Life of Pi

Yann Martel

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is a bestseller. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting “religions the way a dog attracts fleas.” Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

status Copy #1 (4576): in
genre Literature and Fiction » General Literature
publisher Random House of Canada
publish date 2001
popularity checked out 7 time(s)

Reviews

  • By Zach Sylvester -

    I found the beginning a little dry but the book becomes magical once you get into the thick of it. Get yourself stranded.

  • By Alex Morrow -

    The beginning of the book was a 3 for me, and the latter half was a 4. I still feel like, when it boils down to it, it would be a tad kind to give the book overall a 4.

    At first it came off as dry and preachy, a bit painful to read. I felt like many of the side stories were utterly unnecessary, thrown in as a sort of fluff. Or to say, “Look how silly and wacky this kid is. Look. Please look.” And I quickly got tired of the way the main character spoke.

    But I won’t lie: I finished the second half in one sitting. It did a great job of hooking me, and dropped most of the habits I found so irksome in the beginning. Once it became a survival story, I was much more interested. The ending was fantastic as well.

    As far as style goes, this reading is “light”. It’s not particularly difficult. This is something you take casually, something assigned to freshmen in high school.

  • By Jon Maurins -

    A truly magical story. So magical, in fact, that I am not tumbling over whether or not it is entirely true or not. It serves as an adventure into the limitless realm of imagination, the miraculous ability we have been granted from some mysterious force… Whether you believe that force is an accidental, circumstantial result of a plainly scientific chemical reaction, or whether you choose to use the (more captivating and engulfing, in my opinion) concept of god to signify the source of this experience as it is, you will find joy in reading this book.

    As others have noted above, it is a quick read; I read it in a few days. Nonetheless, The Life of Pi is a story as thick as any with existential instigation. Come to it with an open mind, an open heart.

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