Rating: WARTY!
This was another audiobook experimental fail! In this case, it began as though it was going to be a fun listen, but like too many other such audiobooks, it ended-up becoming too boring for me to continue with. A certain previous US president is a moron if he really thinks this novel is "an elegant proof of God." It's proof of nothing more than how a writer can ramble pretentiously if neither he nor his editor curbs it.
The author says it was inspired by Max and the Cats, a novella published in 1991 by Moacyr Scliar, and Martel almost got sued for it, but you can't copyright an idea, only a written work, and I understand that the two stories are rather different, although the basic premise of each is essentially the same. Having listened to this one, I suspect the other story will be better, but I have not read it.The entire book is a flashback, which I do not like at all, and it's in first person, which is another reason not to like it. As it happened, it began entertainingly, the most fun part of the story being in the beginning, when Pi (whose full name is Piscine Molitor Patel) lived as a child in Pondicherry, a city in southeast India, south of Chennai. His family owns a zoo, and that story was interesting and amusing, but then Pi's father suddenly decides to move the family to Canada, and a few days out of the port, the ship sinks.
Nearly everyone dies, and Pi finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger, a hyena, a zebra, and an orangutan. The hyena eats everything except the tiger; then the tiger eats the hyena. Pi and the tiger seem to agree to avoid each other from then on, but a sailor shows up and apparently has the intention of eating Pi. Fortunately for Pi, the interloper is summarily dispatched by the tiger.
The boat reaches an island which is inhospitable, so Pi and the tiger set sail once more, finally beaching in Mexico, whereupon the tiger takes off for the wilds leaving Pi feeling bereft. Pi is interviewed about the shipwreck, and tells the truth, but the interviewers don't believe him so he makes up a lie involving no animal activity, and he offers that as an alternative, whereupon they choose the believe the animal story rather than the alternative. everyone seems to be an idiot in this story.
The take-home text from the novel appears to be that anything can be reality, which is plain stupid. It's been repeatedly shown that humans are the most unreliable witnesses imaginable, routinely mis-remembering and misinterpreting things, and augmenting their 'reality' with pure fiction, and changing their stories to match those which others are spouting, so the asinine pretense that an internal 'religious' experience can be a valid reality is as nonsensical as it is hysterical.
Yes, it may make your blinkered life different, but it's meaningless to everyone else. Science is the only sure way to find out about reality. Religion might be fine on a personal level, but in the big picture, it creates monsters like David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite and Jim Jones. Just because such people say it's so doesn't mean they have any better handle on 'reality' than your typical hallucinating or delusional inmate confined in a psychiatric hospital.
I can't rate this as a worthy read.
