Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, is a brutal, dramatic tale. It perplexes, confronting the reader with realism and fantasy in the same thoughts. It’s the kind of story that makes you wonder if it could possibly have really happened. If so, what really happened? I’m left with a mystery, but not a frustrating one, it’s magical in a sense. I savor it like the taste of a fine meal I’ve just finished. I linger over it and reminisce.

Martel leaves the reader with questions, the kind we ask about God and mortality. He incorporates many processes of thought that are slower to digest than the story itself. Survival, instinct, terror, fearlessness, and human guile all come into play in Life of Pi along with revulsion, playfulness, hopelessness, and faith. I almost put “faith” in capital letters here, because this is the story of a boy with so much faith he practices three religions—three great, complex religions—when one religion is often too much for an ordinary person. Peace-loving vegetarian Piscine Molitor Patel, named after a Parisian swimming pool, with an irrational number as a nickname, leaves his boyhood home in Pondicherry, India, at sixteen and comes up against the need to stay alive under horrific conditions.

His story begins slowly, making you wonder where it’s headed. But you need that time to get to know Pi and rest up for what’s to come. Suddenly he’s shipwrecked, castaway on a lifeboat, with an unlikely group of survivors. He’s forced to make decisions he would never otherwise face. He has no choice. Every reader is convinced of that, no matter which version of his story you choose to believe—the one with animals or the one without. Survival is an ugly, brutal process. Survival is messy. It smells bad. We realize that, on the downhill slide into Pi’s story, yet even at its ugliest the tale rings with beauty and a kind of grandeur. Splashes of color and surprise elevate our vantage point. I wish I could tell you more. I’m tempted to give things away, just to be able to share my feelings about various bits and pieces of this novel, but I don’t want to spoil the outcome or the journey for anyone, and Pi is the natural narrator of these events.

Suffice it to say this story has changed my perspective, tilted my world ever so slightly. I will never look at my pets or zoo and circus animals the same way—or another person, for that matter—another tree. Everything in the world dissolves and is reconstituted by this story into something new, with mysterious depths of shadow and light.

I’ll leave you with a taste of the wisdom of Pi. It’s simple and applies to everyone. Aren’t we all, in one sense or another, castaways on this big lifeboat we call Earth? Some of us help each other survive, some of us simply consume, some destroy, some hope, and nothing more.

Pi says, “In my experience, a castaway’s worst mistake is to hope too much and do too little. . . . To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.”

Instead of hoping for rescue, we have to do what’s necessary to live now. Every minute is precious. It won’t do to wait for a tiger to come along and hasten us to act. That only happens in stories. But oh, what a story that can be.