Yann Martel's award-winning novel, "Life of Pi," is a story about a 16-year-old Indian boy who survives a shipwreck and spends months on a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger named "Richard Parker." Piscine Molitor Patel is a strange boy. His father is a zookeeper, and he has a very good understanding of animal behavior, loves stories, and practices not just Hinduism, but Christianity and Islam as well. At the age of sixteen, Pi and his family plan to emigrate from India all the way to North America on a Japanese cargo ship, called the Tsimtsum, with their zoo animals along with them.
About half way on their trip, they run into a very bad storm and the ship sinks along with Pi's family. Pi ends up on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan named Orange Juice, a wounded zebra, and a fully-grown Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Richard Parker kills all of the other animals on the boat, leaving just himself and Pi. They are stranded on the lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific for 227 days (Martel 316). Upon drifting onto the shores of Mexico, Richard Parker runs into the jungle, and Pi never sees him again. With the Japanese wondering what happened to their ship, they interrogate the only survivor who is Pi himself. They do not believe his story. After hours of trying to get Pi to tell them more of a believable story, he tells a different story which is much more realistic.
The plot of this book is really what gets to me. A 16 year old boy, who comes from a relatively well off family in the heart of South India, ends up on a life boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with an adult Bengal tiger due to unseen circumstances. You would wonder how an author could come up with a story that can make such a fluid transition. But Yann Martel has done it, and he has done it very well. Yann Martel picked a very interesting setting. Pondicherry, India is a very lively city. He did a very good job of describing the sights, the smells, and the people that are there, which make you feel that you are walking the city streets along Pi's side.
