The Life Of Pi: A Book Club Review

I recently joined an Iligan-based Book Club. We have an assigned book to read and then schedule a meet-up, usually at Aruma Cafe, after one month. This August, the chosen book (as determined by an assigned host) is The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The synopsis of the book as reviewed by Amazon.com:

The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting “religions the way a dog attracts fleas.” Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat’s sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination

During the monthly Book Club meeting, we are asked to answer some guide questions that were prepared and selected by the host. I have the following answers or insights on the guide questions (Warning: there are some spoilers ahead):

Pi’s story of surviving on a lifeboat with zoo animals is rather incredible. Did the far-fetched nature of the story ever bother you? Was Pi a convincing storyteller?

The story bothered me because initially I thought that this was a philosophical book. I had preconceived thoughts that sooner or later the animals would talk to Pi (like that of the Jungle Book animated film, Walt Disney version) and that these animals would inject their principles to this relatively young boy. But as I went on with the story, the novel revealed to me that the author treated the animals plainly as animals. But of course the last pages of the book revealed another thing.

Pi was a convincing storyteller because for one, he is a keen observer of animals since he came from a family of zookeepers. Second, reading the book was a bit tedious because you are transported to a scene where a boy and a tiger are lost at sea or ocean for that matter and the flow of the story is not really that riveting or a typical page-turner fiction. However, I believe that the author was able to transport me perfectly to that state because I can relate to the characters and to the situation they were in. The book reminded me of the movie Lost in Translation (starring Billy Crystal and Scarlett Johansson). This is a film about being bored and restless in a foreign country like Japan wherein the characters could not speak and read Japanese. The movie focused on being lost and hopeless, but more importantly, it was focused on being bored.

In his introductory note Yann Martel says, “This book was born as I was hungry.” What sort of emotional nourishment might Life of Pi have fed to its author?

I have a funny answer to this question. I think that the author was literally hungry (this might be caused by depleting personal funds, but then, I could be wrong) and so he thought of writing a book on surviving a shipwreck and what to eat when you’re a surviving passenger and you’re in the middle of the unforgiving ocean.

How do the human beings in your world reflect the animal behavior observed by Pi? What do Pi’s strategies for dealing with Richard Parker teach us about confronting the fearsome creatures in our lives?

Well, it just reminds me of the adjective “animalistic” from the noun “animalism”. This adjective is often used to describe human behavior in sex and murder but I think it goes beyond that. It also reveals our desire to survive in a dog eat dog world. A similar story to the Life of Pi is the novel/memoir entitled  “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex” by Nathaniel Philbrick (by the way this ship tragedy was mentioned by the Martel in the book, page 189). This book is a story of survival but it was also controversial because this was a story of cannibalism. The people survived the tragedy because they were able to beat all odds, even the unthinkable, and that included their eating of their fellow men on the life boat.

We all have “Richard Parkers” in ourselves but as this story is a story of courage and hope, every tiger in us can be tamed and at some point will eventually leave us like the way Richard Parker left without saying goodbye to Pi when they docked at the Mexican shore. Before I came to the “revelation” chapters, the Book Club host texted me and asked if I’m done reading the book, and I replied that I am on the last pages and added that I will certainly miss Richard Parker. But now that I remember the twist in the story, I just smile at the memory of my response.

Nearly everyone experiences a turning point that represents the transition from youth to adulthood, albeit seldom as traumatic as Pi’s. What event marks your coming of age?

I thank the Lord that I did not have such a traumatic experience such as Pi’s. I think my coming of age would be (and this is unexciting) when I left home and went to college. I was in a new place and I did not have any relatives except for my cousin Ian. We stayed in the same boarding house but I have known him only since that summer before school opened in June. In some ways, I would consider that moment as being placed in an unchartered territory and I must learn to survive academically and emotionally.

Is Life of Pi a tragedy, romance, or comedy?

I think the book was a tragedy but as Pi asked the Japanese investigators,

“So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?’ Mr. Okamoto: ‘That’s an interesting question?’ Mr. Chiba: ‘The story with animals.’ Mr. Okamoto: ‘Yes. The story with animals is the better story.’

It was when I read these lines that I understood why The Life of Pi was described as a story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction by the L. A. Times Book Review. More than just being a tragic story, Life of Pi is a story of survival, of second chances and of moving on with life.