I chose this book because my friend was in the middle of reading it and she said it’s supposed to be a fascinating book. After a couple of weeks I stumbled upon this book in my living room. It belonged to my sister and so I immediately took the chance to read it myself as well. It has a very childlike, yet interesting cover which made me very curious as to the content.
Author:
“The author of Life of Pi, is Yann Martel who was born in Spain in 1963. He had Canadian parents but grew up in several countries such as: Costa Rica, France, Mexico and Canada. After studying philosophy at university, he worked variously as a dishwasher, tree planter, and security guard. After these odd jobs, he began to write. He mainly lives in Montreal, Canada.
Martel currently lives in Alaska with his wife, Alice Kuipers (who is also an author), whom he met at a writers conference where she was working as a volunteer.”
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and Other Stories (1993)
Self (1996)
We Ate The Children Last (2004)
Time and Place
The story first takes place in Pondicherry, India. Piscine’s father is the owner of the Pondicherry Zoo and thus there are also little parts that take place within the zoo.
The family leaves India on June 21st, 1977 and this is when they go aboard a Japanese cargo ship named Tsintsum. The rest of the story takes place on the Pacific Ocean where Pi lives in a boat. This lasts 227 days. The last part of the story takes place in Tomatlán, Mexico.
Characters:
Piscine Molitor Patel
This boy is the main character in the book. He is known to everyone as Pi, which is the name he gave himself at a new school after being sick of everyone calling him nasty names. He gets his unusual name from the French word for pool—and, more specifically, from a pool in Paris in which a close family friend, Francis Adirubasamy, loved to swim. You get a view of his childhood in which he took up swimming and learnt to love it. When he becomes a teenager he talks about the different religions that he was interested in, which seems weird to others surrounding them as everyone usually just has one religion that they follow. You see that he has a very strong character and likes to learn new stuff and deepens himself in the history of certain things.
He doesn’t mention many friends in the story, which makes the reader believe he’s more of a loner and very independent. He’s a true individual and has an extremely strong soul, which is learnt as he makes his 227-day journey on the Pacific Ocean.
This is quite an odd character in the book as it a Royal Bengai tiger. I mentioned this tiger only because I do believe it plays quite an important role in the story.
He got his name from the person who captured him, and after a mistake with switching the names of the catcher and the tiger, who was originally named Thirsty.
The tiger is worth mentioning as he is present the full 227 days that Pi makes his journey. Survival is hard for both of them and Richard Parker develops from an aggressive 450-pound tiger, to a weak and skinny animal.
Richard Parker came from the Pondicherry Zoo and was being transported to Canada, but sought shelter in the lifeboat when the ship began to sink.
He surprisingly doesn’t attack Pi, but simply accepts the boy. Part of this reason is possibly that Pi is the one who feeds him and cleans up after him on the lifeboat.
Point of View:
The main part of the story is seen from Pi’s point of view in first person. You get a look at his desperation, his hope for rescue and his giving up on everything.
However, in the first and last chapter of the book, it is the author himself who has the word and explains how he got to hearing the story about Pi.
Duration of Story:
a) The duration of the story is not exact as the story also goes into a little bit of Pi’s childhood and his beliefs, which basically drags out the story 16 years. 16 Is the age of Pi when he and his family go aboard the cargo ship, planning to migrate to Canada. So the story is actually about the whole of Pi’s life, which is 16 years.
However, the journey of Pi on the Pacific Ocean is 227 days, which is the main part of the story and what it revolvs around.
The parts that were written by the author in the beginning and ending of the book were parts of the present.
The story did have jumps in time, as every day of Pi’s journey was not fully described by the day. Sometimes there would be a week in between journal entries or even longer.
Genre:
This book is a fictional novel, but the author makes the reader believe that the survival of Pi and his 227-day journey really did happen. He does this by his writing of the discovery of the story of Pi in his Author’s Note. However, this does not convince me that it is non-fiction, as it could also simply be a tale.
This book fits best under the catogory of Philosophy, in my opinion, as Pi has many views of life and by reading the book he takes you through it. A good example would be religion, where Pi studies different religions and follows more than just one, doing simply just as he believes.
Motif:
There are different topics that repeat itself in the story. These are:
• Religion. When Pi is growing up, he learns about different religions and follows more than just one. He is very interested in each one of them and feels the need to not just stick with one. Using his beliefs, he continues praying in the lifeboat as he is fighting for survival and the religions give him strength and hope.
This motif continues after he is rescued and goes to study in Canada, he chooses Religion as one of his studies. Also, in the beginning, Pi tells the author: “I have a story that will make you believe in God.”
• Hunger & Thirst. As Pi is out on the Pacific Ocean, he struggles to get food and water every single day. He is forced to go against being a vegetarian, and starts to eat fish to survive. This motif is perhaps most common in this book. Every dat you find out if Pi managed to feed himself that day or not. It’s touching to read about how hard it can be to catch just one fish, when you’re so desperate for a little bit of food.
The main theme for this book is survival and speaks for itself as Pi has a dramatic change in his life which makes him struggle for survival every day for his entire journey. Coming from a comfortable lifestyle in Pondicherry, where he always had food available, he now has to catch his own fish and slaughter seaturtles. Not only Pi, struggles with survival, but so does Richard Parker who gets weaker by the day with his only source of water and food coming from Pi who gives him a share of his food.
At last, also in the beginning of the journey when the other animals are also aboard the lifeboat, they fight with eachother to survive. The Heyena gets hungry first and feeds on the zebra. Afterwards it feeds on the orangutan, but loses its life to Richard Parker. These are all examples of how everyone had to fight for their survival.
Explanation of Title:
The title of the book: Life of Pi, is pretty self-explanatory.
The story is about Pi growing up, his beliefs, and then his journey on the Pacific Ocean where he struggles to survive. Giving you a glimpse of his future home and family, you can see what has become of Pi and the story of his life is hereby wrapped up in a 319-page book.
Mood:
The book was a very easy read and the way the story was written, pulled the reader in, excited to find out how Pi survived another day on the Pacific Ocean.
The author takes the reader on a journey and you get to know the strong and intelligent character of Pi, along the way. There aren’t many difficult words in the story and so the reader is not confused as you learn about different religions, zoo animals, survival on a lifeboat, etc.
Evaluation:
I have to admit that this book was definetely a page-turner. When I first started reading, it was not as interesting as I had hoped since the author went into a lot of details from Pi’s childhood. However, after you see how Pi’s character is defined and when his journey begins, it becomes hard to put down the book. The struggle for Pi’s survival was very touching to me and the fact that he manages to survive the entire journey is breathtaking, looking at the little tools he had available. What also interested me was Richard Parker, the tiger, whom Pi shared the lifeboat with. There was some sort of bond between them that is very uncommon for a human and a hungry tiger. In a way the tiger kept Pi alert and gave him some sense of companion which helped him in the journey.
I definetely recommend this book, as I was very much pulled in by this story and I guarrentee the next reader will be too.
Summary:
“The first section is an adult Pi Patel’s rumination over his childhood. The main character, Piscine Patel (aka "Pi") talks about his life living as the son of a zookeeper, and speaks at length about animal behaviour, while also speaking about his religion – Pi practices Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, having seen merits in all three religions. He says "I just want to love God." Fleeing political oppression, Pi and his family leave Pondicherry for Canada. En route, the Japanese ship Tsimtsum carrying him and his family mysteriously sinks (most likely due to an engine malfunction). Crew and passengers are lost at sea and Pi is the only survivor. He manages to survive due to being tossed into the lifeboat before the ship goes under, where he is joined by a zebra that jumps into the boat and breaks its leg due to the impact. Pi then mistakenly helps a dangerous 450-pound Bengal tiger (incongruously named Richard Parker), only to realize his mistake once the tiger is on board. There are other animals on the boat with Pi, including a hyena, an orangutan (named Orange Juice) and sundry rats and cockroaches. At first Pi believes that the tiger abandoned the boat, and focuses on saving the zebra. It is not long before the hyena begins to feed on the zebra. After the zebra's death, the hyena kills the orangutan, prompting Pi to approach it, lest he be next. It is then that he notices that Richard Parker has been resting under a tarpaulin and has been aboard the lifeboat the entire time. The tiger kills and eats the hyena, but does not immediately attack Pi. The young man manages to construct a raft using supplies aboard the boat, and avoids direct confrontation with Richard Parker by keeping out of the tiger's territory on the deck of the boat. He fishes and feeds both Richard Parker and himself and tries to keep both of them alive. Later as they are close to death, the duo wash ashore upon a strange island formed of a tightly-knit edible algae. The island is populated by meerkats and contains pools of fresh water, but at night the algae that forms the island becomes dangerously acidic. After some time, Pi finds a strange tree on the island, and upon examining the tree's unusual "fruit", finds human teeth. He deduces that the 'island' is actually a massive plantlike organism that has consumed a human previously. Pi and Richard Parker soon leave. They later make it to Mexico, whereupon the tiger leaves Pi feeling at a loss for losing his one companion. By the time he has made it to the hospital, he has been at sea for 227 days. During his stay in the hospital, Pi is visited by two Japanese officials, Okamoto and Chiba, who work for the Japanese government, and he proves to be most frustrating for them. They tape record their conversation with him in order to find out and form an official report on how the ship sank. He stubbornly tells them his story of animals and spending seven months at sea with a ferocious tiger, but the skeptical men cannot believe his tale. Pi asks the two men if they disliked his story. Okamoto replies that they enjoyed it, but that they need to know what really happened. Pi says he will tell another story. In this story, the four occupants of the lifeboat are Pi, his mother, the cook (an ill-tempered, greedy Frenchman), and a sailor (a beautiful young Chinese boy). The sailor had broken his leg jumping into the lifeboat, and the cook cuts the leg off and tries to use it for bait. The sailor dies and the cook butchers and eats him. Pi and his mother, both horrified, try to stop him. The cook kills Pi’s mother and throws her head in Pi’s direction. Soon after, Pi fights the cook and kills him. He eats his heart and liver and pieces of his flesh. Then, as Pi says to Okamoto and Chiba, “Solitude began. I turned to God. I survived.” The parallels between that story and his story involving the tiger are noted by the two horrified Japanese men. They ask more about the ship and how it sank, but Pi cannot tell them anything useful. Pi asks them which story they preferred: the one with animals or the one without. Both Chiba and Okamoto agree that the one with animals is “the better story.” In his report, which years later he sends to Martel, Okamoto writes that Pi’s story of survival at sea with an adult Bengal tiger is astonishing and unique.”
Sources:
Source 1
Halcombe, G.
“Yann Martel”
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth03A14L010512634824#bibliography
October 10, 2009
Source 2
Unknown
“Life of Pi by Yann Martel Summary”
http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/Life_of_Pi
October 22, 2009
REACTIES
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1 seconde geleden
W.
W.
Best veel fouten in dit verslag
12 jaar geleden
AntwoordenM.
M.
Thank you so much! I love it
7 jaar geleden
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