Life of Pi

by Yann Martel

Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certificates. The plot you’ve

Great line!

Your story is emotionally dead, that’s the crux of it. The discovery is something soul-destroying, I tell you. It leaves you with an aching hunger.

I stuck to the humble, bruised truth.

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless

I would have received the Governor General’s Academic Medal, the University of Toronto’s highest undergraduate award, of which no small number of illustrious Canadians have been recipients, were it not for a beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament of unbearable good cheer.

Medals

Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

Life!

I love Canada. I miss the heat of India, the food, the house lizards on the walls, the musicals on the silver screen, the cows wandering the streets, the crows cawing, even the talk of cricket matches, but I love Canada. It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.

Canada

Piscines Château-Landon, Rouvet or du boulevard de la Gare. They

That is how I got my name when I entered this world, a last, welcome addition to my family, three years after Ravi: Piscine Molitor Patel.

Name

a pyramid of turtles; the iridescent snout of a mandrill; the stately silence of a giraffe; the obese, yellow open mouth of a hippo; the beak-and-claw climbing of a macaw parrot up a wire fence; the greeting claps of a shoebill’s bill; the senile, lecherous expression of a camel. And

Poetry of animals

manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.

Life 2

Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

Religion

am who I am.” Half an hour later two pizzas arrived for “Ian Hoolihan”.

Name

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names. Witness

Identity

My name is Piscine Molitor Patel, known to all as —I double underlined the first two letters of my given name— Pi Patel

Name

The top of his head was bald and pointy, yet he had the most impressive jowls I have ever seen, and his narrow shoulders gave way to a massive stomach that looked like the base of a mountain, except that the mountain stood in thin air, for it stopped abruptly and disappeared horizontally into his pants. It’s

Wild descriptions.

When Mr. Kumar visited the zoo, it was to take the pulse of the universe, and his stethoscopic mind always confirmed to him that everything was in order, that everything was order. He

Order n peace

If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

On faith

The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.

Stewardship

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you would be amazed at the animals that would fall out. It would pour more than cats and dogs, I tell you. Boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, piranhas, ostriches, wolves, lynx, wallabies, manatees, porcupines, orang-utans, wild boar—that’s the sort of rainfall you could expect on your umbrella. And they expected to find—ha! In

Shake out tokyo

The same is true of other circus animals and is also seen in zoos. Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them, most in need of their company, least likely to challenge them or be difficult. The

Social status

am aware of Presence, not personal the way we usually feel presence, but something larger. My heart still skips a beat when I catch sight of the murti, of God Residing, in the inner sanctum of a temple. Truly I am in a sacred cosmic womb, a place where everything is born, and it is my sweet luck to behold its living core.

Temple

There is Brahman, the world soul, the sustaining frame upon which is woven, warp and weft, the cloth of being, with all its decorative elements of space and time. There

Brahaman

The truth of life is that Brahman is no different from atman, the spiritual force within us, what you might call the soul. The

Soul

This, in a holy nutshell, is Hinduism, and I have been a Hindu all my life. With

Identity

So it is that we should not be jealous with God.

Not true

First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.

Wonder

since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story.

Capital Leters

Surely this religion had more than one story in its bag—religions abound with stories. But Father Martin made me understand that the stories that came before it—and there were many—were simply prologue to the Christians. Their religion had one Story, and to it they came back again and again,

Christianity

But divinity should not be blighted by death. It’s wrong. The world soul cannot die, even in one contained part of it. It

Christianity

That is God as God should be. With shine and power and might. Such as can rescue and save and put down evil.

God

He bothered me, this Son. Every day I burned with greater indignation against Him, found more flaws to Him.

Conscience

And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him.

GOD

Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven days. Even on a symbolic level, that’s creation in a frenzy.

Interesting

If Hinduism flows placidly like the Ganges, then Christianity bustles like Toronto at rush hour. It is a religion as swift as a swallow, as urgent as an ambulance. It turns on a dime, expresses itself in the instant. In a moment you are lost or saved. Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.

Christianity is a swift religion

quick, necessary, physical, muttered, striking. Next time I was praying in church—on my knees, immobile, silent before Christ on the Cross—the image of this callisthenic communion with God in the middle of bags of flour kept coming to my mind.

On prayer

with nothing in his looks or in his dress that made memory cry hark. I’m

Descriptions

The feeling, a paradoxical mix of pulsing energy and profound peace, was intense and blissful. Whereas before the road, the sea, the trees, the air, the sun all spoke differently to me, now they spoke one language of unity. Tree took account of road, which was aware of air, which was mindful of sea, which shared things with sun. Every element lived in harmonious relation with its neighbour, and all was kith and kin. I knelt a mortal; I rose an immortal. I felt like the centre of a small circle coinciding with the centre of a much larger one. Atman

Worship..which relligion

An intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose.

God

“I suppose that’s what we’re all trying to do—love God.”

Devotion

The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile,

Heart

What makes them uproot and leave everything they’ve known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why

Identity n place

But I had noticed before that it was when I tried my hardest to recognize him that I was least able to pick him out.

trying to se

We did not want to live in a country of gale-force winds and minus-two-hundred-degree winters. Canada was not on the cricket map.

Canada

Litres of water used up in the wetting of stamps. Dear

Exagerstion

Transportation organized. A fortune spent on telephone calls. It’s a joke in the zoo business, a weary joke, that the paperwork involved in trading a shrew weighs more than an elephant, that the paperwork involved in trading an elephant weighs more than a whale, and that you must never try to trade a whale, never.

Zoo joke

Father walked out into the urban jungle of Pondicherry and bought a cow with dark wet eyes, a nice fat hump and horns so straight and at such right angles to its head that it looked as if it had licked an electrical outlet. Father

Zoo crwaziness

For she was leaving India, India of the heat and monsoons, of rice fields and the Cauvery River, of coastlines and stone temples, of bullock carts and colourful

India

Why can’t reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there’s so little fish to catch?”

Purpose?

moved with the slow, massive confidence of a continent.

On ships