Life of Pi

Reading Guide Life of Pi Yann Martel Introduction Pi Patel is an unusual boy. The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional-but is it more true? About the Author Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of peripatetic Canadian parents. He grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario and Mexico, and has continued travelling as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. After studying philosophy at Trent University and while doing various odd jobs - he began to write. He is the prizewinning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of short stories, and of Self, a novel, both of them published internationally. He has been living from his writing since the age of 27. He divides his time between yoga, writing and volunteering in a palliative care unit. Yann Martel lives in Montreal. Topics to consider 1. Pondicherry is described as an anomaly, the former capital of what was once French India. In terms of storytelling, what makes this town a appropriate choice for Pi's upbringing? 2. Yann Martel recalls that many Pondicherry residents provided him with stories, but he was most intrigued by this tale because Mr. Adirubasamy said it would make him believe in God. Did Pi's tale alter your beliefs about God? 3 Yann Martel sprinkles the novel with italicized memories of the "real" Pi Patel and 1 wonders in his author's note whether fiction is "the selective transforming of reality, the twisting of it to bring out its essence." If this is so, what is the essence of Pi? 4. One reviewer said the novel contains hints of The Old Man and the Sea, and Pi himself measures his experience in relation to history's most famous castaways. Considering that Pi's shipwreck is the first to focus on a boy and his tiger, how does Life of Pi compares to other maritime novels and films? 5. How might the novel's flavor have been changed if Pi's sole surviving animal were the zebra or Orange Juice? (We assume that if the hyena had been the only surviving animal, Pi would not have lived to tell us his story.) 6. In chapter 23, Pi sparks a lively debate when all three of his spiritual advisors try to claim him. At the heart of this confrontation is Pi's insistence that he cannot accept an exclusively Hindu, Christian, or Muslim faith; he can only be content with all three. What is Pi seeking that can solely be attained by this apparent contradiction? 7. What do you make of Pi's assertion at the beginning of chapter 16 that we are all "in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God"? Do you believe that Pi's piousness was a response to his father's atheism? 8. Among Yann Martel's gifts is a rich descriptive palette. Regarding religion, he observes the green elements that represent Islam and the orange tones of Hinduism. What color would Christianity be, according to Pi's perspective? 9. Nearly everyone experiences a turning point that represents the transition from youth to adulthood, albeit seldom as traumatic as Pi's. What event marks your coming of age? 10. Why did Pi at first try so hard to save Richard Parker? 11. Pi imagines that his brother would have teasingly called him Noah. How does Pi's voyage compare to the biblical story of Noah, who was spared from the flood while God washed away the sinners? 2 12. Is Life of Pi a tragedy, romance, or comedy? INTERVIEW:Yann Martel by Orrin Judd Orrin Judd: Your bio mentions that you were born in Spain to "peripatetic Canadian parents" and notes your extensive travels. Did you spend much time in Canada when you were growing up? Do you consider yourself "Canadian"? How did you decide to settle in Montreal? Yann Martel: A scholarship to my father to do his doctorate in Spain provided my parents the golden opportunity to leave Quebec, which at the time of my birth was a deep, dark bottom of a Catholic well. We moved from Spain to Alaska, where my father taught at the University of Alaska for two years. After that we returned to Canada, to Victoria, to British Columbia, for another academic stint. Then my father joined the department, and we were off again, to Costa Rica, to France, to Spain, to Mexico, to France again, with interludes in Ottawa. To answer your question, then, I grew up in Canada off and on. It was always present in my mind, if not right at hand. Yes, I consider myself Canadian. Don't know what else I could consider myself. I settled in Montreal because that's where my plane landed. I was in my mid-20s and returning to Canada after four years in France. My literary career was beginning to happen, which means I had high ambitions but not much money. I needed a cheap place to live. Montreal was that, besides a really neat town. OJ: Do you consider your writing to have been influenced by any authors in particular? YM: Yes, pretty well everyone I've read. I believe one becomes a writer by first being a reader. It's reading that forms your literary imagination. So I was influenced by all the writers I read as a child and adolescent, mostly the usual suspects, the famous dead white males, from the Victorians to the early 20th century Americans with a few other writers from other traditions popping in (Knut Hamsun, Yukio Mishima, Dante, etc). OJ: Several reviewers refer to Life of Pi as being a novel of magical realism. Do you consider this to be true? Would you consider yourself a magical realist? For instance, will your next novel be as fantastical? Have past stories been? YM: Labels, labels, labels. Makes you feel like a can of Campbell Soup. I don't consider myself anything in particular. I just do my thing. I don't think the label of "magical realist" is particularly appropriate. Pi is too gritty, too realistic a story to be put side by side with One Hundred Years of Solitude. But I don't really care. I think reviews pin that label on me to identify roughly the imaginative quotient of the book. And since I believe art is about the imagination, that filter that gives life its flavour and full force, yes, my next novel will have "fantastical" elements, not that I like that word. Makes imagination sound whimsical and irrelevant. OJ: When a book like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections comes out here in the States there's a palpable sense that he's trying to write "the Great American novel" and, by chance, I recently found a copy of Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes, which says on the back cover: "No Canadian has come closer to the elusive Great Canadian Novel than Hugh MacLennan." Do you consider yourself to be part of a Canadian Literary tradition? or sui generis? 3 YM: I'm a solitary artist deliberately out of tune, out of touch, with the latest events and the brouhaha of the mainstream. Life is local and now and within. On to the book itself: OJ: Apropos of nothing, Rohinton Mistry is also short-listed for the Booker and coincidentally it had struck me when reading your book that Pi somewhat resembled him in the sense of being a storyteller and an Indian fleeing from political unrest at home to Canada for opportunity. Is there any particular significance to Pi's being Indian? Does he reflect a particular immigrant experience in Canada with which you were familiar? Was this the most convenient way to make him Christian/Muslim Hindu? YM: I think only an Indian could practice three religions the way Pi does. The Hindu tradition is like English language: It takes as its own everything it likes. For example, the 6th (or is it the 7th or 8th?) Avatar (of incarnation, if you want) of Vishnu is Buddha. Hindus have an open if-it-works-take-it-on approach to the cosmos (when they're not descending into sectarian nationalism, that is). So Pi is, in some ways, very Indian. I wanted him to be Indian because I wanted to include in my novel the Hindu tradition. And India is a fertile ground for all religions, which can't be said of Western countries these days. OJ: This is perhaps related to the prior but, this seems like the kind of book that could have been driven by your need to write about Pi himself, because he's so beguiling, but it's also easy to imagine an author being compelled by just the one mental picture of a man in a boat with a tiger. Did you have some such epiphany or is there a specific story or person or some other trigger that was the original basis for the book or is it a product only of the ideas within its pages? YM: Briefly, this is how it happened: Ten years ago. Review in New York Times Book Review by John Updike of a Brazilian novel by one Moacyr Scliar. About Jewish family running zoo in Berlin in 1933. Business bad (i.e. someone just go elected to power). They decide to move to Brazil. Ship sinks. Jewish zookeeper ends up in lifeboat with black panther. Obvious allegory of Nazi Germany. Not a good review. Did nothing to Updike. But premise sizzled in my mind. I thought "Man, I could do something with that". But book already written, so I moved on and wrote my first novel and traveled. Five years later I'm in India. Remember premise. Explosion in my imagination. Whole chunks of the novel--the two stories, the blind Frenchman, the many animals, etc.--emerge fully formed in my head. I spent the next six months doing practical research in India, then reading books in Canada. Then I wrote the book. Came easily. Pi was a constant pleasure to write. OJ: Was your level of knowledge of life in Pondicherry a product of past travels or did you go and do research for this book? YM: Just answered that. I spent several weeks in Pondicherry. And returned on a subsequent trip to India to check out specific details (for example, whether the statue of Gandhi on the seaside esplanade was a walking Gandhi or a standing Gandhi. OJ: I don't want to go into too much detail about the end of the story, because of its twist, but I do have a couple general questions. I noticed that some critics differed over what the ending meant and I thought it meant something else. Did you intend to leave it somewhat open-ended or do you have a hard, fast view of what happened? If the latter, I recall reading that Graham Greene used to get upset that people read his book "Heart of the 4 Matter" differently than he intended them to. Are you bothered that people might read your book differently than you intended, perhaps that it might even become a settled understanding of the book? YM: So long as a reader really reads the book, that is, lets it meet his or her imagination, I don't care how they interpret the book. A book is only 50%. The other 50% is what the reader brings to it. I can't control that second half. I ask that readers bring openmindedness and intelligence to Life of Pi, that's all. The rest is up to them. OJ: One of the characters in the book says that it's a story "that will make you believe in God". If it's not too personal, are you a man of faith? Do you believe that Pi's faith is necessary to his survival? YM: Yes, I have a faith of sorts, which does not mean that I'm not racked by doubts. But that's all right. I have let go of agnosticism and made that leap of faith. Where I'll land, what I'll find, is something that will take me a lifetime to answer. But to answer your question more concretely, I go to mass every Sunday, I take religious talk seriously (and counter religious nonsense from the inside now, rather than from the outside, quoting Jesus right back at them), and I consider myself a pilgrim on the way to a meeting with God. OJ: Reviews of the book seem to be uniformly positive--many are even rhapsodic. You've already won at least one prize and it looks like more might follow. I wondered did you know when you were writing the book that it might be something special? Or does everything you write feel the same to you and then you just have to wait to see if it finds an audience? YM: I knew Life of Pi was a good book. No matter how it fared publicly, it pleased me. I hoped readers would like it as much as I do, and that seems to be happening, but it hasn't been necessary for me to appreciate it. OJ: Finally, do you mind telling us what you're working on now? YM: An allegory of the Holocaust featuring a monkey and a donkey that are traveling through a land that is both a land--with trees and soil and rivers and skies, etc.--and a shirt--with seams and buttons and button holes and tear, etc. As they travel, the monkey notices words written in nature. He writes them down on the donkey's back. The words form a poem, "Instructions for the washing of a 20th century shirt", which will both stand on its own and be a commentary on the novel as a whole. The two animals will be slowly making their way to the capital of the shirt country, the city of Yellow Star, so called because of the shape of the fortifications and the colour of the bricks used. But obviously it turns out that the shirt is that of a Jew during the Nazi era. I want to see how we can deal with evil, how we live with it and can keep on living. The monkey will roughly represent the mind and donkey the body. I want to try to create a portable metaphor for the Holocaust, one that can be applied elsewhere, to other situations, in the hope of preventing other holocausts. Too much of the Holocaust is rooted in facts, which limits its application elsewhere (E.G. Rwanda, Yugoslavia, etc.). OJ: Thank you very much for your time and your consideration. www.brothersjudd.com retrieved 7/1/2004 5 If you enjoyed this book…. 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