Book Review

The “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel is a wonderful novel about self-preservation, bravery, and the gifts that religion can bring to you. It starts out in Pondicherry, India, with a young boy named Piscine who is named after a great pool in France. He lives with his mother and Father and older brother Ravi. His Father is the humble owner of the local zoo; Pi goes into great detail about the nature of the animals throughout the novels and explains the parallels between humans and beasts. Pi is an abnormal young boy because he is born a Hindu, and also practices Christianity and Islam, against his parents’ wishes. He has great spiritual calling which is very admirable in a boy his age. This is during a time of governmental upheaval in India, so Pi’s father decides to move his family to Canada, a foreign land to Pi’s family. Pi’s father sells some of the animals but keeps the most expensive ones. They are sailing a boat to leave India when Pi hears a noise when they are sleeping, he goes out on the deck and sees that the boat is sinking and the stairwell to his family is already filled with water. He sees a life boat that has been already thrown out to see and jumps from the hull about 40 feet onto the life boat. As he watches the ship sink, a zebra jumps from the deck, a hyena and tiger swims up to the boat (the most menacing of the creatures) and a mother orangutan named Orange Juice. Throughout the next few days Pi watches in horror as the hyena eats the zebra alive, and decapitates his friend 0range Juice. The hyena eventually gets killed by the tiger whose name is Richard Parker. Pi knows he will be next because he is the only living creature on the boat so he creates a space between them by using oars and life preservers to float in the water. Over the next couple of days Richard Parker starts whining Prusten, which is a benevolent sound which means he wants to make friends with Pi. Pi then asserts dominance by making loud noises and peeing on his side of the life boat. Pi then starts to fish; he was born and raised a vegetarian but has to kill a fish which he is hesitant the first time. It’s an obvious change over the novel that Pi starts to evolve from a well-mannered young man to mimicking the beast he shares his time with. A series of storms hit the lifeboat and Pi shield himself and the tiger with a tarp, which gives them a sense of friendship against the larger elements. Pi starts to go blind after a while and he hears a French man’s voice talking to him about French food and he assumes that it is Richard Parker talking to him. It is actually another survivor who jumps onto the boat and tries to cannibalize Pi, and Richard Parker kills the man. They end up floating into a Mexican beach and Richard runs into the jungle never to be seen from again. I thought that this was a precious book, full of the harsh reality of the wild. Yann Martel switched from the narration of Pi’s current friend which he meets in Canada to Pi’s own narration on the boat. It was wonderful because the boy’s religious beliefs were so strong in the beginning, and wavered when he acted like a beast but in the end he still found god in everything. Even with the loss of his family and the horrible things he endured, he was still as reverent as he was at the beginning of his journey. It is the age old hero’s journey, the call, the sacrifice, the endurance, and in the end the atonement.