hwebb reviewed Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Review
5 stars
Consistently entertaining. You'll fly through it.
Kindle, 480 pages
Published Dec. 13, 2006 by Seal Books.
After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan… and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary works of fiction in recent years.
Consistently entertaining. You'll fly through it.
Der erste Teil des Romans, das mit dem Ausprobieren des Glaubens, wirkt ein wenig wie ein Lückenfüller, um das Buch dicker zu machen. Die eigentliche Story ist dann aber packend erzählt. Der absolute Überlebenswille zählt! Und das gibt Mut und ist klasse!
Meh.
I watched the film and it was amazing!!! Can't wait to read the book :)
I started off with a children's book. Now I'm done reading, half mesmerized and half shocked. The way the story was built up, caught me completely off-guard, with equal shares of pleasant surprises and bitter truths.
It's all about hope and the perceiving the beauty around us.
Now, to watch the movie.
Enjoyed reading this, although things kept getting stranger and more fantastical as it went along. Loved and was disappointed as things wrapped up, but made it worth having read all the way to the end.
This is one of the few books that I heard a lot about before reading it, but ended up liking it even more than I expected.
An interesting adventure that took a little too long to get going. Prior to Pi arriving on the boat I felt the story dragged, but once the boat showed up so did the story. There were times I felt this story was too whimsical, too make believe, but everything made sense in the end and the conclusion left me satisfied. I didn't read this book seeking a deeper meaning, I enjoyed the tale and looked at the book as a story of human desire and will to live.
Opinions were all over the map, from "I loved it", to "Why did this win a Booker?". Some liked the religious philosophy in the first part, while others hated it. The suggestion was put forth that this book was really written for young adults, with a teenage protagonist and a final section that spelled out the allegories. Carolyn, who put much more thought into this book than I did, would wake up in the middle of the night to try to puzzle it out. Was Richard Parker God? Was he Nature, imperfectly subjugated by Man? Because having him be Pi's bestial alter-ego, who comes to the fore when disaster strikes and then disappears into the jungle when Pi reaches safety just isn't good enough.