Having seen the movie adaption a priori and fallen in love with it, I thought chances of getting entangled with a book I already knew its plot and events were scarce. And boy was I wrong. The book simply rocked my deepest inwards like Pi Patel’s raft midst a Pacific rainstorm.

Yann Martel did a wonderful job mixing all the elements. I lived many days in counted minutes. Pi’s journey became mine.
Part one helps setting the story.
The chapters in part two, as some got to forty pages, gave a struggling texture that cuts one out of breath. I tensed as Pi tensed. My mouth grew cracks as Pi’s body dehydrated.
Part three mainly consists of the conversation between our Indian protagonist and the two gentlemen from the Maritime Department in the Japanese Ministry of Transport. It’s a really fascinating piece as it splits your mind in two distinct compartments – aside from the anatomically existing ones:
1. Reason. I’m sure if we were in the gentlemen’s shoes, we would’ve questioned the story rushing “Come on, Mr. Patel, it’s just too hard to believe!” like Mr. Okamoto exclaimed.
2. Faith. I mean four hundred pages of Pi’s journey can’t be simply dismissed like that from the reader’s mind. We were caught in the ocean tides, we rejoiced each time a dorado was caught, we felt the island’s deceiving appearance and its carnivorous stings.

I think in the end, what the book arises is not whether or not one should have faith, but rather how much one ought to be open to newly incongruous life concepts, like faith. I remember quite acutely exiting the movie theater wanting to explore Islam. Now that I’ve read the book, I’m eager to explore both Hinduism and Islam; not in the purpose of finding god or whatnot, but in order to expand my life stage and add more layers and toppings to it.

“The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?” It does Pi Patel, it truly does.