Life of Pi
Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian Tamil boy from Pondicherry who explores issues of spirituality and metaphysics from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger which raises questions about the nature of reality and how it is perceived and told. He is part of a Tamil speaking family.
The novel has sold more than ten million copies worldwide.[1] It was rejected by at least five London publishing houses[2] before being accepted by Knopf Canada, which published it in September 2001. The UK edition won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year.[3][4][5] It was also chosen for CBC Radio’s Canada Reads 2003, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee.[6]
The French translation L’Histoire de Pi was chosen in the French CBC version of the contest Le Combat des livres, where it was championed by Louise Forestier.[7] The novel won the 2003 Boeke Prize, a South African novel award. In 2004, it won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Best Adult Fiction for years 2001–2003.[8] In 2012 it was adapted into a feature film directed by Ang Lee with a screenplay by David Magee.
The book begins with a note from the author, which is an integral part of the novel. Unusually, the note describes entirely fictional events. It serves to establish and enforce one of the book’s main themes: the relativity of truth.
The narrator, Indian theologist Piscine Molitor Patel, tells the story of his childhood in Pondicherry, during the early years of India’s status as an independent nation. At the time, he is the son of the local zoo’s manager. While recounting his life there, Piscine proffers insight on the antagonism of zoos, and expresses his thoughts on why animals react less negatively than proponents of the idea suggest.
The narrator describes how he acquired his full name as a tribute to the swimming pool in France. After hearing schoolmates tease him by transforming the first name into “Pissing”, he establishes the short form of his name as “Pi” when he starts secondary school. The name, he says, pays tribute to the transcendental number which is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
In recounting his experiences, Pi describes several other unusual situations involving proper names: two visitors to the zoo, one a devout Muslim, and the other a committed atheist, bear identical names; and a 450-pound tiger at the zoo bears the name Richard Parker as the result of a clerical error which switched the tiger’s name with the name of his human captor.[9]
One day, Pi and his older brother Ravi are given an impromptu lesson on the dangers of the animals kept at the zoo. It opens with a goat being fed to another tiger, followed by a family tour of the zoo on which his father explains the aggressive biological features of each animal.
Pi is raised as a Hindu who practices vegetarianism. At the age of fourteen, he investigates Christianity and Islam, and decides to become an adherent of all three religions, much to his parents’ dismay (and his religious mentors’ frustration), saying he “just wants to love God”.[10] He tries to understand God through the lens of each religion, and comes to recognize benefits in each one.
A few years later in February 1976, during the period when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declares “The Emergency”, Pi’s father decides to sell the zoo and emigrate with his wife and sons to Canada.
