Jim Fonseca's Reviews > Life of Pi

[Revised, pictures and shelves added 2/28/23]

For years I noticed this book on display, particularly its cartoonish paperback cover. Was it a children's book? This Pi stuff -- was it something about math? (Was it plagiarized? See story at end.)

It's a castaway story and like all castaway and shipwreck stories it's about human endurance, indomitable spirit and man vs. nature. The things that distinguish this story from Robinson Crusoe or Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away, is that the main character (Pi, short for Piscine) is trapped in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.



Pi is Indian and he's multi-religious - a true believer in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. He comes from a family of zookeepers who were transporting their animals by freighter. This is how he wound up with a tiger in his lifeboat.

It's an inspiring book, but drags in spots -- more than 200 days at sea is a lot of fish and storm stories. I kept waiting for the multi-religious theme to play a real role in the story but it did so only peripherally, so the plot seems a bit disconnected from that theme.

In the end, we are offered two stories: one of murder and cannibalism and one of a journey in the lifeboat with animals. A key line comes at the end of the book as a throwaway: 'Which story do you prefer? So it is with God.' It's a decent read and an interesting plot but as I revise this review, with hindsight, I'm downgrading my rating from 4 to 3.

Life of Pi won the 2002 Booker prize and was a huge seller worldwide – 12 million copies and 1.5 million ratings on GR. But here’s a story I came across when I reviewed another book, The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes, by Brazilian Jewish author Moacyr Scliar. Here’s the (paraphrased) story from the NY Times obituary for Scliar in 2011 and from Wikipedia:



Scliar wrote a novel, Max and the Cats, about a Jewish youth who flees Nazi Germany on a ship carrying wild animals to a Brazilian zoo. After a shipwreck the boy ends up sharing a lifeboat with a jaguar. The book achieved fame twice over. Critically praised on its publication in 1981, it touched off a literary storm in 2002 when the Canadian writer Yann Martel (b. 1963) won the Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi, about an Indian youth trapped on a boat with a tiger. Mr. Martel’s admission that he borrowed the idea led to an impassioned debate among writers and critics on the nature of literary invention and the ownership of words and images. Martel admitted he got the idea by reading a review of Scliar’s book but said he never read the book itself. “In a certain way I feel flattered that another writer considered my idea to be so good, but on the other hand, he used that idea without consulting me or even informing me,” Mr. Scliar told The NY Times. “An idea is intellectual property.”

Top image is a still from the movie on npr.org
The author from theguardian.co.uk