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Life of Pi (平装)
by Yann Martel
| Category:
Story, Award-winning books, Ages 9-12, Children's book |
| Market price: ¥ 118.00
MSL price:
¥ 98.00
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| Stock:
In Stock |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction and its human creators. |
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AllReviews |
  1 2 Total 2 pages 15 items |
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J. Norburn (MSL quote), Canada
<2007-05-06 00:00>
Life of Pi is an extraordinary novel. In Pi, Martel has created a character whose enthusiasm for life is contagious and whose ability to deal with adversity is inspiring. Life of Pi is an insightful, unusual tale about a shipwrecked man lost at sea in a small boat with a fully grown (albeit sea-sick) Bengal tiger.
Pi's remarkable ordeal at sea is engaging, but it's the revelation at the end of the novel that really sets this novel apart. Martel is a gifted story teller who takes us on a journey and then shows us that the path we have taken can be viewed differently if you change your perspective.
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Miami Bob (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-06 00:00>
At the beginning, two men meet and one tells the other of a great story he knows and compels attention from the other - much like the beginning of great stories like "The Man Who Would Be King."
Then we learn much about the intracacies of the world of the beast - as the narrator lived for years in a zoo managed by his family. While watching the Discovery Channel in his own back yard, we read some fun stories, including those about a boy's hunt for religion [at one time he worships Thursday (Hinduism), Friday (Islam), Saturday (Judaism) and Sunday (Christianity) which leads his teasing brother to tell him to find three more and he would never have to work].
Then the story really begins. In great detail, we live with the tremendously wise and sometimes precocious teenager who lives and survives for 8 months on a lifeboat with a bengal tiger, a hyena, a zebra and a rat. The escapades are great. The writing style is easy and the fluidity of the chapters almost mesmerizing. He often writes short one- or two-page chapters, and then moves to another subject with a new chapter.
The maturation of the boy evolves gently. At first, he fishes little. Eventually, we are experiencing Old Man and the Sea - except the man is not old, the sea is the Pacific, and the big catch is not the fish, but rather the tiger.
In the end, some of the confrontations and excitement are outright otherwordly. Maybe the scenes are true, maybe they are manifestations of his dreary mind and soul. In any event, they are great - if not the greatest - scenes in the book. After a hundred or more pages of his vividly described drudgery of living on a small boat, the boy encounters scenes which only Star Trek fans or Robinson Crusoe readers could associate with.
This was a fun adventure. I imagine many schools will require this to be read by high school students in the future.
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Scott George (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-06 00:00>
I actually read this book back when it was first picked up for Barnes and Noble Discover New Authors section. Luckily, that was before the hype started.
This book is about a boy who survives a shipwreck and finds himself on a small lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, and a tiger. After months at sea, he arrives on the coast of Mexico with an incredible story. But is it the truth? Or, is it a question of faith?
You may have heard a tremendous amount of hype about this book. If you are like me, that will tend to turn you away from a book. Don't let it. Life of Pi won't change your life or give you a new sense of spirituality or any such nonsense, but it is a riveting and thoughtful book and very well written.
I highly recommend it.
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P. Gunelson (MSL quote), Minnesota
<2007-05-06 00:00>
Although the start of the book is slow, the finish is magical. This story is an example of an ingenious literary technic of rendering a tale with the beginning being a story with very believeable personal opinions, social statements and views, clear incidents of early childhood family experiences, continuing cleverly into a slowly woven tale told as a seemingly nonficticious adventure. The story eventually developes further into an epic like heroic saga and more than just real dramatic account that keeps the reader guessing about whether this perhaps truly have happened.
Very original, thoughtful and just a great story. It's a really enjoyable book.
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A. M. Rush (MSL quote), Alexandria
<2007-05-06 00:00>
It doesn't matter whether what you tell people is truth or fiction, because there's no such thing as truth, no real difference between fantasy and reality, so you might as well go with the more interesting story. That's "Life of Pi" in a nutshell. Sorry to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it yet.
Remember that season of the TV series "Dallas" that turned out to be just a dream? That's kind of how you feel after you've invested hours of your time reading page after page of a quite engrossing survival narrative, only to find out that it was all something the survivor made up.
Or was it? Ah, there's the twist that we're supposed to find so clever. But the officials from the ship company who tell Pi they don't believe his story are such hopelessly weak strawmen that the author pretty much forces you to accept the "better story." Pi, and, by extension, Martel, have no patience for the "dry, yeastless factuality" that the ship officials want, you see. Never mind whether it's closer to the truth - it's just too boring, and we need colorful stories to make our lives richer. Besides, Pi and Martel say, as soon as something leaves your mouth, it's no longer reality - it's only your interpretation of reality. So why bother grasping for the truth? You prefer the Creation story to the Big Bang? Then go with the Creation story, even if it defies logic and scientific discovery.
That's all well and good. Everyone likes a good story. But there's a time and a place for them, and the ship officials didn't need a story - they needed to know what happened to their ship. To that end, Pi's entire tale is irrelevant anyway. And that, in turn, makes you wonder what the whole point of the book was. Other than, maybe, to laud the power of storytelling in a really hamfisted manner. Or to advocate for taking refuge in fantastical fiction when reality is too harsh. Or to champion shallow religious beliefs ("Why, Islam is nothing but an easy sort of exercise, I thought. Hot-weather yoga for the Bedouins. Asanas without sweat, heaven without strain."). Or to bash agnostics. Or something.
Be advised that this is not a book for children or the squeamish. Pi's transformation from vegetarian to unflinching killer, and Richard Parker's dietary habits, are rife with gratuituously gory details about the manner in which animals suffer and are killed and eaten.
The story promises to make you believe in God. Yet with Martel's insistence that a well-crafted story is just as good as or even preferable to reality, he leaves us not believing in a god of any kind, but rather suggesting that we embrace the stories that religions have made up about their gods, regardless of those stories' relation to scientific knowledge, since the stories are so darn nice, comfy, warm, and fuzzy in comparison with real life. Whether the God in the stories actually exists, meanwhile, becomes totally irrelevant. So ultimately, Martel makes a case for why he thinks people should believe in God - it's a respite from harsh reality, we're told, a way to hide from life rather than meet it head-on with all of its pains and struggles - and that's quite different from what he ostensibly set out to do. He trivializes God into a "nice story," a trite characterization sure to offend many readers.
Pi sums up this postmodern worldview by telling the ship investigators, "The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no?" Well, no, the world IS just the way it is, in all of its highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies, happiness and sadness. But Pi and Martel's solution is to avoid the whole messy thing altogether, pretend that the way things are don't really exist, and pull a security blanket of fiction over your head. Create your own reality as you see fit. That's called escapism. It's fine when you want to curl up with a good book on a rainy day and get lost in the story for a few hours, but it's a lousy way to try to deal with real life.
Pi would tell me that I lack imagination, just as he told the investigators they lacked imagination when Pi claimed he couldn't "imagine" a bonsai tree since he's never seen one, as a way of mocking the investigators' reluctance to believe in Pi's carnivorous island. (Nice cultural stereotyping with the bonsai, by the way - the investigators are Japanese.) But you see the problem, right? It's not a matter of lacking imagination. It's a matter of conflating things that are obviously imaginary with things that are obviously real. They're not one and the same. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. You might as well say that the story of Frodo and the Ring is every bit as real as the American Revolution.
Pi also tells us, quite pointedly, that choosing agnosticism is immobilizing, while atheists and religious folks make a courageous leap of faith. Yet immobility is precisely where Pi places us, so that by the time the book ends, you're stuck not knowing what to think about what you've just read. Do you accept the original shipwreck story just because it's more engrossing, even if it's less believable? Or do you accept the plausible but boring story Pi gives to the officials after he's rescued? Fanciful religious allegories or cold, scientific recitation of facts that might come from the mouth of an atheist - we're expected to pick one or the other.
But it's a false dichotomy. We needn't make a choice between embracing religious tales merely because they're more interesting or settling for the sobering realities of science and reason. We can go as far as our reason will take us and then leave ourselves open to further possibilities - just as Pi himself suggests. That's not immobility. That's intellectual honesty - an admission that I don't know all the answers but am willing to keep an open mind about whatever else is presented to me.
Seems better than saying you might as well just accept the better story since it really makes no difference. That's laziness. And it doesn't make for a very good story.
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