Contemporary Reads: Life of Pi

Life of Pi (2002) by Yann Martel became an International publishing sensation after winning the Man Booker Prize. It tells the story of how an Indian teeneager, Piscine Molitor Patel or Pi, survived a shipwreck in the company of a Bengal tiger.

The book is divided in three parts:

- In Part I, we learn about Pi's upbringing in the Indian town of Pondicherry. His interest in religion will see him becoming a Christian and a Muslim while still remaining a Hindu. Aside from religion, his other main interest is animals (his family runs the local zoo). Later in life he'll major in religious studies and zoology.

- In Part II, the family decides to leave India to emigrate to Canada. They sail across the Pacific in a Japanese ship with most of the animals on board. Amid much confusion, before the ship sinks Pi is thrown into a boat and is, thus, the only survivor. The only human survivor, that is, since on the boat there are also a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a tiger! Soon the hyena eats zebra and the orang-utan and the tiger eats the hyena. Both the Pi and the tiger hilariously known as Richard Parker survive for many months and after a brief sojour on a meerkat infested island they arrived to Mexico.

- In Part III, two members of the Japanese Ministry of Transport who find Pi's story unbelievable. So he changes it just by substituting the zebra by a Taiwanese salior, the orang-utan by his mother and the hyena by a French cook. Finally, the Japanese officials decide to stick to the story with animals and it is the one that 'sounds best'.

This is a highly imaginative and shocking novel.