Animal magnetism Justine Jordan is charmed by a zoological oddity in Life of Pi by Yann Martel%09%09%09%09Books%20|%09%09%09%09The%20Guardian%09|Buzz up!Digg it Justine Jordan, The Guardian, Saturday 25 May 2002 Life of Pi
Yann Martel
In the author's note that prefaces this vertiginously tall tale, Yann Martel blends fact and fiction with wily charm. Yes, he'd published two books that failed to shake the world - eager, studious-young-man's fiction with a strain of self-conscious experimentalism - and taken off to India nursing the faltering seeds of another. But no, he didn't there meet a wise old man who directed him to a putative "main character", now living back in Martel's native Toronto: a certain Piscine Molitor or Pi Patel, named for a French swimming pool and nicknamed for an irrational number, who in the mid-1970s survived 227 days lost at sea with a Royal Bengal tiger.
Despite the extraordinary premise and literary playfulness, one reads Life of Pi not so much as an allegory or magical-realist fable, but as an edge-of-seat adventure. When the ship in which 16-year-old Pi and his zookeeping family are to emigrate from India to Canada sinks, leaving him the sole human survivor in a lifeboat on to which barge a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a bedraggled, seasick tiger, Pi is determined to survive the impossible. "I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day." And Martel writes with such convincing immediacy, seasoning his narrative with zoological verisimilitude and survival tips about turtle- fishing, solar stills and keeping occupied (the lifeboat manual notes that "yarn spinning is highly recommended"), that disbelief is suspended, like Pi, above the terrible depths of the Pacific ocean.
Martel dextrously prepares us for the seafaring section in the first part of the book, which describes Pi's sunny childhood in the Pondicherry zoo and his triple conversion to Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. We learn much about animal behaviour - flight distances, aggression, social hierarchy - which is later translated to Pi's survival tactics on the lifeboat. Like a lion tamer in the circus ring, Pi must convince the tiger that he is the super-alpha male, using toots on his whistle as a whip and the sea as a source of treats, marking the boundary of his territory on the boat with urine and fierce, quaking stares.
The ongoing miracle of his existence at sea is also foreshadowed by his spiritual life on land; Pi is a creature of faith (or faiths) who sees eternally renewed wonder in God and his creation. There is joy on the lifeboat - as well as horror, and gore, and "tense, breathless boredom". He had chosen his irrational nickname because of his schoolmates' insistence on pronouncing Piscine as "pissing", but he also has a believer's scepticism about reason, "that fool's gold for the bright". In one of the many elegant, informative digressions in the book's first section, Martel takes us through instances of zoomorphism, whereby an animal takes a human or another animal to be one of its own species, and the usual predator-prey relationship is suspended. Pi characterises this adaptive leap of faith as "that measure of madness that moves life in strange but saving ways"; in other words, his coexistence with the tiger is possible precisely because it has never happened before.
Faith and science, two marvelling perspectives on the world, coexist throughout the book in a fine, delicate balance, as when the two Mr Kumars, one Pi's atheist teacher and the other the baker who introduces him to Islam, meet at the zoo to "take the pulse of the universe" and wonder together, in opposing ways, at the sheer surprisingness of the zebra and its stripes. In its subject and its style, this enormously lovable novel is suffused with wonder: a willed innocence that produces a fresh, sideways look at our habitual assumptions, about religious divisions, or zoos versus the wild, or the possibility of freedom. As Martel promises in his author's note, this is fiction probing the imaginative realm with scientific exactitude, twisting reality to "bring out its essence".
The realism that carried the reader in the erratic wake of the small boy and large tiger falters as they begin to waste away and die - and then the book gets seriously strange, with ghostly visitations and impossible islands, as though Martel wants not so much to test our credulity as entirely to annihilate it. It's an odd tactic, though it does leave a fertile interpretative space, a dark undercurrent below the narrative's main structure, which has the neatness of fable.
Though horrors are hinted at, "this story", as the book had unfashionably assured us, "has a happy ending." Pi runs safely aground in Mexico, and the tiger about which he still has "nightmares tinged with love", which saved his life by coming between him and a more terrifying enemy, despair, leaps ashore and disappears into the jungle, denying him an anthropomorphic goodbye growl. Of course, the officials who arrive to investigate the ship's sinking don't believe him for a moment. In a daring coda, Pi offers them another story, which turns the tale on its head and seals Martel's extraordinary, one-off achievement. He had written earlier about how a blinkered dedication to factuality can lead one to "miss the better story". The better story has a tiger in it.
Taming the Tiger
By Gary Krist, New YorkTimes July 7, 2002
LIFE OF PI
By Yann Martel.
A HINDU, a Muslim and a Christian are trapped on a lifeboat for 227 days with a 450-pound Bengal tiger. It sounds suspiciously like the setup of a joke, something you might hear at a tavern from the guy who's been downing gimlets all night. But ''Life of Pi,'' the Canadian writer Yann Martel's extraordinary novel based on this very premise, is hardly your average barroom gag. Granted, it may not qualify as ''a story that will make you believe in God,'' as one character describes it. But it could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life -- although sticklers for literal realism, poor souls, will find much to carp at.
For one thing, the Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian are all the same person -- Pi Patel, an amiable Indian teenager who sees no reason why he can't practice three religions at once. He's also something of an expert on animal behavior. As the son of a zoo owner in the South Indian city of Pondicherry, he grew up on familiar terms with howler monkeys, one-wattled cassowaries and American bison. As a result, he's attuned to the intricacies of interspecies cohabitation. ''A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence,'' he explains. ''Exactly where an animal says to us, 'Stay out!' with its urine or other secretion, we say to it, 'Stay in!' with our barriers. Under such conditions of diplomatic peace, all animals are content and we can relax and have a look at each other.''
This zoological savvy proves indispensable to Pi when he and his family decide to escape the political instability of 1970's India and move -- lock, stock and menagerie -- to Canada. Like latter-day Noahs, they load their animals onto a Japanese cargo ship named the Tsimtsum and set sail for the New World. But ''midway to Midway,'' something inexplicable happens. For reasons that will forever elude the maritime authorities, the Tsimtsum sinks -- suddenly and violently -- just before dawn on its fourth day out of Manila. Only five survivors are able to reach the single lifeboat that doesn't go down with the ship: Pi himself, an injured zebra, a prize Borneo orangutan, one very nervous hyena and a tiger who (thanks to a clerical error that confused the names of the animal and its captor) is called Richard Parker.
They make for a rather volatile crew. The politics of the animal kingdom being what they are, the zebra, the orangutan and the hyena are quickly dispatched, leaving boy and tiger alone on the 26-foot craft. But thanks to a territory-defining tarpaulin and the general bewilderment of two traumatized and seasick creatures, the obvious does not immediately occur. Pi remains uneaten long enough to reach an important insight about his boatmate: ''I had to tame him,'' he realizes. ''It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.'' As paradoxical as it may seem, Pi understands that his own survival depends on keeping his ferocious opponent alive and well -- ''because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker.''
Although ''Life of Pi'' works remarkably well on the pure adrenaline-and-testosterone level of a high-seas adventure tale, it's apparent that Martel is not interested in simply retelling the classic lifeboat-survival story (with a Bengal tiger playing the prickly Tallulah Bankhead role). Pi, after all, is a practitioner of three major religions who also happens to have a strong background in science; with such a broad résumé, his story inevitably takes on the quality of a parable. In fact, although the book reverberates with echoes from sources as disparate as ''Robinson Crusoe'' and Aesop's fables, the work it most strongly recalls is Ernest Hemingway's own foray into existentialist parable, ''The Old Man and the Sea.'' But while Hemingway depicted the defining struggle of his archetypal man as one of sheer endurance and determination, Pi's battle is more subtle. The boy must finesse his demon, not overcome it, and do so by means of a kind of psychological jujitsu. He comes to realize that survival involves knowing when to assert himself and when to hold back, when to take the upper hand and when to yield to a power greater than himself. He discovers, in other words, that living with a tiger ultimately requires acts of both will and faith.
There are times when Martel pushes the didactic agenda of his story too hard. One episode involving a bizarre ''Gandhian'' island of passively carnivorous seaweed -- populated by an enormous herd of South African meerkats -- struck me as a little too baldly allegorical, however magical its imagery. But Martel is usually able to keep his feet on the ground by focusing on the physical and logistical details of his hero's predicament.
He writes with a playful and discursive casualness, but that doesn't prevent him from delivering some arresting descriptions. In one of the more cinematic moments in the novel, Pi catches a bioluminescent dorado and must pummel it to death with the dull side of a hatchet: ''The dorado did a most extraordinary thing as it died: it began to flash all kinds of colors in rapid succession. Blue, green, red, gold and violet flickered and shimmered neonlike on its surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death.''
Moreover, in the book's final chapters, just when many novels are winding down to their foregone conclusions, Martel gives ''Life of Pi'' an intriguing twist. After the lifeboat comes safely to shore in Mexico (and Richard Parker disappears without ceremony into the jungle), Pi finds that his wild narrative is not believed by the officials sent to debrief him. And he knows exactly why: ''You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently.''
Urged to provide a more credible explanation for his survival, Pi placates the officials with a story that contains just the kind of ''dry, yeastless factuality'' they're looking for. But is this more straightforward (and tigerless) version of events actually closer to the deeper truth of his adventure? It's a testimony to Martel's achievement that few readers will be tempted to think so.
A fishy tale Yann Martel goes to sea with an unlikely collection of characters in Life of Pi%09%09%09%09Books%20|%09%09%09%09The%20Observer%09|Buzz up!Digg it Tim Adams, The Observer, Sunday 26 May 2002 Life of Pi
Yann Martel
About a third of the way through this novel, you find yourself being asked to believe in the following scenario: a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi (short for 'Piscine' - don't ask) has been cast overboard from a sinking ship. The ship had a cargo of zoo animals and the boy finds himself in a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (which the hyena is eating alive) an orang-utan and a Bengal tiger hiding under a tarpaulin. They are drifting thousands of miles from land, and there are sharks circling the boat. The orang-utan is looking distinctly seasick; the boy is trying to work out an effective way of catching flying fish, while he dwells on the chances of his avoiding the zebra's fate.
In recent weeks, in the literary pages, there have been reports of the death of magic realism, that catch-all genre of Eighties exoticism spawned by the loose global grouping of Márquez and Rushdie and Calvino. On the evidence of Yann Martel's second novel it would seem that these reports have been greatly exaggerated.
Having just about convinced his reader of the possibility of Pi being on the boat itself, Martel, a Canadian, then endeavours to sustain his fantastical survival story for 300-odd pages. The real trick of this book is that he almost succeeds.
The story is given all the apparatus of a yarn. It begins with an authorial note about the difficulties of writing second books when the first has sunk with barely a ripple. The writer narrator travels to Tamil Nadu, dreaming of a tea plantation on which to write his great Portuguese (don't ask) novel, but the book goes nowhere, and he mails it to a mythical address in Siberia. Casting around for ideas he is directed towards an Indian man who lives in Canada, and whose life, it is suggested, is something close to being the greatest story ever told. All the narrator will have to do is write it down.
The man is Pi (3.14 to his mates) and the story is the story of his seven months in the boat with the tiger (who soon sees off the remainder of the floating menagerie). Before he is set adrift Pi has been a spiritual adventurer; his travels with his zoo-owning father bring him into contact with Christians and Muslims and Hindus, and he embraces all religions with similar fervour. When he curses it is thus to: 'Jesus, Mary, Mohammed and Vishnu!'
Undoubtedly, on the boat, he needs all the divine help he can muster. Having gone through various panicky survival strategies in the first few hours - pushing the tiger (called Richard Parker - don't ask) overboard - he decides his only hope is to try to show him who is the alpha male in their particular highly restrictive jungle. This he proceeds to attempt with the help mainly of a ship's whistle.
Martel has large amounts of intellectual fun with outrageous fable. The novel occasionally develops little disquisitions on the idea of faith, on the limits of credulity or the nature of nature; it asks you to find reference points in Robert Louis Stevenson and Blake, the Bible and the Ramayana.
Mostly, it dramatises and articulates the possibilities of storytelling, which for this writer is a kind of extremist high-wire act: almost every time he looks as if he is about to fall, he contemplates instead a thrilling handstand, or swallows a sword. Though this performance eventually becomes a bit tiresome, you cannot help but admire its showmanship. There is also some useful practical advice: should you ever find yourself alone in a dinghy with a man-eating tiger never forget to blow your whistle at full blast and be sure to puke on the edges of your territory.
Fascinating 'Life of Pi' gives readers a reason to believe
Reviewed by Jonathan Kiefer, San FranciscoChronicle, Sunday, June 23, 2002 Life of Pi By Yann Martel ----
In his American debut, the prize-winning Canadian fiction writer Yann Martel begins with an explanation of how this particular tale first transfixed him. It was a story, he recalls, to "make you believe in God."
That's ambitious, even for an accomplished fabulist and metaphysical philosopher, but it's also a very clever way to start people turning pages. Right out of the gate, "Life of Pi" is full of fierce but friendly storytelling energy. It's a real adventure: brutal, tender, expressive, dramatic and disarmingly funny.
Piscine Molitor Patel, named for a Parisian swimming pool, is the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, "once the capital of that most modest of colonial empires, French India." Such exoticism serves him well; Pi's early surroundings, as he and Martel describe them, are wondrous. "I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet," he says. "It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses."
That's exquisite, but only if the author can provide examples. Happily, Pi's analysis is repeatedly borne out by Martel's astonishing abilities as an informed and impassioned describer.
Pi spends his precocious adolescence studying readily available zoology, and, to the eventual dismay of his parents, three unique religions. "They didn't know that I was a practicing Hindu, Christian and Muslim. Teenagers always hide a few things from their parents, isn't that so? All sixteen-year- olds have secrets, don't they?" His spiritual affairs are rendered with loving care, and the inevitable farcical debate among Pi's religious educators is hilarious, if a touch overextended.
Soon thereafter, Pi and his family and many of their animals plan to emigrate to Canada on a Japanese freighter, but partway through their voyage the ship sinks. The disaster strands Pi in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on a lifeboat with a seasick orangutan, a wounded zebra, a frenetic hyena and an eerily placid Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
By this point, two things are clear: 1) that "Life of Pi" is very difficult to stop reading, and 2) that none of its details is a throwaway, least of all a tiger named Richard Parker. Explanation comes by way of an interesting sub- story, one of many well-placed digressions. Another is the grimly memorable lesson Pi's father once taught him about the dangers of tigers.
And a third, which synthesizes those others, is the moment in the lifeboat when Richard Parker first lays eyes on Pi and the narrator considers himself a goner. Martel imparts a great pang of suspense -- made all the more titillating by what follows, a nuanced and absorbing description of the animal's sublime beauty.
After some unsparingly gory conflict in the boat, Pi and Richard Parker are left alone together. It spoils nothing to say that they coexist on the open ocean for more than 200 days. ("A story is always better appreciated if its ending is known first," the author states in a disclaimer early on.)
As Pi somehow finds the resources to sustain his life, Martel finds the wherewithal to sustain the spirit and vitality of his narration. The sense that this is not a coincidence provides much of the book's delight.
Splashing through the story, like the sea creatures swirling around Pi's besieged vessel, are abundant epiphanies -- some shimmering just below the surface, others lurking but less visible. Martel's prose is suitably buoyant throughout. How nimbly he navigates through an examination of natural and religious order, of the comforts of containment and the chilling prospects of freedom. One might infer plenty of influences from the author's mannerisms, but his creed is his own: Martel puts his faith in the act of storytelling.
Though it's still difficult to stop reading when the pages run out, Martel closes the book elegantly. (A good thing, too. As Pi puts it, "What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.") At the end of his ordeal, Pi's story seems so fantastic that people refuse to believe it -- so he decides to revise accordingly.
"Life of Pi" may or may not make its readers believe in God, but they will surely want to believe in Pi Patel. Thanks to Martel's handling, his story is the sort of novel one might share with one's children (of appropriate age), confident in its power to nudge them toward becoming properly curious lovers of books and life.
Life of Pi is a masterful story Life of Pi
by
Yann Martel Review by W. R. Greer ----
I turned around, stepped over the zebra and threw myself overboard.
This sentence, full of surprise and wonder, jumps out of the middle of Life of Pi. It's indicative of the story Yann Martel tells in this novel, a remarkable story where he makes the unbelievable sound credible. When you stumble across sentences like that, you know you're in the hands of a master storyteller. Yann Martel gives us the story of Piscine Molitor Patel, self-christened as Pi. He drives this name home by saying "Three! Point! One! Four!" to his new classmates after suffering the nickname of Pissing at a previous school. Never mind that his name comes from a swimming pool in France. Pi Patel is an earnest young man in Pondicherry, a tiny area in southern India which was once part of French India (one of the many obscure facts that Yann Martel scatters throughout his story). The first part of the novel tells of Pi's childhood as the son of the zookeeper in Pondicherry. Growing up in the zoo, Pi learns a lot about animals. He educates us in the ways of animals, both penned and wild, and in how to keep them content and controlled. He rails against anthropomorphosis, which is ascribing human emotions and traits to animals. Instead he explains that animals are creatures of habit and once all their needs are met, they're content and willing to repeat the same scenario every day. Upset their routine, even in the smallest of ways, and you have an unhappy animal on your hands. Pi even tells the reader how a lion tamer controls his charges by being the alpha male, asserting his dominance and providing for their needs so they stay submissive to him. It turns out to be a good lesson for Pi to learn as a young man.
As he enters his teen years, Pi goes in search of God. His parents weren't pious people, but growing up in India, Pi was initially a Hindu. When he first encounters Christianity, he finds Jesus lacking in comparison to the Hindu gods, who are grand in stature and history. He comes to embrace Christianity's message of love. Then he discovers Islam, "a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion." Pi becomes a devout member of all three religions, content in his newfound sense of God. Once the priest, the pandit, and the imam discover his activities with each other's churches, they confront Pi and his parents and tell him he can't belong to all three and must choose one. The fractious arguing among the three religious leaders over which religion he should choose is the funniest part of the novel. Yann Martel makes them all look simplistic and spiteful as they belittle each other's faith. Pi puts them all in their place with the declaration that he was just trying to love God. His older brother, Ravi, provides a different perspective on it all, suggesting he might try to become a Jew too. "At the rate you're going, if you go to temple on Thursday, mosque on Friday, synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday, you only need to convert to three more religions to be on holiday for the rest of your life."
The first section of the novel ends with Pi and his family leaving India for Canada. The zoo is closing and the animals are being sent to zoos all around the world. The family and many of the animals board a Japanese cargo ship for their passage to Canada. Pi is 16 and embarking on the trip to a new life. Unfortunately, it wasn't the life he expected. As the first sentence in Part Two of the book says, "The ship sank."
Pi is cast adrift in a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a huge Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The first week is a horrific one as the animals battle for survival in the cramped boat and Pi quakes with fear as he tries to avoid being part of the food chain. Eventually, just the tiger and he are left in the boat. The rest of the book is Pi's tale of 227 days at sea. The boat is well stocked for a human, but Pi soon realizes that his only hope for survival is to keep the tiger content and subservient to him. Pi lives in constant terror of Richard Parker, but manages to keep him supplied with fish, turtles, and fresh water so that he doesn't turn on him. Pi spends most of him time in despair, not just emotional, but physical. Yet, at times, he is dazzled by the wonderfulness of God's creation and creatures. He refuses to give up and die and instead lives by his wits and determination. He has to abandon being a vegetarian to survive on anything he can eat, which he finds he attacks with the savagery of a starved animal.
Yann Martel keeps the story of Pi's long voyage moving at an interesting pace. You know from the beginning that Pi will survive, but at times you wonder how he will overcome each challenge he faces. Martel doesn't allow Richard Parker to be anything more than a dangerous Bengal tiger and Pi never to be more than a desperate boy lost at sea. As Pi's long days at sea take a toll on his health and mind, the story begins to strain credulity. Martel then challenges the reader at the end to disbelieve it all. In the end, it becomes a matter of faith.
There are parts of the book that come up short. The book is written as Pi's recollection to the writer researching his story. The first section of the book has short chapters with the writer interacting with the adult Pi. These serve no purpose other than to remind us that this is the adult Pi retelling his story. The writer doesn't surface again until the very end of the book. At times, the teenage Pi sounds like an adult philosopher when lost at sea. If you stretch the point that the novel is Pi retelling the story in his adult voice, you can let it pass. Almost.
These are small nits, though. Reading Life of Pi, you find yourself at the mercy of a great storyteller. Yann Martel will dazzle you with his prose and his mastery of arcane facts, and challenges you to believe his story. You will be left with a better understanding of animals, including man, and much to ponder and question. Life of Pi is a delicious treat to savor.
Justine Jordan is charmed by a zoological oddity in Life of Pi by Yann Martel%09%09%09%09Books%20|%09%09%09%09The%20Guardian%09|Buzz up! Digg it
Justine Jordan, The Guardian, Saturday 25 May 2002
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
In the author's note that prefaces this vertiginously tall tale, Yann Martel blends fact and fiction with wily charm. Yes, he'd published two books that failed to shake the world - eager, studious-young-man's fiction with a strain of self-conscious experimentalism - and taken off to India nursing the faltering seeds of another. But no, he didn't there meet a wise old man who directed him to a putative "main character", now living back in Martel's native Toronto: a certain Piscine Molitor or Pi Patel, named for a French swimming pool and nicknamed for an irrational number, who in the mid-1970s survived 227 days lost at sea with a Royal Bengal tiger.
Despite the extraordinary premise and literary playfulness, one reads Life of Pi not so much as an allegory or magical-realist fable, but as an edge-of-seat adventure. When the ship in which 16-year-old Pi and his zookeeping family are to emigrate from India to Canada sinks, leaving him the sole human survivor in a lifeboat on to which barge a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a bedraggled, seasick tiger, Pi is determined to survive the impossible. "I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day." And Martel writes with such convincing immediacy, seasoning his narrative with zoological verisimilitude and survival tips about turtle- fishing, solar stills and keeping occupied (the lifeboat manual notes that "yarn spinning is highly recommended"), that disbelief is suspended, like Pi, above the terrible depths of the Pacific ocean.
Martel dextrously prepares us for the seafaring section in the first part of the book, which describes Pi's sunny childhood in the Pondicherry zoo and his triple conversion to Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. We learn much about animal behaviour - flight distances, aggression, social hierarchy - which is later translated to Pi's survival tactics on the lifeboat. Like a lion tamer in the circus ring, Pi must convince the tiger that he is the super-alpha male, using toots on his whistle as a whip and the sea as a source of treats, marking the boundary of his territory on the boat with urine and fierce, quaking stares.
The ongoing miracle of his existence at sea is also foreshadowed by his spiritual life on land; Pi is a creature of faith (or faiths) who sees eternally renewed wonder in God and his creation. There is joy on the lifeboat - as well as horror, and gore, and "tense, breathless boredom". He had chosen his irrational nickname because of his schoolmates' insistence on pronouncing Piscine as "pissing", but he also has a believer's scepticism about reason, "that fool's gold for the bright". In one of the many elegant, informative digressions in the book's first section, Martel takes us through instances of zoomorphism, whereby an animal takes a human or another animal to be one of its own species, and the usual predator-prey relationship is suspended. Pi characterises this adaptive leap of faith as "that measure of madness that moves life in strange but saving ways"; in other words, his coexistence with the tiger is possible precisely because it has never happened before.
Faith and science, two marvelling perspectives on the world, coexist throughout the book in a fine, delicate balance, as when the two Mr Kumars, one Pi's atheist teacher and the other the baker who introduces him to Islam, meet at the zoo to "take the pulse of the universe" and wonder together, in opposing ways, at the sheer surprisingness of the zebra and its stripes. In its subject and its style, this enormously lovable novel is suffused with wonder: a willed innocence that produces a fresh, sideways look at our habitual assumptions, about religious divisions, or zoos versus the wild, or the possibility of freedom. As Martel promises in his author's note, this is fiction probing the imaginative realm with scientific exactitude, twisting reality to "bring out its essence".
The realism that carried the reader in the erratic wake of the small boy and large tiger falters as they begin to waste away and die - and then the book gets seriously strange, with ghostly visitations and impossible islands, as though Martel wants not so much to test our credulity as entirely to annihilate it. It's an odd tactic, though it does leave a fertile interpretative space, a dark undercurrent below the narrative's main structure, which has the neatness of fable.
Though horrors are hinted at, "this story", as the book had unfashionably assured us, "has a happy ending." Pi runs safely aground in Mexico, and the tiger about which he still has "nightmares tinged with love", which saved his life by coming between him and a more terrifying enemy, despair, leaps ashore and disappears into the jungle, denying him an anthropomorphic goodbye growl. Of course, the officials who arrive to investigate the ship's sinking don't believe him for a moment. In a daring coda, Pi offers them another story, which turns the tale on its head and seals Martel's extraordinary, one-off achievement. He had written earlier about how a blinkered dedication to factuality can lead one to "miss the better story". The better story has a tiger in it.
Taming the Tiger
By Gary Krist, New York Times July 7, 2002LIFE OF PI
By Yann Martel.
A HINDU, a Muslim and a Christian are trapped on a lifeboat for 227 days with a 450-pound Bengal tiger. It sounds suspiciously like the setup of a joke, something you might hear at a tavern from the guy who's been downing gimlets all night. But ''Life of Pi,'' the Canadian writer Yann Martel's extraordinary novel based on this very premise, is hardly your average barroom gag. Granted, it may not qualify as ''a story that will make you believe in God,'' as one character describes it. But it could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life -- although sticklers for literal realism, poor souls, will find much to carp at.
For one thing, the Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian are all the same person -- Pi Patel, an amiable Indian teenager who sees no reason why he can't practice three religions at once. He's also something of an expert on animal behavior. As the son of a zoo owner in the South Indian city of Pondicherry, he grew up on familiar terms with howler monkeys, one-wattled cassowaries and American bison. As a result, he's attuned to the intricacies of interspecies cohabitation. ''A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence,'' he explains. ''Exactly where an animal says to us, 'Stay out!' with its urine or other secretion, we say to it, 'Stay in!' with our barriers. Under such conditions of diplomatic peace, all animals are content and we can relax and have a look at each other.''
This zoological savvy proves indispensable to Pi when he and his family decide to escape the political instability of 1970's India and move -- lock, stock and menagerie -- to Canada. Like latter-day Noahs, they load their animals onto a Japanese cargo ship named the Tsimtsum and set sail for the New World. But ''midway to Midway,'' something inexplicable happens. For reasons that will forever elude the maritime authorities, the Tsimtsum sinks -- suddenly and violently -- just before dawn on its fourth day out of Manila. Only five survivors are able to reach the single lifeboat that doesn't go down with the ship: Pi himself, an injured zebra, a prize Borneo orangutan, one very nervous hyena and a tiger who (thanks to a clerical error that confused the names of the animal and its captor) is called Richard Parker.
They make for a rather volatile crew. The politics of the animal kingdom being what they are, the zebra, the orangutan and the hyena are quickly dispatched, leaving boy and tiger alone on the 26-foot craft. But thanks to a territory-defining tarpaulin and the general bewilderment of two traumatized and seasick creatures, the obvious does not immediately occur. Pi remains uneaten long enough to reach an important insight about his boatmate: ''I had to tame him,'' he realizes. ''It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.'' As paradoxical as it may seem, Pi understands that his own survival depends on keeping his ferocious opponent alive and well -- ''because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker.''
Although ''Life of Pi'' works remarkably well on the pure adrenaline-and-testosterone level of a high-seas adventure tale, it's apparent that Martel is not interested in simply retelling the classic lifeboat-survival story (with a Bengal tiger playing the prickly Tallulah Bankhead role). Pi, after all, is a practitioner of three major religions who also happens to have a strong background in science; with such a broad résumé, his story inevitably takes on the quality of a parable. In fact, although the book reverberates with echoes from sources as disparate as ''Robinson Crusoe'' and Aesop's fables, the work it most strongly recalls is Ernest Hemingway's own foray into existentialist parable, ''The Old Man and the Sea.'' But while Hemingway depicted the defining struggle of his archetypal man as one of sheer endurance and determination, Pi's battle is more subtle. The boy must finesse his demon, not overcome it, and do so by means of a kind of psychological jujitsu. He comes to realize that survival involves knowing when to assert himself and when to hold back, when to take the upper hand and when to yield to a power greater than himself. He discovers, in other words, that living with a tiger ultimately requires acts of both will and faith.
There are times when Martel pushes the didactic agenda of his story too hard. One episode involving a bizarre ''Gandhian'' island of passively carnivorous seaweed -- populated by an enormous herd of South African meerkats -- struck me as a little too baldly allegorical, however magical its imagery. But Martel is usually able to keep his feet on the ground by focusing on the physical and logistical details of his hero's predicament.
He writes with a playful and discursive casualness, but that doesn't prevent him from delivering some arresting descriptions. In one of the more cinematic moments in the novel, Pi catches a bioluminescent dorado and must pummel it to death with the dull side of a hatchet: ''The dorado did a most extraordinary thing as it died: it began to flash all kinds of colors in rapid succession. Blue, green, red, gold and violet flickered and shimmered neonlike on its surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death.''
Moreover, in the book's final chapters, just when many novels are winding down to their foregone conclusions, Martel gives ''Life of Pi'' an intriguing twist. After the lifeboat comes safely to shore in Mexico (and Richard Parker disappears without ceremony into the jungle), Pi finds that his wild narrative is not believed by the officials sent to debrief him. And he knows exactly why: ''You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently.''
Urged to provide a more credible explanation for his survival, Pi placates the officials with a story that contains just the kind of ''dry, yeastless factuality'' they're looking for. But is this more straightforward (and tigerless) version of events actually closer to the deeper truth of his adventure? It's a testimony to Martel's achievement that few readers will be tempted to think so.
A fishy tale
Yann Martel goes to sea with an unlikely collection of characters in Life of Pi%09%09%09%09Books%20|%09%09%09%09The%20Observer%09|Buzz up! Digg it
Tim Adams, The Observer, Sunday 26 May 2002
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
About a third of the way through this novel, you find yourself being asked to believe in the following scenario: a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi (short for 'Piscine' - don't ask) has been cast overboard from a sinking ship. The ship had a cargo of zoo animals and the boy finds himself in a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (which the hyena is eating alive) an orang-utan and a Bengal tiger hiding under a tarpaulin. They are drifting thousands of miles from land, and there are sharks circling the boat. The orang-utan is looking distinctly seasick; the boy is trying to work out an effective way of catching flying fish, while he dwells on the chances of his avoiding the zebra's fate.
In recent weeks, in the literary pages, there have been reports of the death of magic realism, that catch-all genre of Eighties exoticism spawned by the loose global grouping of Márquez and Rushdie and Calvino. On the evidence of Yann Martel's second novel it would seem that these reports have been greatly exaggerated.
Having just about convinced his reader of the possibility of Pi being on the boat itself, Martel, a Canadian, then endeavours to sustain his fantastical survival story for 300-odd pages. The real trick of this book is that he almost succeeds.
The story is given all the apparatus of a yarn. It begins with an authorial note about the difficulties of writing second books when the first has sunk with barely a ripple. The writer narrator travels to Tamil Nadu, dreaming of a tea plantation on which to write his great Portuguese (don't ask) novel, but the book goes nowhere, and he mails it to a mythical address in Siberia. Casting around for ideas he is directed towards an Indian man who lives in Canada, and whose life, it is suggested, is something close to being the greatest story ever told. All the narrator will have to do is write it down.
The man is Pi (3.14 to his mates) and the story is the story of his seven months in the boat with the tiger (who soon sees off the remainder of the floating menagerie). Before he is set adrift Pi has been a spiritual adventurer; his travels with his zoo-owning father bring him into contact with Christians and Muslims and Hindus, and he embraces all religions with similar fervour. When he curses it is thus to: 'Jesus, Mary, Mohammed and Vishnu!'
Undoubtedly, on the boat, he needs all the divine help he can muster. Having gone through various panicky survival strategies in the first few hours - pushing the tiger (called Richard Parker - don't ask) overboard - he decides his only hope is to try to show him who is the alpha male in their particular highly restrictive jungle. This he proceeds to attempt with the help mainly of a ship's whistle.
Martel has large amounts of intellectual fun with outrageous fable. The novel occasionally develops little disquisitions on the idea of faith, on the limits of credulity or the nature of nature; it asks you to find reference points in Robert Louis Stevenson and Blake, the Bible and the Ramayana.
Mostly, it dramatises and articulates the possibilities of storytelling, which for this writer is a kind of extremist high-wire act: almost every time he looks as if he is about to fall, he contemplates instead a thrilling handstand, or swallows a sword. Though this performance eventually becomes a bit tiresome, you cannot help but admire its showmanship. There is also some useful practical advice: should you ever find yourself alone in a dinghy with a man-eating tiger never forget to blow your whistle at full blast and be sure to puke on the edges of your territory.
Fascinating 'Life of Pi' gives readers a reason to believe
Reviewed by Jonathan Kiefer, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 23, 2002Life of Pi
By Yann Martel
----
In his American debut, the prize-winning Canadian fiction writer Yann Martel begins with an explanation of how this particular tale first transfixed him. It was a story, he recalls, to "make you believe in God."
That's ambitious, even for an accomplished fabulist and metaphysical philosopher, but it's also a very clever way to start people turning pages. Right out of the gate, "Life of Pi" is full of fierce but friendly storytelling energy. It's a real adventure: brutal, tender, expressive, dramatic and disarmingly funny.
Piscine Molitor Patel, named for a Parisian swimming pool, is the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, "once the capital of that most modest of colonial empires, French India." Such exoticism serves him well; Pi's early surroundings, as he and Martel describe them, are wondrous. "I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet," he says. "It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses."
That's exquisite, but only if the author can provide examples. Happily, Pi's analysis is repeatedly borne out by Martel's astonishing abilities as an informed and impassioned describer.
Pi spends his precocious adolescence studying readily available zoology, and, to the eventual dismay of his parents, three unique religions. "They didn't know that I was a practicing Hindu, Christian and Muslim. Teenagers always hide a few things from their parents, isn't that so? All sixteen-year- olds have secrets, don't they?" His spiritual affairs are rendered with loving care, and the inevitable farcical debate among Pi's religious educators is hilarious, if a touch overextended.
Soon thereafter, Pi and his family and many of their animals plan to emigrate to Canada on a Japanese freighter, but partway through their voyage the ship sinks. The disaster strands Pi in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on a lifeboat with a seasick orangutan, a wounded zebra, a frenetic hyena and an eerily placid Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
By this point, two things are clear: 1) that "Life of Pi" is very difficult to stop reading, and 2) that none of its details is a throwaway, least of all a tiger named Richard Parker. Explanation comes by way of an interesting sub- story, one of many well-placed digressions. Another is the grimly memorable lesson Pi's father once taught him about the dangers of tigers.
And a third, which synthesizes those others, is the moment in the lifeboat when Richard Parker first lays eyes on Pi and the narrator considers himself a goner. Martel imparts a great pang of suspense -- made all the more titillating by what follows, a nuanced and absorbing description of the animal's sublime beauty.
After some unsparingly gory conflict in the boat, Pi and Richard Parker are left alone together. It spoils nothing to say that they coexist on the open ocean for more than 200 days. ("A story is always better appreciated if its ending is known first," the author states in a disclaimer early on.)
As Pi somehow finds the resources to sustain his life, Martel finds the wherewithal to sustain the spirit and vitality of his narration. The sense that this is not a coincidence provides much of the book's delight.
Splashing through the story, like the sea creatures swirling around Pi's besieged vessel, are abundant epiphanies -- some shimmering just below the surface, others lurking but less visible. Martel's prose is suitably buoyant throughout. How nimbly he navigates through an examination of natural and religious order, of the comforts of containment and the chilling prospects of freedom. One might infer plenty of influences from the author's mannerisms, but his creed is his own: Martel puts his faith in the act of storytelling.
Though it's still difficult to stop reading when the pages run out, Martel closes the book elegantly. (A good thing, too. As Pi puts it, "What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.") At the end of his ordeal, Pi's story seems so fantastic that people refuse to believe it -- so he decides to revise accordingly.
"Life of Pi" may or may not make its readers believe in God, but they will surely want to believe in Pi Patel. Thanks to Martel's handling, his story is the sort of novel one might share with one's children (of appropriate age), confident in its power to nudge them toward becoming properly curious lovers of books and life.
Life of Pi is a masterful story
Life of Pi
by
Yann Martel
Review by W. R. Greer
----
I turned around, stepped over the zebra and threw myself overboard.
This sentence, full of surprise and wonder, jumps out of the middle of Life of Pi. It's indicative of the story Yann Martel tells in this novel, a remarkable story where he makes the unbelievable sound credible. When you stumble across sentences like that, you know you're in the hands of a master storyteller. Yann Martel gives us the story of Piscine Molitor Patel, self-christened as Pi. He drives this name home by saying "Three! Point! One! Four!" to his new classmates after suffering the nickname of Pissing at a previous school. Never mind that his name comes from a swimming pool in France. Pi Patel is an earnest young man in Pondicherry, a tiny area in southern India which was once part of French India (one of the many obscure facts that Yann Martel scatters throughout his story). The first part of the novel tells of Pi's childhood as the son of the zookeeper in Pondicherry. Growing up in the zoo, Pi learns a lot about animals. He educates us in the ways of animals, both penned and wild, and in how to keep them content and controlled. He rails against anthropomorphosis, which is ascribing human emotions and traits to animals. Instead he explains that animals are creatures of habit and once all their needs are met, they're content and willing to repeat the same scenario every day. Upset their routine, even in the smallest of ways, and you have an unhappy animal on your hands. Pi even tells the reader how a lion tamer controls his charges by being the alpha male, asserting his dominance and providing for their needs so they stay submissive to him. It turns out to be a good lesson for Pi to learn as a young man.
As he enters his teen years, Pi goes in search of God. His parents weren't pious people, but growing up in India, Pi was initially a Hindu. When he first encounters Christianity, he finds Jesus lacking in comparison to the Hindu gods, who are grand in stature and history. He comes to embrace Christianity's message of love. Then he discovers Islam, "a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion." Pi becomes a devout member of all three religions, content in his newfound sense of God. Once the priest, the pandit, and the imam discover his activities with each other's churches, they confront Pi and his parents and tell him he can't belong to all three and must choose one. The fractious arguing among the three religious leaders over which religion he should choose is the funniest part of the novel. Yann Martel makes them all look simplistic and spiteful as they belittle each other's faith. Pi puts them all in their place with the declaration that he was just trying to love God. His older brother, Ravi, provides a different perspective on it all, suggesting he might try to become a Jew too. "At the rate you're going, if you go to temple on Thursday, mosque on Friday, synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday, you only need to convert to three more religions to be on holiday for the rest of your life."
The first section of the novel ends with Pi and his family leaving India for Canada. The zoo is closing and the animals are being sent to zoos all around the world. The family and many of the animals board a Japanese cargo ship for their passage to Canada. Pi is 16 and embarking on the trip to a new life. Unfortunately, it wasn't the life he expected. As the first sentence in Part Two of the book says, "The ship sank."
Pi is cast adrift in a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a huge Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The first week is a horrific one as the animals battle for survival in the cramped boat and Pi quakes with fear as he tries to avoid being part of the food chain. Eventually, just the tiger and he are left in the boat. The rest of the book is Pi's tale of 227 days at sea. The boat is well stocked for a human, but Pi soon realizes that his only hope for survival is to keep the tiger content and subservient to him. Pi lives in constant terror of Richard Parker, but manages to keep him supplied with fish, turtles, and fresh water so that he doesn't turn on him. Pi spends most of him time in despair, not just emotional, but physical. Yet, at times, he is dazzled by the wonderfulness of God's creation and creatures. He refuses to give up and die and instead lives by his wits and determination. He has to abandon being a vegetarian to survive on anything he can eat, which he finds he attacks with the savagery of a starved animal.
Yann Martel keeps the story of Pi's long voyage moving at an interesting pace. You know from the beginning that Pi will survive, but at times you wonder how he will overcome each challenge he faces. Martel doesn't allow Richard Parker to be anything more than a dangerous Bengal tiger and Pi never to be more than a desperate boy lost at sea. As Pi's long days at sea take a toll on his health and mind, the story begins to strain credulity. Martel then challenges the reader at the end to disbelieve it all. In the end, it becomes a matter of faith.
There are parts of the book that come up short. The book is written as Pi's recollection to the writer researching his story. The first section of the book has short chapters with the writer interacting with the adult Pi. These serve no purpose other than to remind us that this is the adult Pi retelling his story. The writer doesn't surface again until the very end of the book. At times, the teenage Pi sounds like an adult philosopher when lost at sea. If you stretch the point that the novel is Pi retelling the story in his adult voice, you can let it pass. Almost.
These are small nits, though. Reading Life of Pi, you find yourself at the mercy of a great storyteller. Yann Martel will dazzle you with his prose and his mastery of arcane facts, and challenges you to believe his story. You will be left with a better understanding of animals, including man, and much to ponder and question. Life of Pi is a delicious treat to savor.