Book Review: Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Survival supersedes beliefs, principles, and even morals. The malleability of the latter concepts—that defines character and persona, distinguishes man’s social strata, class and leverage in the society he lives in—against a person’s will to live is explicitly painted in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.
     
Pi Patel, 16, consistently deals with bashful versions of his name, a battle well-fought but eventually pointless and miniscule against a shipwreck, which he survived, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Migrating from India to Canada due to his father’s political and economic weather forecast initiated a chain of tortuous scenes that slowly stripped Pi Patel, 16, off of his religious convictions, yes it’s in plural, his morality, his diet preference, but not his human drive and instinct to survive. And of course, Pi’s belief in God–after all it was a story intended to make Yann Martel believe in God.
     
Pi seeks survival on a lifeboat, with no means to propel himself anywhere, or even a direction to propel himself to, bathing in the scorching heat of unfiltered and uncensored sun rays, surrounded by an ocean of undrinkable salt water, 360 degrees visual range of vast nothing, and an adult carnivorous, not to mention hungry, Bengal tiger sharing occupancy with him in the lifeboat. With a ludicrous plan worked out—survive with the tiger—Pi sets his plan into motion, a plan dictated more by thirst and hunger.
     

Martel begins Pi’s story, which won the Man Booker Prize Award for Fiction by the way, by throwing statements to readers for them to ponder on. Reading Life of Pi has effects similar to having a good conversation with a friend but it would be with a book and your self, though this sounds insane or needing a psych consult, it’s just that the points are interesting enough to spark an internal argument—one that you cannot hold in and you just need to discuss to another being, hopefully someone you’re familiar with, and not a Bengal tiger.
     
Perhaps unknowingly, or maybe not, Martel dictates his alpha-male trait or authority along with Pi’s introduction. If not for Pi’s dialogues, it would seem that you’re reading an article straight from a National Geographic journal—a vital and most crucial inclusion in the entire stretch of the plot.
     
Eventually, the seemingly ‘one-chapter-a-day’ book speeds up the tempo, transporting the reader right there between Pi and Richard Parker, the tiger whose name is an allusion to an Edgar Allan Poe character. Martel’s descriptions are enough to satiate imaginative hunger. At times the situation might drag but this is momentary and  sublimates as the storytelling picks up pace again.
     
When Pi finally reaches land, a feeling of relief may be felt but the tone of finality, you’ll realized has been given when Martel has interviewed the older Pi living in Toronto, Canada. Because land, and finally conversing with other humans, seems to be stranger, unnatural and more unacceptable than life at sea with a tiger and other sea creatures. Its ending poses questions of what is moral, what is believable, what is real and what is undesirable.
     
The final pages has an overwhelming influence to reread the previous chapters, resisting would be up to the reader—I did resist. But one thing’s for sure, Martel just can’t stop taunting your intellectual muscle until the last page—even when you close the book.


image courtesy: www.salemhigh.com