Book #61: The Life of Pi

Title: The Life of Pi
Author: Yann Martel

We read this book for the November meeting of our book club. Unfortunately, I wasn't done with it in time to attend, but Eddie and his mom and I had an impromptu discussion of the book at home instead. Eddie's mom said that she loved the first half of the book, where Pi Patel is living in India and exploring different religions. He was raised Hindu, but also adopts Christianity and Islam, and finds no contradiction in actively practicing all three at once. The first part of the novel seems like sort of a traditional bildungsroman, where the young protagonist comes of age. In this case, he grows up the son of a zookeeper, who like many Indians in the 1970s, decides to emigrate to Canada, which is where the book gets really interesting.

On the ship to Canada, his family and the contents of his father's zoo on board, Pi survives a shipwreck. For nearly a year, he lives on a lifeboat. At the beginning of his time on the lifeboat, he's living with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a large male tiger named Richard Parker. The hyena, zebra and orangutan quickly meet their ends, and Pi and Richard Parker must learn to survive with each other. Eddie loved this part of the book. I'm not surprised-- it was sort of like Survivor on steroids. Survivor with a tiger, of course.

The last chapter is where both parts of the book come together. The reader must decide if Pi is telling the truth about living with Richard Parker, or if he's made a myth, styled after religious myths, in order to help him make sense of his experience on the boat. Am I, as an active believer of the LDS faith allowed to admit that I believe that myth is an important part of Christian (and even Mormon) religious history? Myth helps us understand and process truth in a way that's accessible to us. Alone on a boat, Pi may have died or gone insane. With Richard Parker, real or imagined, he was able to live to tell his story.