This is a heavy book. Be warned. You must be prepared to polish it off in one sitting and yet still feel unsatisfied. You will end up thinking about the story even DAYS after you had finish reading it.
This is how impactful the book is.
Stunningly written, it questions a lot on religion, life, god and the question of necessity, perception and faith.
Pi was a religious man, he believed in many religion. He just wanted to believe in god. That's pluralism and I can identify with that. Since coming into contact with spirituality, I'm becoming closer to thinking that there is no one definite religion, but perhaps just different portrays of one god/source of life (?) to different people through different gods and thus appealing to them to their different cultures and practices.
And yes, Pi has a really strong sense of survival. Surviving 227 days afloat the sea is no mean feat, although in the end we knew how he did. The ending is open to many interpretations. How I interpret it though was that there were no animals on board. I mean the animals were all locked up in their cages and placed in the cargo at the bottom of the ship. Should the ship have sunk, the animals were the first to perish-they can't escape from their cages, much less swim to the surface into lifeboats. So I don't believe that the animals were really there. I'm more inclined to the second story, whereby each animal represents one character- the zebra as the sailor, the orang utan as Pi's mother, the hyena as the cook and Richard Parker as Pi.
With this newfound knowledge (and reading this book after the movie), it was really tough reading it, knowing when the animals injure/kill each other were actually between humans made it harder to stomach. And also the parts on cannibalism, the ethnics-whether it was really justified to do so were also brought up in the story. The drive of necessity, the lack of food made humans resort to animal like behaviours, killing one another and yes of course- only the strongest survive. Isn't that the Darwinian theory that many of us are familiar with? The survival of the fittest. And yes, Pi's very fit. There's the animal side in him, the Bengal Tiger Richard Parker side, that will do anything to survive.
It's kind of like a split personality for Pi. He had to acknowledge the presence of an evil side of him (the tiger) because that's what keeps him alive. The meat eating tiger side. The vegeterian Pi will not be able to survive alone out there. He needed the tiger. And the tiger needed Pi so that he won't go insane.
A very heavy book. I will have a hard time getting this out of my mind.
Some quotes that I like from the book:
"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."
"If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”
“You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.”
“You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.”
“If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?”
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