Life of Pi

The recap

Piscine Molitor Patel, known as Pi to anyone hoping to avoid a schoolyard pun, grows up in Pondicherry, India, where his father runs the town zoo and Pi cheerfully practices Hinduism, Christianity and Islam all at once. When the family decides to emigrate to Canada, they sail across the Pacific on a Japanese cargo ship along with a number of their animals. The ship sinks, and sixteen-year-old Pi finds himself in a lifeboat with a spotted hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. What follows is a survival story of remarkable inventiveness: rationing water, studying animal behavior, learning to fish and negotiating territory with a predator in a space barely big enough for one. Martel frames the adventure as a story designed to test what readers are willing to believe, and it raises sly questions about faith, storytelling and how we make sense of suffering. Playful, philosophical and hard to put down, it is a fable that lingers.