RexLegendi reviewed Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Review of 'Life of Pi' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
“I know what you want. 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. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.”
Shame I saw Ang Lee’s interpretation of Life of Pi before reading the novel: taking in the story makes a more than average difference if you already know the last chapter. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the novel by Canadian writer Yann Martel (1963), who has made an impressive effort to empathise with an Indian boy trapped at sea after a shipwreck.From birth, protagonist Pi’s life is incredible. Named after a Parisian swimming pool – Piscine Molitor – the boy grows up in a zoo in Pondicherry, once the French part of India. Due to a series of events in the 1970s, his family decides to emigrate to …
“I know what you want. 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. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.”
Shame I saw Ang Lee’s interpretation of Life of Pi before reading the novel: taking in the story makes a more than average difference if you already know the last chapter. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the novel by Canadian writer Yann Martel (1963), who has made an impressive effort to empathise with an Indian boy trapped at sea after a shipwreck.From birth, protagonist Pi’s life is incredible. Named after a Parisian swimming pool – Piscine Molitor – the boy grows up in a zoo in Pondicherry, once the French part of India. Due to a series of events in the 1970s, his family decides to emigrate to Canada. When their ship – Noah’s Ark if you like, given its wondrous cargo – sinks to the bottom of the ocean, Pi is the sole human survivor. He has to share his lifeboat though with a crippled zebra, a female orang-utan, a spotted hyena and Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger.The novel reads like a modern version of a medieval fable, or at least it takes ‘fabulating’ to the limit. Martel put a lot of thought into the place of animals in his story. His long introduction is full of facts and trivia about animals in captivity and in the wild. (I sometimes wondered what primatologist Frans de Waal ([b:Mama's Last Hug|45894068|Mama's Last Hug Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves|Frans de Waal|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568276393l/45894068.SX50.jpg|62339663]) would have made of this.) The author is also remarkably good at describing Pi’s thoughts, for example when the boy acknowledges that he cannot do without the tiger and tries to establish an ‘alpha-omega’ relationship.Overall I learned a lot from this funny written page-turner. The introduction could have been shorter (why all this poorly crafted stuff about religion?) and the last chapter should have been much more subtle. I understand why it could have won the Booker Prize.
