Just when you concluded that fiction writing was only about boring corporate deceit, political espionages, corny romances, avenging women, medico-legal thrillers (yawn!), arrives Yann Martel, a storyteller with a refreshing mastery over his skills, with a gift called Life of Pi,Booker prize winner 2002, forcing you to regain lost trust in fiction.
A book destined to become a modern classic!
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After a long time here is a fiction writer with a certain amount of freshness in his writing. For Yann Martel, “Life is so beautiful, death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can.”
His style is elegant, reader-friendly and he is highly informative on such a boggling number of topics. He offers many levels of understanding on singular subject matters. Most importantly, delivers a crisp and refreshingly stylized novel, making even the most weather-beaten of clichés sound daisy fresh, painting pictures with his pen.
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The Story
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Vast and expansive in its reach, from the picturesque esplanades of Pondicherry get tossed in the middle of the raging Pacific amidst flying fish, maco sharks and sea storms
Pi (Piscine Molitor Patel), lives in Pondicherry, where his father runs and owns the city zoo. When he is 16, his parents decide to emigrate to Canada taking the zoo with them. Tragedy strikes when the cargo ship sinks in a storm.
Yann Martell masterfully describes an impending storm.
“Light on pandemonium it was. Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited. What I had before me was a spectacle of wind and water, an earthquake of the senses, that even Hollywood couldn’t orchestrate… The ship was sinking. My mind could hardly conceive it. It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire.”
Pi loses his parents, elder brother (Ravi, a wonderfully true to life merciless teaser), and gets marooned on a lifeboat with
a zebra with a broken leg
a terminally disgusting hyena
an adult female orangutan that was once his pet
a testy untrustworthy royal Bengal tiger.
Soon its just him and the tiger left on board.
An amazing story of how Pi devises ways and means to sustain himself against improbable odds. 227 days of battling a Royal Bengal Tiger amidst shark infested Pacific waters with slim chances of being rescued.
It’s a survival of an indomitable human spirit, enslaving a man-eater under extreme circumstances, till the predator becomes his reason for survival. Pi has to tame the tiger, psychologically bully it and teach it who is the master in the boat. Its alpha human and omega tiger here.
At a very superficial level the novel does seem to borrow heavily from Robinson Crusoe or Castaway, the movie. But thats definately not what it is solely about.
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Amazing account of animal life
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The book is beautiful for its description of animals. Yann Martel will startle you with an account of a hyena satisfying its hunger. Chapter 8 in which a father tells his son about dangerous animals in the zoo is worth re-reads.
Surprisingly interesting discussions on zoology pepper the course of this story. Astute observations of animal behavior and psychology have never made such an arresting yet easy going read.
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Beautiful thoughts on Religion
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Beautiful thoughts of accepting and living with more than one religion and multiculturalism, something aptly desirable in today’s troubled times.
In a search to be closer to God, Pi accepts and imbibes religions more than one, much to everyone’s waking horror, leading to rib-tickling squabbles. He prays to Jesus, Allah, Mary, Vishnu. All.
Sample this eminently quotable, most delicious section from the initial part of the book:
“I could see the sea to my left and down the road a long ways, I suddenly felt I was in heaven. The spot was no different from when I had passed it not long before, but my way of seeing it had changed. The feeling, a paradoxical mix of pulsing energy and profound peace, was intense and blissful. Whereas before the road, the sea, the trees, the air, the sun all spoke differently to me, now they spoke one language of unity. Tree took account of road, which was aware of air, which was mindful of sea, which shared things with sun. Every element lived in harmonious relation with its neighbour, and all was kith and kin. I knelt a mortal; I rose an immortal. I felt like the center of a small circle coinciding with the center of a much larger one. Atman had met Allah.”
Mention Booker, expectations soar.
The last Booker prize winner I read was a novel by Arundati Roy on which I possess opinions best left unsaid. With such previous experiences I embarked on reading Life of Pi with zilch expectations, and ended up enjoying each page at times subtly smiling, at others provoked in thought, and mostly at tenterhooks.
Although the harrowing life and death experience when tossed asea forms the bulk of the book, Life of Pi is not just a tale of a shipwreck.
It is an adventure, an account of human-animal equations, a plea for religious brotherhood, a search for truth and purpose in each component of this universe, a look at family life, a nail-biting thriller, a spiritual journey, part fiction, part philosophy.
All this and much more.
Absolutely compulsory!
