Product Description

Life of Pi is a masterful and utterly original novel that is at once the story of a young castaway who faces immeasurable hardships on the high seas, and a meditation on religion, faith, art and life that is as witty as it is profound. Using the threads of all of our best stories, Yann Martel has woven a glorious spiritual adventure that makes us question what it means to be alive, and to believe.

Growing up in Pondicherry, India, Piscine Molitor Patel -- known as Pi -- has a rich life. Bookish by nature, young Pi acquires a broad knowledge of not only the great religious texts but of all literature, and has a great curiosity about how the world works. His family runs the local zoo, and he spends many of his days among goats, hippos, swans, and bears, developing his own theories about the nature of animals and how human nature conforms to it. Pi’s family life is quite happy, even though his brother picks on him and his parents aren’t quite sure how to accept his decision to simultaneously embrace and practise three religions -- Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.

But despite the lush and nurturing variety of Pi’s world, there are broad political changes afoot in India, and when Pi is sixteen his parents decide that the family needs to escape to a better life. Choosing to move to Canada, they close the zoo, pack their belongings, and board a Japanese cargo ship called the Tsimtsum. Travelling with them are many of their animals, bound for zoos in North America. However, they have only just begun their journey when the ship sinks, taking the dreams of the Patel family down with it. Only Pi survives, cast adrift in a lifeboat with the unlikeliest of travelling companions: a zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Thus begins Pi Patel’s epic, 227-day voyage across the Pacific, and the powerful story of faith and survival at the heart of Life of Pi. Worn and scared, oscillating between hope and despair, Pi is witness to the playing out of the food chain, quite aware of his new position within it. When only the tiger is left of the seafaring menagerie, Pi realizes that his survival depends on his ability to assert his own will, and sets upon a grand and ordered scheme to keep from being Richard Parker’s next meal.

As the days pass, Pi fights both boredom and terror by throwing himself into the practical details of surviving on the open sea -- catching fish, collecting rain water, protecting himself from the sun -- all the while ensuring that the tiger is also kept alive, and knows that Pi is the key to his survival. The castaways face gruelling pain in their brushes with starvation, illness, and the storms that lash the small boat, but there is also the solace of beauty: the rainbow hues of a dorado’s death-throes, the peaceful eye of a looming whale, the shimmering blues of the ocean’s swells. Hope is fleeting, however, and despite adapting his religious practices to his daily routine, Pi feels the constant, pressing weight of despair. It is during the most hopeless and gruelling days of his voyage that Pi whittles to the core of his beliefs, casts off his own assumptions, and faces his underlying terrors head-on.

As Yann Martel has said in one interview, “The theme of this novel can be summarized in three lines. Life is a story. You can choose your story. And a story with an imaginative overlay is the better story.” And for Martel, the greatest imaginative overlay is religion. “God is a shorthand for anything that is beyond the material -- any greater pattern of meaning.” In Life of Pi, the question of stories, and of what stories to believe, is front and centre from the beginning, when the author tells us how he was led to Pi Patel and to this novel: in an Indian coffee house, a gentleman told him, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” And as this novel comes to its brilliant conclusion, Pi shows us that the story with the imaginative overlay is also the story that contains the most truth.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1692545 in Books
• Published on: 2004-12-01
• Released on: 2004-12-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Yann Martel's second novel, Life of Pi, appeared in Canada in 2001 to enthusiastic reviews and moderate sales. A year later, it came out of nowhere to win the Booker Prize and became an international publishing phenomenon (and Amazon.ca's first blockbuster). In a wonderful display of storytelling verve, Martel takes a distinctly unpromising premise--a "story that will make you believe in God" about a boy trapped on a lifeboat with an enormous tiger--and pulls it off with complete and winning confidence.

Amazon.ca
Serious novels about young boys being drawn closer to God while trapped on lifeboats with dangerous wild animals ought to be impossible. Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel, proves they're not. Its plot stretches the limits of credibility into new and exciting shapes, and the fact that Martel has made his materials into an enchanting story is almost unbelievable. Martel's Pi is Piscine Molitor Patel, a boy from Pondicherry, one of the few Indian towns to be colonized by France. Pi is an intelligent, unusual child: he has a scientific turn of mind but is also a practising Hindu, Moslem, and Christian. Pi's family runs a large zoo, but they decide to sell their animals to zoos in the United States and emigrate to Canada. Crossing the Pacific (with their animals), they're shipwrecked halfway between China and Midway. Pi survives, only to find himself sharing a lifeboat with an injured zebra, a spotted hyena, an orangutan, and Richard Parker--an immense Bengal tiger.

Most of these animals are doomed, but Pi and Richard Parker cling to life, establishing a tacit order on the lifeboat. Martel handles this part of the story perfectly: one would expect Life of Pi to become cute, or perhaps preachy, but it is neither. Life on the boat proceeds in strict accordance with the rules of ecology and territorialism, and the interdependence of the passengers is both believable and absorbing. Life of Pi is a superb novel, both for its story and for its rich examinations of religion, isolation, and love. If this is an indication of what is to come, we can expect great things from Yann Martel. --Jack Illingworth

Books in Canada
Forging an individual writing style entails risks for all authors, especially sensitive writers whose second book does not fare well: too over the top with magic realism and you are trespassing on South American territory; too contemporary and you are not inventive enough; too mysterious and you risk being compared to P.D. James; too many religious references and you are a fanatic. Perhaps would-be writers embarking on voyages to where no one has gone before, should take notes from Montreal's Yann Martel, whose recent book Life of Pi, could easily have a disclaimer on the book jacket proclaiming it "defies classification," but can be shelved under witty, airily entertaining, harrowing and remarkable, beguiling and a triumphant tour de force.
This novel begins with a confession from the author, whose strategy for coping with writer's block is detailed. Simultaneously strange and believable, and foreshadowing the various literary alchemies throughout the book, it is a great opening and allows me to digress for a moment. Although I would never presume to advise readers on how to read a book, I suggest creating the right ambience first: where language is concerned, find ways to use the word 'bamboozle'. Since our hero, Piscine (Pi) Molitor Patel, is from Pondicherry India, a burri gin and nimbu, should always be on hand. Swaying in a hammock would definitely add to the experience, and yes I know, Pondicherry was more Gallic than Britannic. Therefore, may I suggest une tasse de cognac to savour the musings of this spicy storyteller.
Martel uncoils the plot with great agility, neatly manipulating plausible premises into more and more realistic outcomes. The cross between zoology and religion is soon established. With great zeal and an incandescent sense of humour, Pi tells of growing up in the Pondicherry Zoo, spread over numberless acres where his father was director. Sixteen-year-old Pi's secular parents are mystified when they discover three wise men-an imam, a pandit and a priest-all fighting for their son's soul and eventual salvation. Pi defies religious conventions and is as comfortable on a prayer rug as he is receiving communion or performing pujas at a Hindu temple. That an author should choose three religions for his protagonist is a conceit so ripe for imaginative delectation that you almost want Martel to make more of it. But the book is soon confined to the claustrophobic and solitary world of a lifeboat. Pi, the sole human survivor of a catastrophic sea accident has to share his craft and contend with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker as they struggle to survive the endless voyage on the Pacific. (If you are thinking a cross between Findley's Not wanted on the voyage and Melville's Moby Dick, just remember that Martel defies comparison!).
Pi is good company as a narrator. Bright and charmingly straightforward, he recounts his ordeal with precision and poignancy. He is the captain of his fate and the struggle to survive and maintain his sanity is neatly juxtaposed with the sights, odours, food and weather on the ocean. You never feel cut off from Pi's plight, and the fine line between madness and the state of enduring grace is finely balanced. It would be wrong to disclose how Martel concludes his book. Let it suffice to say this reader was fascinated to the end. Martel's ringmaster precision, his control is consistent throughout the book. His story is a wonderful reminder that loving life despite the horrors and suffering it inflicts is fundamental to all of humanity.
There is only one thing that still bothers me, and I have written it on my to do list-to phone Pi who is apparently listed in the Toronto directory. I just want to tell him not to pine too much for Richard Parker... "I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of good-bye, without looking back even once. This pain is like an axe that chops at my heart." I have rehearsed my speech" 'Pi,' I will say, 'let me introduce you to my friends Calvin and Hobbes, they always make me smile, assuage the ache borne of the world's malice and they understand tigers!'
Irene D'Souza (Books in Canada)