Life of Pi

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Life of Pi

Yann Martel

Literature

Jul 29, 2018

The “Pi” of the title is Piscine Molitor Patel, an Indian boy named after a swimming pool. As we learn in the first of the novel’s three parts, he passes his early youth in Pondicherry, where his father runs a zoo. The young Pi exhibits a penchant for spiritual exploration, and undergoes a religious expansion—rather than a conversion—by adding elements of Christianity and Islam to his native Hindu beliefs. The second part of the novel details what happens when his family decides to immigrate to Canada. Traveling on a vessel that carries many of the zoo’s animals, they meet with calamity in the form of shipwreck, and Pi finds himself in a lifeboat shared with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and, most importantly, a 450-pound tiger named Richard Parker. Whimsical and amusing, Life of Pi encompasses a great deal of human experience—from theology to zoology, desperation to wonder—in its drifting current of story. It’s marvelous, in the exact sense of the word.

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