UPDATE: Some will see this as good news...there is a movie based on this piffling 21st-century Kahlil Gibran ripoff, directed by Ang Lee, coming out...trailer here. As one can readily see, no smarm or treacle has been spared.


The whole world has a copy of this book, including me...but not for long. Over 10,000 copies of this on LT, so how many trees died just for our copies alone? Don't go into the forest, ladies and gents, the trees will be lookin' for revenge after they read this book.

There is no question that Martel can write lovely sentences: "Those first hours were associated in my memory with one sound, not one you'd guess, not the yipping of the hyena or the hissing of the sea: it was the buzzing of flies. There were flies aboard the lifeboat. They emerged and flew about in the way of flies, in great, lazy orbits except when they came close to each other, when they spiralled together with dizzying speed and a burst of buzzing." (p118, paper ed.) Good, good stuff, nicely observed and handsomely rendered, and not enough to lift this dreary pseudo-philosophical rehash of Jonathan Livingston Seagull into greatness.

Piscine Molitor (Pi) Patel does not wring my heartstrings on his spiritual quest across the vasty deep, accompanied by a tiger named Richard Parker, to a carnivorous island, thence to Mexico to answer to a pair of noxious Japanese stereotypes and, ultimately, to Canada...sort of an anodyne for all the adventure he's been through, the way the author presents it. If I were Canadian or Torontoid (or whatever they call themselves), I'd be livid with fury over this crapulous insult to my homeland.

But hey, I'm Texan and Murrikin, if they don't care enough to run this yahoo outta town, why should I? The yodeling of joyous awakening that fogged this book on its debut..."a story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction" ugh!; "could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life" oh really?; "a fabulous romp through an imagination by turns ecstatic, cunning, despairing and resilient" *retch*...made my "oh yeah?" follicle erect its sturdy little hair, so I avoided it. But, in all fairness, people I love and respect lived it, so it's a mitzvah to read it, right?

Public notice: My spiritual debt to the opinions of others is, with the reading of this ghastly book, herewith Paid In Full For Good. Most strongly and heartily NOT RECOMMENDED.


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