| Author | Yann Martel |
|---|---|
| Original title | Life of Pi |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Philosophical fiction |
| File Format | |
| Rating | Click to rate this post! [Total: 1 Average: 5] |
Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian Tamil boy from Pondicherry who explores issues of spirituality and metaphysics from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger which raises questions about the nature of reality and how it is perceived and told.
The novel has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. It was rejected by at least five London publishing houses before being accepted by Knopf Canada, which published it in September 2001. The UK edition won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year. It was also chosen for CBC Radio’s Canada Reads 2003, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee.
The French translation L’Histoire de Pi was chosen in the French CBC version of the contest Le combat des Livres, where it was championed by Louise Forestier. The novel won the 2003 Boeke Prize, a South African novel award. In 2004, it won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Best Adult Fiction for the years 2001–2003. In 2012 it was adapted into a feature film directed by Ang Lee with a screenplay by David Magee.
Table of Contents
Summary
In an author’s note, an anonymous figure of the author explains that he traveled from his home in Canada to India because he felt restless. There, while having coffee in a cafeteria in the city of Pondicherry, he met an old man named Francis Adirubasamy who offered to tell him a story fantastic enough to give him faith in God. This story is that of Pi Patel. Then, the author goes into the story itself, but not before telling his reader that the account will be more natural if the account is in Pi’s own voice.
The first part is narrated in the first person by Pi. Pi narrates from an advanced age, remembering his previous life as a high school and university student in Toronto, and then even further back in his childhood in Pondicherry. He explains that he suffered intensely and found comfort in religion and zoology. He describes how Francis Adirubasamy, a close business partner of his father and a competitive swimming champion, taught him to swim and gave him his unusual name. Pi is named after the Piscine Molitor, a Parisian swimming club with two swimming pools that Adirubasamy used to frequent. We learned that Pi’s father once directed the Pondicherry Zoo, teaching Pi and his brother, Ravi, about the dangerous nature of animals by feeding a tiger with a live goat before its young eyes. Pi, raised as a Hindu, discovers Christianity, then Islam, and chooses to practice all three religions simultaneously. Motivated by the political struggle of India, Pi’s parents decide to move the family to Canada; On June 21, 1977, they sailed on a cargo ship, along with a crew and many cages full of zoo creatures.
At the beginning of Part Two, the ship begins to sink. Pi clings to a lifeboat and encourages a tiger, Richard Parker, to join him. Then, realizing his mistake in bringing a wild animal onboard, Pi jumps into the ocean. The story goes back in time when Pi describes the explosive noise and the chaos of the sinking: the crew members throw him into a lifeboat, where he soon finds himself alone with a zebra, an orangutan, and a hyena, apparently in shock. His family left. The storm calms down and Pi contemplates his difficult situation. The hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, and then, to Pi’s surprise, Richard Parker reveals himself: the tiger has been at the bottom of the lifeboat all along. Soon the tiger kills the hyena, and Pi and Richard Parker are alone together in the sea. Pi subsists with canned water and filtered seawater, emergency rations, and freshly captured marine life. It also provides for the tiger, who dominates and trains.
Days pass slowly and lifeboat passengers live cautiously. During an episode of temporary blindness caused by dehydration, Pi has an encounter with another blind castaway. The two discuss food and tie their boats together. When the blind man attacks Pi, intending to eat him, Richard Parker kills him. Not long after, the boat stops on a strange island of trees that grow directly from the vegetation, without soil. Pi and Richard Parker stay here for a while, sleeping in their boat and exploring the island during the day. Pi discovers a huge colony of meerkats that sleep in trees and freshwater ponds. One day, Pi finds human teeth in the fruit of a tree and concludes that the island eats people. He and Richard Parker return to the sea and finally wash themselves on a Mexican beach. Richard Parker escapes and the villagers take Pi to a hospital.
In the third part, two Japanese Ministry of Transportation officials interviewed Pi about his time at sea, hoping to shed light on the fate of the doomed ship. Pi tells the story above, but it does not completely satisfy skeptical men. Then he tells it again, this time replacing animals with humans: a voracious cook instead of a hyena, a sailor instead of a zebra, and his mother instead of the orangutan. Officials point out that the two stories coincide and that the second is much more likely. In their final report, they praise Pi for living so long with an adult tiger.
Review
A passionate defense of zoos, an adventure in the trans-Pacific sea that challenges death to the “Kon-Tiki” and a hilarious story of woolly dog starring a four hundred and fifty pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker: this novel Audacious manages to be all this, since it tells the improbable story of the survivor of Pi Patel, a young Indian called by a pool (his full name is Piscine) that lasts seven months in a lifeboat with only a hungry and huge feline for company. This saga of man and cat, happily aphoristic and without apology, is a practical and compelling guide to deal with what Pi calls, with a typically underrated brio, “great lifeboat pests.”
About the Author
Biography
Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Fiction Award
Yann Martel, the son of diplomats, was born in Spain in 1963. He grew up in Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Alaska, and Canada and, as an adult, spent time in Iran, Turkey, and India. After studying philosophy at the university, he worked on several strange jobs until he began to make a living as a writer at the age of twenty-seven. He lives in Montreal.
Life of Pi PDF
