chapters spent on religion in the beginning seem to be leading up to one question: "Even if you can't see it, and it seems impossible, isn't it all right to believe in it if it makes a nice story?"

Well...no. Not really, not for this reader. Because that would mean disregarding logic and reasoning, and if we all did that then we'd never move on and discover new things and ask far more interesting questions, such as "Where do we come from?" and "How did the universe come into existance?".

I am not anti-religious; I simply believe that everyone's entitiled to question popularly held, unproven and occasionally unlikely beliefs. Where would we be if we took Pi's advice to keep blind faith in interesting stories? Still in the iron age, probably.

If you can ignore the patronising conclusion, the story on its own is all right to pass a few days with, but certainly not exciting enough to explain the hype. Pi is a rather flat and uninteresting character that you'll likely have forgotten by the time you're nose-deep into your next read, though for some the majestic tiger Richard Parker may linger a little longer. He was the one I was rooting for.

possibly one of my favourite books of all time
I loved this book and was gutted when I finished it... It's such an unusual book, I've never read anything like it - it's also very different to the only other book I've read by Yann Martel, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.

The fact that Yann Martel manages to sustain your interest, faith and belief in what is, for a lot of the book, essentially a story about a boy and a tiger is one of the extraordinary feats of this book.

I was surprised to read from other reviews that some people had read this and found it changed their life. Don't buy this book expecting that - [as an aside, I think that it's rare that one book has the same effect on different people... it's better to discover your own life-changing book as a surprise whilst reading it!] but if you enjoy a beautifully written, darn good yarn, this is the one for you!

Good read but didn't change my life
I was really excited to read this book because a lot of people had told me it changed their lives. People had even told me it made them believe in God so I was expecting something special and was eagerly awaiting to be converted. The story did keep me gripped and I liked it overall but I was dissapointed that it only offered the 'wager argument' as a good enough reason to be religious.

As a novel it's great and I would give it 5 stars. The only thing that made me mark it lower was it didn't meet my expectations when it came to theology.