BOOK: The Life of Pi

AUTHOR: Yann Martel

SUMMARY: Narrated by a sixteen-year-old Indian boy, who sets out on an adventure of a lifetime, this book explores a diverse range of life experiences. It explores age-old life themes: life versus death, man versus nature, religion and science, experience and youth but with a clever format. This complex combination gives the reader much to discuss and ponder. It lets us ask more questions than it gives us answers. The chapters are short and told in the first person. You have a feeling of traveling along with Pi (Piscine Molitor Patel) on his adventure. Mantel uses a rich descriptive palette in each of the three parts of the book. Many people felt that the middle of the story sagged a bit but all of the book clubs have found much for discussion. Pi measures his experience in relation to history's most famous castaways and some readers have compared him with The Old Man and the Sea. This young writer, Mantel, has an energy that Hemingway lacked in his later years.

PLOT: The son of a zookeeper, Pi has a vast knowledge of animal behavior and a great love of story telling. The family's decision to immigrate to Canada changes the character of the story from that of a teenager looking at different religions and handling his unusual name to a story of survival in the deep blue sea. When the cargo ship carrying Pi, his family and assorted zoo animals are traveling on sinks, he exists in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra and a 450pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. His survival depends on his animal knowledge along with a battle for food and shelter that lasts for many months at sea. Pi maintains that his unusual relationship with the tiger Richard Parker is what kept him alive. Yet when the reader has accepted this unlikely symbiotic tie between boy and tiger, the book ends with Pi retelling the story in more plausible terms. Which story is true? The reader is left to decide.

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