I finished reading Life of Pi tonight, written by Yann Martel, but it was a book that, for me, provided a level of suffering that almost kept me from completing it.
I first heardabout this book after it had won a few awards, and a Brazilian writer named Moacyr Scliar was considering legal action against Martel for using his story idea as the basis of LoP. I was intrigued, thinking some great act of plagiarism had occurred, so I'd researched and found that only the underlying premise was taken. No spoiler here, the various covers of the book give away that that premise is a boy and a tiger (a jaguar in Scliar's work) share a large lifeboat. In his introduction, Martel credits Scliar with providing the "spark" of inspiration for Life of Pi. Anyone who has tried to create a story of any kind knows that there are no original ideas left, at least ones that are interesting for a story line. All that can be done is mixing and remixing of themes which are then sifted through our own (hopefully) unique experiences in life, to form something original, in comparison to all other contemporary work, and hopefully entertaining as well. It was such a direct route to Martel's premise for his novel from the Scliar's novella, and the actual acknowledgment of this route by Martel in his introduction that was the problem, as far as Scliar and his Brazilian publishers were concerned. Martel said that it had been a great idea for a story that he hadn't read because, "Why put up with a brilliant premise ruined by a lesser writer?" That was a quote from an interview with him after Life of Pi was published, and that had seemed to make this even more of an issue than it had been even though Martel later insisted the quotation was taken out of context. It's easy to see why Scliar was offended and grumbled publicly. And this was the publicity that had moved me to get the book (you can read about the final result of Scliar's ruffled feathers in this interview with Martel).
So, after my wife and her mother read the book, and both raved about its quality, I set to reading it, trusting it would reward me as it had both of them. It started out fine enough. There are two levels of existence for the book. The first person accounts of an author who has chosen to pen Pi's extraordinary tale, and Pi's first person accounts starting as a child and his life at the Pondicherry Zoo in India where his father was the zookeeper. The author character's voice is essentially Martel's own. In the introduction he describes his own actual experience with his previous novel that failed in Canada, and how, in 1996, he began another book which ground to a halt before he "found" Pi Patel's story while in India. He even credits Moacyr Scliar for the aforementioned spark, and the Canadian Council for the Arts for the grant money to do the book. It's a clever opening, mixing fiction and non-, and prepares the reader for a story that is so full of life you begin to wonder if it is a piece of literary fiction after all.
Early on, however, the book became laborious to read. The story slowed to a crawl as it delved into Pi's confused religious state as a boy. There is a lot of detail on the spiritual tides in Pi's life, and I found it difficult and slow reading due in part to my own personal beliefs. I could go into a great deal of detail about why I feel this way but I think it's best to keep this private (something I wish more people did of their own beliefs as well). I suppose it's ironic that Martel's Pi dismisses non-believers as missing the entire point (of life and, Martel seems to be saying on a different level, of his story), and that the introduction held a quote by a fictitious character that presented the story to the author as one that would, "…make you believe in God."
After about seventy pages of the novel, I cast it aside and refused to open it again. It was slow, and it was becoming an essay on religion that was boring me. All I could say for it at that point that it was great for sliding off to sleep at night. I instead turned to Tolkien's The Hobbit, and within twenty pages I felt refreshed to be reading a story that moved swiftly and got right to the point (it was aimed at a target audience of children, after all). But a part of me felt like I was cheating myself by not continuing with LoP. My wife tried to motivate me to continue, promising that the content I wasn't enjoying would soon be over. She even counted the pages for me before I would be clear of it; twenty, or so.
A few weeks later and I resumed reading LoP, even after The Hobbit had pulled me back into Middle-Earth for another jaunt. My wife had lied. Within fourteen pages the story began to progress again, and by twenty I was fully interested in Pi and all that would befall him.
I refuse to give any spoilers when it comes to movies, books, or anything, so I won't go into details on what I specifically liked and didn't like in LoP. I can say that it is well written (gee, what a risky statement after it won the Booker Prize among others), and the sheer amount of details that Martel produces for Pi's perspective had me doubting this was fiction, even though I knew it most certainly was. There's a lot of well placed humour and tension, but even between these moments I was completely fascinated.
I've just finished the book tonight and am debating a second read of it already. If I did, it would be one more time than I've read The Hobbit. In fact, I've never read a book twice in my life. It always seemed like such a large amount of wasted effort that I've never even considered it, until tonight. Even though I tend to read fairly methodically, not missing too much and taking my time with each page, LoP was something more than just the words on paper that formed a story. As the character Pi wished for himself during his journey, it seems to be a book that you could read over and over again and comprehend more of its meaning each time.
Life of Pi was very much like a roller coaster ride for me. I stood before it and marvelled at how interesting it looked from solid ground, and how much fun a ride on it would be. Others who got off reinforced what those before them had said, and there were the awards it had won as well. To ride it was a must. I got on and began, full of high hopes. The difference between a conventional roller coaster ride and LoP was that as I began to clink up the long first incline I realized that I had to make the effort to move myself to the top. I didn't know how much further I had to go before the excitement would begin, and I stopped altogether after doing my best to continue on when I had all but lost hope that it would be worth it. I cast it aside and gave up on it for a time, but after some reassurance from my wife, and some more spare time to spend, I completed the last of the incline. Once I was finished the first part, the full out stomach clenching drop occurred and the rest of the ride was fast and entertaining with some surprising and fun twists and turns along the way. When I got off, I immediately wanted to ride it again.
It was a small amount of suffering in comparison to the suffering of Pi, but I think I ended up appreciating it all the more for that early struggle. The first part ended up being half or more of the time I spent reading LoP, but once over that first enormous hump the rest of the book sped by too fast. I found myself wanting to re-read entire chapters as soon as I was finished. It left me wanting more, and I couldn't get off.
Okay, so the execution of that analogy is fairly clumsy, but it's also fairly accurate in describing my experience with this book.
I recommend Life of Pi to all. Flee from your desk right now and acquire a copy any way you can. But you can forget about borrowing mine. I might be inclined to read it again any day now…
