Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper's son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain. - (Baker & Taylor)
Martel's novel tells the story of Pi—short for Piscine—an unusual boy raised in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to live in Canada and sell the animals to the great zoos of America. The ship taking them across the Pacific sinks and Pi finds himself the sole human survivor on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg and Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Life of Pi brings together many themes including religion, zoology, fear, and sheer tenacity. This is a funny, wise, and highly original look at what it means to be human. - (Findaway World Llc)
Martel's novel tells the story of Pi—short for Piscine—an unusual boy raised in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to live in Canada and sell the animals to the great zoos of America. The ship taking them across the Pacific sinks and Pi finds himself the sole human survivor on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg and Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Life of Pi brings together many themes including religion, zoology, fear, and sheer tenacity. This is a funny, wise, and highly original look at what it means to be human. - (Findaway World Llc)
Booklist Reviews
Pi Patel, a young man from India, tells how he was shipwrecked and stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for 227 days. This outlandish story is only the core of a deceptively complex three-part novel about, ultimately, memory as a narrative and about how we choose truths. Unlike other authors who use shifting chronologies and unreliable narrators, Martel frequently achieves something deeper than technical gimmickry. Pi, regardless of what actually happened to him, earns our trust as a narrator and a character, and makes good, in his way, on the promise in the last sentence of part one--that is, just before the tiger saga--"This story has a happy ending." If Martel's strange, touching novel seems a fable without quite a moral, or a parable without quite a metaphor, it still succeeds on its own terms. Oh, the promise in the entertaining "Author's Note" that this is a "story that will make you believe in God" is perhaps excessive, but there is much in it that verifies Martel's talent and humanist vision. ((Reviewed May 15, 2002)) Copyright 2002 Booklist Reviews
Library Journal Reviews
Wherein Hero temporarily enters a different world and is greatly changed by his experiences there. He returns improved, perhaps, writes Booker, "moved from ignorance to knowledge." Five stages begin with a Fall into the other world; in Martel's elegant Life of Pi, Pi is on the brink of adulthood when his ship sinks, and he is a castaway for 227 days. First adrift on a lifeboat, then stranded on an island, he gets back into the lifeboat and makes it to Mexico. Did I mention the Bengal tiger? That's key to the next stage: Initial Fascination/Dream. This unfamiliar world is initially exhilarating to Hero, but it's not somewhere he can ever call home. In Pi's case, this is doubly so as he is accompanied on his Voyage by Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal Tiger (I still don't understand why he's named Richard Parker). As time goes on, Pi enters the Frustration stage with "difficulty and oppression," in this case slow starvation and Pi's increasing need to maintain his unlikely Alpha role on the boat. The next two stages, Nightmare and Thrilling Escape and Return, are straightforward. After almost starving, they suddenly wash ashore. The tiger disappears into the jungle, and Pi returns to normal life, but how did he grow? Well, readers soon discover that the tiger wasn't a physical beast but the symbolic representation of the fierce, animalistic drive that Pi had to evince in order to survive the superhuman tribulation of spending seven and a half freaking months alone and slowly starving to death. Pi grew from boy to man-even if he's also become a food hoarder- Douglas Lord, "Books for Dudes," Booksmack! 10/6/11. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal Reviews
Named for a swimming pool in Paris the Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel begins this extraordinary tale as a teenager in India, where his father is a zoo keeper. Deciding to immigrate to Canada, his father sells off most of the zoo animals, electing to bring a few along with the family on their voyage to their new home. But after only a few days out at sea, their rickety vessel encounters a storm. After crew members toss Pi overboard into one of the lifeboats, the ship capsizes. Not long after, to his horror, Pi is joined by Richard Parker, an acquaintance who manages to hoist himself onto the lifeboat from the roiling sea. You would think anyone in Pi's dire straits would welcome the company, but Richard Parker happens to be a 450-pound Bengal tiger. It is hard to imagine a fate more desperate than Pi's: "I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me." At first Pi plots to kill Richard Parker. Then he becomes convinced that the tiger's survival is absolutely essential to his own. In this harrowing yet inspiring tale, Martel demonstrates skills so well honed that the story appears to tell itself without drawing attention to the writing. This second novel by the Spanish-born, award-winning author of Self, who now lives in Canada, is highly recommended for all fiction as well as animal and adventure collections. Edward Cone, New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. #
