Book Bearings
Life of Pi
- 349 pages · about 6 hours
- First published 2001
- 115 editions
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1 About this book
Piscine Patel, known as Pi, grows up in Pondicherry, India, where his family keeps a zoo, and as a boy he is drawn to several religions at once. When he is sixteen the family sets out for Canada on a cargo ship, taking some of the animals along. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself in a lifeboat on the Pacific with a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The novel tells how he survives 227 days at sea, and leaves it to the reader to decide what to believe. Yann Martel's novel was published in 2001.
- Zoo animals
- Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks
- Shipwreck survival
- Human-animal relationships
- Adventure
- Survival at sea
- Survival
- Teenage boys
2 What to expect
A survival story with a philosophical frame: an Indian teenager is cast adrift on the Pacific in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. The first third, on his childhood around a zoo and his embrace of several religions, is slow and reflective; the long middle is a detailed, sometimes gruesome account of staying alive at sea. It is a book about faith and storytelling, playful in voice, and its last chapters change how the rest is read.
Good for readers who want: a survival adventure, questions of faith and truth, and animals at sea.
3 About Yann Martel
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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