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Summary
Summary
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.
Summary
Raised in India by his zookeeper father, Pi is about to move to Canada so that his family can sell their animals to American zoos. However, tragedy strikes on the open ocean, and Pi finds himself floating at sea with a hyena, an orangutan, a tiger, and an injured zebra.
Author Notes
Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain on June 25, 1963. After studying philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, he worked at odd jobs and travelled widely before turning to writing. His works include Seven Stories, What Is Stephen Harper Reading?, and Beatrice and Virgil. He was awarded the Journey Prize for the title story in The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. His second novel, Life of Pi, won numerous awards including the 2002 Man Booker. He continued to make the bestseller list in 2018 with his title, The High Mountains of Portugal.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
The mega-selling author on faith, animals and his new novel -- and his instant rise from struggling writer to literary household name Yann Martel can pinpoint the moment when he rejected a secular worldview and "fell in love with faith". At the end of 1996, as a hard-up writer with two little-known books to his name, he backpacked to the Indian subcontinent and was, he says, "dazzled". He enjoyed visiting Hindu temples, but found himself absorbed in other religions too: "Round the corner from where the Hindu gods lived there was always a church or a mosque or a temple of another faith." Martel's upbringing had been non-religious, but in India he realised he was "tired of being reasonable"; it was leading him nowhere. His discovery of faith was bound up with another awakening -- to the wonder of animals. In India, they were everywhere, "not just the obvious sacred cows ... or the loudly cawing crows, or the tribes of monkey". In the temples he visited, he "became aware of the many animals of Hinduism: Hanuman the monkey, Ganesha the elephant-headed, Nandi the bull, Garuda the eagle, and so on". Confronted with gods and animals for the first time, he "took both of them seriously ... I bought a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and of the gospels. I camped near cows and observed them at length. I started attending masses, pujas and Friday prayers." India was not only "where gods and animals abound and rub shoulders", but a place "where all stories were possible". The story it made possible for Martel was Life of Pi, his 2002 Man Booker prize-winning novel, adored around the world, which has now, he tells me, sold nearly 13m copies. It is a set text in schools, has been translated into more than 40 languages and been adapted into a film for which director Ang Lee won an Oscar. The central metaphor of Life of Pi came to him one day like a revelation: "the animal will be divine ... and the lifeboat crossing the Pacific will be ... an odyssey of the soul across existence". The animal is, of course, a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker, the fearsome companion of Pi, an Indian boy in a boat adrift on the ocean for 227 days; the enthrallingly detailed story of survival that Pi later recounts to the narrator is, in Martel's words, all about "discovering life through a religious perspective". He has summarised the novel's subtext in three lines: "Life is a story; you can choose your own story; a story with God is the better story." As Pi asks the investigators who are reluctant to believe his implausible account: "If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for?" Following its publication and the subsequent fanfare, Martel went on a world publicity tour that lasted two whole years. He has a new novel out, The High Mountains of Portugal, and the campaign to promote this one is much shorter -- the author, 52, now has a wife, the British writer Alice Kuipers, and four children under the age of 10 ("I started late"). But there are obvious comparisons between the new book and the tour de force for which, he concedes, he will always be best-known. It is another exploration of grief, faith and the limits of reason, and it features -- even more obviously than Life of Pi -- an animal symbolising the divine. So Martel has found himself once again rehearsing his now highly polished opinions on such topics as the uses of allegory and why animals make such good characters. He is very fluent talker, who is unafraid to provide an intellectual toolkit to understanding his work or to deliver the more profound meaning-of-life messages his fiction is intended to convey. The animal-as-divine this time round is a chimpanzee. In the first of the new novel's three linked sections, Tomas, a young man who lives in Lisbon, sets out to find a centuries-old crucifix on which the form of Christ is taken by a chimp. In the second section, a pathologist conducts a surreal autopsy and discovers inside the dead body of an elderly man a bear cub (which stands for his son, who died as a boy) and, wrapped around the cub, a young chimpanzee, a symbol of Jesus and the faith that had kept the man going. In the third section, a Canadian senator decides to up sticks and move to a Portuguese village taking with him a chimp called Odo; gradually he learns to love the ape and to be more like him -- to live a simple life in the present moment -- and Odo gains "disciples" among the villagers. One reviewer, in the Boston Globe, has commented that all of this "might seem like so much pious piffle, but for Martel's drollery and ingenuity in packing his inventive novel with beguiling ideas". In general, the reception to The High Mountains of Portugal has been much more positive than that given to Beatrice & Virgil, Martel's long-awaited follow-up to Life of Pi, a fictional exploration of the Holocaust (also featuring animals). Ron Charles in the Washington Post noted that in the final section of the new book, which explores the solace the grieving senator Peter Tovy finds in the antics of Odo, "Martel's writing has never been more charming, a rich mixture of sweetness that's not cloying and tragedy that's not melodramatic." Martel says that in both Life of Pi and The High Mountains of Portugal he has, essentially, been peddling Pascal's wager: "You might as well live a godly life, because if He exists, well, great, you are going to go to heaven; and if He doesn't, well, you've still led a good life." He sees religions, for all their drawbacks, as providing a moral structure: "There's no great advantage to being a compulsive liar, or to screwing every single woman you meet; there's no great advantage to being greedy." His interest in morality and faith figures goes beyond Jesus to "Buddha or Karl Marx or David Beckham": adherence to each, he suggests, has gone beyond the rational, but still makes a kind of sense. Marxism has a moral structure too: "Marx was talking about the discrepancy between the poor and the wealthy, which is outrageous to this day. I'm so for Bernie Sanders. I don't think he's electable, but to be talking about wealth inequalities is essential." Most reviews spent little time on the connections between its three parts, which, Martel has determinedly explained, represent atheism, agnosticism and belief. In the final section, Peter and Odo the chimp share a house, wrestle and groom each other -- Martel says he expressly set out to describe "someone who finds themselves in a state of grace by actually living with a faith object". "I used a chimp," he says, "because I wanted an animal that would plausibly reflect a human being ... There is something in the social behaviour of the greater apes ... if you look into their eyes, there is something troubling, a questioning of our excessive intelligence. Because, for all our intelligence, we are destroying the planet. We are crucifying the animal world. That's why the senator aspires to be more like Odo, rather than the other way round." Apes, he has said, are "like a smoky, warped mirror of who we are, in an earlier form". "If I'd written about a chimpanzee on the cross a hundred or more years ago, it'd have been more shocking ... luckily, evangelical Christians don't read novels." (Though some did write to him complaining that Pi follows more than one religion.) "In any case it's not an insult. If the idea of Christianity is that God became human, and if humans are close to animals, then in a sense God became animal too. I wanted to expand the idea of what it means for God to be incarnate in Jesus." Martel is also keen to get across another point of comparison between animals and faith. "When I was reading about religions," he says, "I noticed a particular quality in religious figures. One is their strong sense of being right here, right now. Buddhism is all about trying to be in the present moment, but you see it in Jesus too. Animals live in the present. People, on the other hand, are always dealing with their past, and worrying about their future; the present moment seems to slip by unnoticed." Martel himself has an unworldly side. He doesn't drink, or smoke, and seems to care little about material things. He lives in an unflashy house in Saskatoon, a small city on the Canadian prairies, in the province of Saskatchewan: "I don't want to live in New York, London and Paris and be the writer with a capital W." In any case, his children, he says, keep him humble. "They are not impressed that I won the Booker prize; they aren't impressed that I wrote Life of Pi." He shows me a photograph of his beatific-looking kids: fatherhood is a kind of "religious ecstasy". He has talked winningly of benefiting from a "freak success", and remembers what life was like as an impoverished, struggling writer. Two years before finishing Life of Pi, he was living on [pound]4,000 a year: "I liked the lightness." In the author's note to a republished edition of his first book, the collection of four stories entitled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, he writes: "I lived with my parents. Or, to be more accurate, I lived off my parents. I paid no rent, ate their food. I did short-term work -- tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard -- never letting these jobs get in the way of my pen ... I sent stories out. Once I sent 16 different stories to 16 different literary reviews. I received 16 rejections." The book, published in 1993, was well received but sold few copies. His first novel, Self, which followed in 1996, was an experimental exploration of gender and sex. He compares it to Woolf's Orlando : a man on his 18th birthday metamorphoses into a woman; seven years later, he turns back again. Men are so incurious about what it is actually like to be female, Martel reflects. "I read the feminist classics, and also just closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself a woman." Self sold "almost nothing". Then, with Life of Pi, he suddenly became a literary megastar. In November 2002, a month after being awarded the Booker Prize, he wrote about the experience and his surprised exultation at winning: At Heathrow, the passport officer asks me why I am visiting the United Kingdom. I pause for a moment. "I'm here to win the Booker prize," I tell him, figuring that if I win he'll remember me, turn to his mates and say, "I let that bloke in." And if I lose, he will have forgotten me." The what?" he says ... Then, on the night, at the moment the winner is announced ... I roar "Yes!" and jump up, raising my left fist in the air. I raise both my arms. I feel like Jesus Christ after he's done his three days in Hell, I feel like a boy who has just discovered the joys of self-abuse, I feel like Sir Edmund Hillary after he's stumbled to the top of Everest, all three joys all at once. The book was, unlike some Booker winners of that era, a highly accessible novel. The judges' choice was "a rip-roaring popular success", according to Salley Vickers, who was one of them. "The booksellers loved us for it." Another judge that year, Russell Celyn Jones, has written: 'We knew that we just handed Yann Martel a million bucks.' Life of Pi 's sales long ago handed Martel a secure financial future, and the Ang Lee movie, which came out in 2012, has left him further enriched. But the writer is far from gushing about the film: it "was visually ravishing" but "I thought the storytelling was a little bit weak. It's a good complement to the book. It paints some nice pictures, but I don't think it's a standalone product." Unsurprisingly, Martel's publishers looked forward to the follow-up to Life of Pi, but were a little perturbed when what he proposed was a book on the Holocaust using animals as an allegorical device. His plan was for a "flip-book", with a Beckettian "conceptual play" about the suffering of a monkey and a donkey in a cataclysm called the "Horrors", published back-to-back with a non-fiction essay about the need for representations of the Holocaust beyond historical realism. ("Where are the Holocaust romances?" he has asked. "Where are the Holocaust comedies?") The flip-book idea was rejected, as the opening of the reworked novel, Beatrice & Virgil, makes clear, but though major changes were made to the framing of the story (and Martel received an advance of something like $3m), the critical reception was harsh. The influential reviewer Michiko Kakutani called it "disappointing and perverse", another called it dull and pretentious. The general sense was that the novel hubristically tried and failed to do for the Holocaust what Orwell did for Stalinism in Animal Farm. In the Evening Standard, David Sexton was brutal: "What is one to say? Perhaps, to be kind, that Martel, not Jewish himself incidentally, is just not very bright." Its author has always staunchly defended the book -- "Some people loved it, some hated it," he tells me. Martel suggests that "we are not yet ready" for imaginative treatments of the Holocaust. And he repeatedly stresses that fiction can "get to a greater truth" than mere fact. "Novelists can get to places that no historian or journalist can," he says. One aspect of Martel's writing, which is often called his "cutesy" or "whimsical" side, was generally seen as enlivening a fantasy adventure with a tiger but judged less appropriate for the subject of the Holocaust. It is also the case that some elements within the old-style literary establishment have always been sceptical of Martel: Sexton, who so disliked Beatrice & Virgil, has written of Life of Pi that its "mystical twaddle ... sticks in the throat". And perhaps it is possible to hear some of the comments Martel makes about religion ("I really like Islam, it's a lovely religion"; "There's a moistness to Hinduism"; "Positing that there is something divine rather than not passes the time nicely") and dismiss him as an unlikely fusion of Paulo Coelho and David Attenborough. But readers enjoyed Beatrice & Virgil more than the critics, and his appeal to the general book-buying public will assuredly remain strong. After all, as a reviewer of The High Mountains of Portugal noted, his writing "hums with a vivid populism". What is certain is that although Martel admits all negative reviews hurt, he is unlikely to allow any to steer him away from his chosen theme of how fiction and faith can attain a truth beyond the factual and material. "The divine chooses to be elusive, and to hide in stories rather than facts," he tells me. And in his new book, the pathologist's wife, Maria Lozora, asks: "Why would Jesus speak in parables? Why would he both tell stories and let himself be presented through stories? Why would Truth use the tools of fiction? " It is a question the everlasting Pi might well have asked. - Paul Laity.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 My suffering left me sad and gloomy. Academic study and the steady, mindful practice of religion slowly brought me back to life. I have remained a faithful Hindu, Christian and Muslim. I decided to stay in Toronto. After one year of high school, I attended the University of Toronto and took a double-major Bachelor's degree. My majors were religious studies and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed. My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour -- calm, quiet and introspective -- did something to soothe my shattered self. There are two-toed sloths and there are three-toed sloths, the case being determined by the forepaws of the animals, since all sloths have three claws on their hind paws. I had the great luck one summer of studying the three-toed sloth in situ in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day. Our team tested the sleep habits of five wild three-toed sloths by placing on their heads, in the early evening after they had fallen asleep, bright red plastic dishes filled with water. We found them still in place late the next morning, the water of the dishes swarming with insects. The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in a most relaxed sense. It moves along the bough of a tree in its characteristic upside-down position at the speed of roughly 400 metres an hour. On the ground, it crawls to its next tree at the rate of 250 metres an hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated cheetah. Unmotivated, it covers four to five metres in an hour. The three-toed sloth is not well informed about the outside world. On a scale of 2 to 10, where 2 represents unusual dullness and 10 extreme acuity, Beebe (1926) gave the sloth's senses of taste, touch, sight and hearing a rating of 2, and its sense of smell a rating of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth in the wild, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it; it will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should look about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a Magoo-like blur. As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound. Beebe reported that firing guns next to sleeping or feeding sloths elicited little reaction. And the sloth's slightly better sense of smell should not be overestimated. They are said to be able to sniff and avoid decayed branches, but Bullock (1968) reported that sloths fall to the ground clinging to decayed branches "often". How does it survive, you might ask. Precisely by being so slow. Sleepiness and slothfulness keep it out of harm's way, away from the notice of jaguars, ocelots, harpy eagles and anacondas. A sloth's hairs shelter an algae that is brown during the dry season and green during the wet season, so the animal blends in with the surrounding moss and foliage and looks like a nest of white ants or of squirrels, or like nothing at all but part of a tree. The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. "A good-natured smile is forever on its lips," reported Tirler (1966). I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at sloths in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing. Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students-muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, in the thrall of reason, that fool's gold for the bright-reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God. I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science. I was a very good student, if I may say so myself. I was tops at St. Michael's College four years in a row. I got every possible student award from the Department of Zoology. If I got none from the Department of Religious Studies, it is simply because there are no student awards in this department (the rewards of religious study are not in mortal hands, we all know that). I would have received the Governor General's Academic Medal, the University of Toronto's highest undergraduate award, of which no small number of illustrious Canadians have been recipients, were it not for a beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament of unbearable good cheer. I still smart a little at the slight. When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and I say, "You've got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!" The skull snickers and moves ever closer, but that doesn't surprise me. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity-it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud. The pink boy also got the nod from the Rhodes Scholarship committee. I love him and I hope his time at Oxford was a rich experience. If Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, one day favours me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on the list of cities I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca, Varanasi, Jerusalem and Paris. Excerpted from Life of Pi by Yann Martel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.