Date of Reading: 31/10/2006
Author: Yann Martel
Subtitle: A Novel
Publisher: Penguin Books
Year: 2002
Summary:
Story concerns with Piscine Molitor Patel or Pi Patel who lives in Pondicherry with his father. He is a zoology student and his father owns a zoo. When he is 16, his family decides to migrate to Canada due to the political turbulance of emergency period. But tragedy strikes when the cargo ship named 'Tsimtsum' carrying them sinks during a storm and his parents and brother Ravi drown.
Pi escapes in a solitary life boat with four other survivors - a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450 pound Royal Bengal Tiger. Pi stays over the tarpaulin with the animals beneath it. Hyena kills both the zebra and the orang-utan and after its sea sickness period the tiger (Richard Parker) does the same to hyena too.
Pi finds a locker with biscuits, water and many other equipments. To escape from Parker he builds a raft, connects it to the boat and spends his days there. He catches fish and turtles and gives half of it to the tiger and even trains him to respond to the vissil. In a storm he loses the raft.
They find an island filled with algae which is later proved to be carnivorous. It produce acidic juice at night to digest living beings. Route to survival opens when they reach the Mexican Coast and Richard Parker disappears into the forest. Pi is saved by the natives. Tsimtsum sank on July 2,1977 and he arrived at Mexico on February 14, 1978. He has spent 227 days (7 months) in Pacific.
Comment:
If you seek another Jungle Book from this, you will be completely devastated. Text is really grave and not easy to read either. First reading wont unravel any of its mysteries.
Book is a meditation on religion, art and life. It can be treated as a post-colonial work as the setting at the beginning is India and author is Canadian. It has also the elements of magic realism as it endows animals with human personalities. Since it also deals with the growing up of Pi, it is bildungsroman too.
Lines I Liked:
"You must take the life the way it comes at you and make the best of it".
"Ignorance is the worst doctor, while rest and sleep are the best nurses after a shipwreck".
and am sure once u read this buk it will always be in ur favorites..a must read..
ReplyDeletehate this book soo much. so boring, slow, gory, and gets to the point only after over 150 pages. if u want to read just the part about the tiger and the shipwreck, start at part 2 (page 121, Chapter 37)
ReplyDeletehate this book soo much. so boring, slow, gory, and gets to the point only after over 150 pages. if u want to read just the part about the tiger and the shipwreck, start at part 2 (page 121, Chapter 37)
ReplyDeleteyes the story was nice its all about one boy and one tiger .awesome and hatoff it
ReplyDelete