Life of Pi - A review
This isn't much of a review of a book, but personal ramblings about it. Sometimes you come across a book that makes your thoughts burst out, whose weight can only be relieved by expressing them. The problem is expressing them orally is hard labor considering that it requires a lot of empathy on the listener to bear them. So i channel my words through one of the most primitive forms of expression: writing.
I picked up this book, "life of Pi" quite accidentally and remained in cold storage for long time. Somehow everytime i saw the book, i said to myself reading an adventure tale was not the thing i needed at that time. I started reading the book, when i was "free" by that i mean i had nothing to do and could not think of anything to be done.
The book starts as an innocuous adventure tale where a zookeeper's son is a castaway in the pacific along with zebra with broken leg, hyaena, orangutan and a bengal tiger, but turns out to be much more than that. The reader is engaged by the writer in a tale of survival where he describes brilliantly the thoughts of solitude, grit and endurance, and ,also bored by the laborious details which describe the boat, the anatomy of various animals and the writer's personal thoughts on them.The encounters with the sea animals and their hunting, though initially very interesting become a bit boring and I at some stage ended up saying "Oh god, not another dorado". The taming of the tiger is a intriguing part of the story.The encounters continue to get incredulous by the day (btw the protagonist survives for 227 days on the pacific) with meerkats in a carnivorous island of algae . I guess you have to put up with it, as this is a story based on "magical realism" a.k.a. a genre where the writer requests the reader to put up with all the crap he has written, with a promise that there will be something good in the end. In that sense, "life of Pi" is indeed a "story of magic realism" where suddenly towards the end, the story comes alive with philosophical overtones. I guess the book isn't an authentic peek into the soul of the protagonist but a craftily knit story with a refreshing plot.
The book starts narrating the story with a promise that "it will make a believer out of you". Left to my conjecture the book is an elaborate statement of Kant's philosophy i.e. faith is the failsafe for reason. I am left with a line in my mind which is quite profound in the context of the book .
" So, you want a story with animals or without animals ?"
Well, if someone asked me "do you think this book was worth the Booker ?" i would shrug my shoulders and reply "was this the best they got at that time ?"
I picked up this book, "life of Pi" quite accidentally and remained in cold storage for long time. Somehow everytime i saw the book, i said to myself reading an adventure tale was not the thing i needed at that time. I started reading the book, when i was "free" by that i mean i had nothing to do and could not think of anything to be done.
The book starts as an innocuous adventure tale where a zookeeper's son is a castaway in the pacific along with zebra with broken leg, hyaena, orangutan and a bengal tiger, but turns out to be much more than that. The reader is engaged by the writer in a tale of survival where he describes brilliantly the thoughts of solitude, grit and endurance, and ,also bored by the laborious details which describe the boat, the anatomy of various animals and the writer's personal thoughts on them.The encounters with the sea animals and their hunting, though initially very interesting become a bit boring and I at some stage ended up saying "Oh god, not another dorado". The taming of the tiger is a intriguing part of the story.The encounters continue to get incredulous by the day (btw the protagonist survives for 227 days on the pacific) with meerkats in a carnivorous island of algae . I guess you have to put up with it, as this is a story based on "magical realism" a.k.a. a genre where the writer requests the reader to put up with all the crap he has written, with a promise that there will be something good in the end. In that sense, "life of Pi" is indeed a "story of magic realism" where suddenly towards the end, the story comes alive with philosophical overtones. I guess the book isn't an authentic peek into the soul of the protagonist but a craftily knit story with a refreshing plot.
The book starts narrating the story with a promise that "it will make a believer out of you". Left to my conjecture the book is an elaborate statement of Kant's philosophy i.e. faith is the failsafe for reason. I am left with a line in my mind which is quite profound in the context of the book .
" So, you want a story with animals or without animals ?"
Well, if someone asked me "do you think this book was worth the Booker ?" i would shrug my shoulders and reply "was this the best they got at that time ?"
posted by Srikanth | 3:01 AM
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