Rating: 4/5
You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
Yann Martel’s
Life of Pi… where to start? One of the most original, fascinating, awe-inspiring, generally extraordinary books that I have ever read. I can’t describe it without somewhere having to use one of those tired clichés. A whole new word should be invented just to describe novels like this one.
Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel was shipwrecked aged 16 in the Pacific Ocean. He was moving with family from India to Canada, where the Patels were intending to erect a zoo. With them aboard the Tsimtsum were many animals, including a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a 450-pound adult Bengal tiger.
These four animals and Pi are the sole survivors of the shipwreck. Piscine and the tiger, who is oddly named Richard Parker, will spend 227 days at sea in an old lifeboat.
—*SPOILER ALERTS BELOW*—
Life of Pi had one of the most unexpected, original and genuinely awesome endings that I’ve ever read. Throughout the book, I had tried to match the animals (and Pi himself) with those who they resemble. I thought that Pi might be God incarnate, and that Richard Parker was the savage, feral inner self of Piscine. But not once did I presume that the animals were never there at all, that they were simply a made-up fantasy to distract us from the horrific things that really happened on the lifeboat in the Pacific.
To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports it branches. To lose a mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing―I’m sorry, I would rather not go on.