Tolog Review: Life of Pi

Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
reviewed by Jia Yu Xin

What is the relationship between human and the natural world? How can faith or religion affect on people’s life? Most of the people may have both of the confusions in their mind. However, the fantasy adventure novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel gives a deep understanding of these questions that may seems to be complicated to answer.

Piscine Pate whose nickname Pi is an Indian boy, grew up with different kinds of animals in the zoo that his father owned. His special childhood leads him a different aspect and brand-new sense of God. He started to believe in Hindu, Christian and Islam at the same time. As life is always unpredictable, Pi went on a life that he never expected when he was sixteen. On Pi’s family way to South America, the ship sinks and Pi’s misadventure was started. All living things were died from the accidents except Pi and a few animals survived. Eventually, only a Bengal tiger and Pi were left on the boat after animals were eaten by each other. Facing this terrible situation, Pi denied giving up himself. Instead he learned how to coexist with the tiger under peace during his total 227 days of challenges.

Life of Pi is narrated by first person and is separated into three sections to describe the inimitable experience. Primary section of the novel begins with the main character retelling his teenager experiences as an adult, focusing on Pi’s family and faith and was portrayed in a more youthful teenager tone. Readers can find a sufficient answer upon faith in the first section. Continue with the most significant parts of the entire novel, the misfortune of Pi on the Pacific Ocean is very well written. The prosperous information of marine and survival described with meticulous words leaves a great impression to readers. When Pi is worrying about the survival issues, he also has the precious chance to investigate this natural world on the Pacific Ocean. Author gives an idea of as good lost as found in a casual way. More importantly, the relationship between natural and man is reflected during Pi’s misadventure with tiger. At the third section of the novel, readers can notice that the teenage Pi we get know at first becomes an adult philosopher when he is interviewing with Japanese officials and telling them his unbelievable journey.

When readers finish the novel, they can observe that it is not purely an adventure novel, but more spiritually inspire makes this novel become so unique. The author is presenting his thought of absolute truth is hard to recognize under some circumstances. He is somehow promoting both religion and atheist, which can makes readers deliberate and debate about. Last but not least, most of the people in nowadays have a comfortable life. We rarely consider about the humanness or the animalistic of either animals or humans under sturdy conditions, which people should really think about.