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Socialist Review Book Club7pm, Friday 25 June 2004 Bookmarks Bookshop
Piscine Molitor Patel, otherwise known as Pi, lives in Pondicherry, India, where his father runs and owns the city's zoo. At the age of sixteen, his parents decide to emigrate to Canada, taking their larger family with them but tragedy strikes when the cargo ship sinks during a terrible storm. A solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the surface of the wild blue Pacific. In it are five survivors; Pi, a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. With intelligence, daring and inexpressible fear, Pi manages to keep his wits about him as the animals begin to assert their places in the food-chain. And ultimately it is the tiger, Richard Parker, with whom Pi must develop an inviolable understanding. "In its subject and its style, this enormously lovable novel is suffused
with wonder: a willed innocence that produces a fresh, sideways look at
our habitual assumptions, about religious divisions, or zoos versus the
wild, or the possibility of freedom. As Martel promises in his author's
note, this is fiction probing the imaginative realm with scientific exactitude,
twisting reality to 'bring out its essence'". Life of Pi was the winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Come Along! |
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Life
of Pi