Book #64: Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Okay, so most people are familiar with the film: A boy travels on a raft with a tiger. It's a simple storyline, and the book is very similar, only with a few things that were notably left out.
It's been a while since I watched the film, but I don't recall it having so much about Piscine "Pi" Patel's backstory, including how he got his nickname. It involves him standing up in class at school, and insisting that he be referred to as "Pi", before being told by the teacher to ask next time he wants to get up.
Pi narrates most of the book, except for the final few chapters, and a few sections in italics that feel like stream-of-consciousness dialogue. The narrative feels dense and excessively detailed at times, but when I got used to it, I realised it was quite a simple story to follow. I loved the fact that the narrative style held my attention in what could have been quite a mundane story about being lost at sea. The level of description put me in mind of Jules Verne in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" at times.
The big difference I saw during the sections that took place at sea were that I'm fairly certain the film toned down a lot of the graphic content, mostly involving kills that "Richard Parker" the tiger performs on other animals, even a human at one point. I really enjoyed reading about the relationship between Pi and the tiger.
However, I also realised that Pi is an unreliable narrator, as the final section of the book indicates. Thus, the final chapter offers an alternative version of events that you will probably be familiar with if you've seen the film, and I liked how it was left to the reader to decide what really happened.
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