Life of Pi

Last night I finished Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I had tried to read it a few years ago and dropped it out of boredom. I found it engrossing this time around.

I'm not going to bother with plot summary, which you can get anywhere. Suffice it to say that it is a story about a boy who lives for months in a life raft with a Bengal tiger. It can be wandering and reflexive and I found the narrators voice putrid the first time I tried to read it, but it didn't bother me this time around. What this novel does very well is end. And I mean that in a good way: it has the best ending of anything I have read or seen in a long time. The ending in a way is a "suprise"--an alternate version of events--but rather than coming across as sleight-of-hand, it really forces you to re-evaluate both the events in the novel and your own feelings about stories. One review described the book as magical realism, and I think I agree. You are presented with outrageous events (a story to "make you believe in God") in stunning detail, without the narrator telling you how to feel about them, or even whether to believe them or not.

The book contains good insights into a suprising breadth of topics: zoology, religion (Hinduism, Chistianity, Islam), survival and the ocean, and storytelling as an art. I would definitely put Life of Pi in the "quirky" catagory--I can't say it affected my belief in God one way or the other, but its been the best thing I've read this summer.