John’s Blog

Your typical boy-meets-tiger story. This is a novel that describes an Indian boy’s trek from Pondicherry, India to Canada, with a pretty notable shipwreck in the middle. For most of the book, Pi Patel is stuck on a very small boat with a very large tiger — but it’s a pretty gripping read, nonetheless.

One of the judges who awarded the book the Booker Prize basically said that the book has a flawed beginning & end, but there’s a ton of great stuff in the middle, and that’s how I feel. I was reminded a lot of reading The Old Man and the Sea, by John Steinbeck, in high school — in particular, I was reminded how bored I was when reading that book, and how not-bored I was when reading Life of Pi. There’s something very compelling about the way that Martel writes the character — makes you both want to believe in the story and also makes you think a lot about what you’d do in similar, or analogous, situations, which I suppose is the whole point.

At the end of the day, I think this is a story that’s a little bit about perception, and a little bit about God, a little bit about culture — but mostly it’s a story about creating the type of world that you want to have, even in the direst of situations.

Definitely worth reading.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2004 at 9:02 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.