Life of Pi by Yann Martel

This book has three distinct parts. In part one we are introduced to the boy Piscine Patel. Piscine lives with his mother, father, and brother in Pondicherry, India. His father is a zookeeper and their house leads into the zoo grounds, thus Piscine knows a lot about animals and zoo keeping. The beginning of the book contains interesting arguments about why zoos are good for animals and tries to bring the other viewpoint against those who might think it cruel to contain animals. It is also interesting when he discusses how people anthropomorphize animals or try to give them human characteristics. It is easier to do that with the apes and chimps, but humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize all of the animals.

Then there is Piscine at school. He is tired of kids taunting him about his name, mispronouncing it like “pissing” so he shortens it to Pi. Pi is deeply religious although curiously he is the only one in his family who is. Pi just loves God so much that he joins three religions–Hindu, Muslim, and Christianity–which boggles the minds of everybody including the leaders of each one those churches. They want him to choose one religion, but he says he loves God too much.

Things start to get hard for the family in India, so they decide to move to Canada. This part was interesting in learning about how hard it is to sell and transfer zoo animals to different locations. So the family boards a tanker called the SimSoon with several animals that they are relocating in the cargo holds underneath the ship. But the ship sinks in the Pacific which leads to part two of the book.

Part two of the book is Pi’s survival all alone in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But he is not all alone! In the lifeboat is a tiger from the zoo, Richard Parker, who escaped the wreck. Pi not only has to survive the elements of the ocean, but he has to do it with an added terror of a Bengal Tiger aboard. The survival strategies in this section of the book were very interesting and very clever as well. Pi is extremely intelligent for a 16 year old boy. My favorite part of this section is near the end of his journey on the sea, they stumble across this island with meerkats on it. This isn’t your typical island though because the trees grow out of algae. The algae has this horrible chemical reaction when the sun goes down so everything inhabiting the island has to live in the trees. I don’t want to give anymore away, but it was one of the most interesting parts of the book for me.

Part three is the shortest section of the book and it is his time after he has made it to the mainland of Mexico and is interrogated by Japanese officials representing the owners of the Simsoon investigating why it sank. I don’t want to reveal anything in detail, but this ending kind of made me angry at first, but kind of made up for it in the last few pages of the book.

I found the book to be fascinating from several perspectives including zoological, religious, survival, and adventure on the Pacific with a wild animal in tow. There were parts that dragged a little for me, but most of it I found very interesting and I would recommend it to anyone. Just watch out for the ending. I guess it makes for a good book discussion group though.

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