Tolog Review: Life of Pi

Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
reviewed by Catherine Doud

When Piscine Molitor Patel, known by others as ‘Pissing’ or ‘Pi’, gets stuck at sea when the boat he was on with all of his family sinks, you would think it couldn’t get any worse. If you thought the above you would be wrong. Pi, the main character of this novel, wasn’t just shipwrecked, on a lifeboat, with no family, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He also had the company of a 450 pound bengal tiger named Richard Parker constantly threatening his life for 227 days. The Life of Pi, is a most definitely interesting life.

In this story, our main character, Pi, lived in Pondicherry, India, where his father ran a zoo, which is where Richard Parker came from. He was very religious, but not in a way you might think. He was a Hindu… and had also been baptized a Christian and was a practicing Muslim. But when the Indian government was threatened, Pi’s father decided that they would sell all of their animals to other zoos in India and bring the rest over to North America, bringing Pi away from his three different places of worship. But, when the cargo ship they traveled in sank around early in the morning, Pi found himself soaked, cold, and in a lifeboat with dangerous animals.

But throughout the 227 days at sea, Piscine goes through a series of rough challenges that are somewhat unbelievable and majorly shape Piscine as a person. Pi’s journey shows his will to survive in seeming impossible circumstances and deeply shows the importance of religion and a god.

This book is very inspiring, and is “A story that will make you believe in God.” Whether it will persuade you into believing in God or not is up to you, but believing in a God really helped Pi survive.

Overall, I thought the book was really exciting and I recommend it if you have a lot of time on your hands for reading. The beginning of the book starts off slow, but Yann Martel, the author, went into great lengths of detail to make the rest of the story complete and It really made you want to keep reading. The book makes me see how precious our lives are and how easily they can be taken away from us, how lucky we are to have lighting, clothes, and fresh drinking water, and how these are really taken for granted. If you want a long novel with a lot of symbolism that is fun to figure out, Life of Pi is the book for you.