Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, India, who explores issues of spirituality and metaphysics from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger which raises questions about the nature of reality and how it is perceived and told.
The novel has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. It was rejected by at least 5 London publishing houses before being accepted by Knopf Canada, which published it in September 2001. Martel won the Man Booker Prize the following year. It was also chosen for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2003, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee.
The French translation L'Histoire de Pi was chosen in the French CBC version of the contest Le Combat des livres, where it was championed by Louise Forestier. The novel won the 2003 Boeke Prize, a South African novel award. In 2004, it won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Best Adult Fiction for years 2001–2003. In 2012 it was adapted into a feature film directed by Ang Lee with a screenplay by David Magee.
In 2022, the novel was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.
Plot
The book begins with a note from the author, which is an integral part of the novel. Unusually, the note describes mostly fictional events. It serves to establish and enforce one of the book's main themes: the relativity of truth.
Part one
In the 1960s, the narrator, Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, grows up as the son of the manager of a zoo in Pondicherry. While later recounting his life there, he proffers insight on the antagonism of zoos and expresses his thoughts on why animals react less negatively than proponents of the idea suggest.
The narrator describes how he acquired his full name as a tribute to the swimming pool in France. After schoolmates tease him by transforming his first name into "Pissing", he establishes the short form of his name as "Pi" when he starts secondary school. The name, he says, pays tribute to the transcendental number which is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
In recounting his experiences, Pi describes several other unusual situations involving proper names: two visitors to the zoo, one a devout Muslim, and the other a committed atheist, bear identical names; and a 450-pound Bengal tiger at the zoo bears the name Richard Parker as the result of a clerical error which switched the tiger's name with the name of his human captor.
One day, Pi and his older brother Ravi are given an impromptu lesson on the dangers of the animals kept at the zoo. It opens with a goat being fed to another tiger, followed by a family tour of the zoo, during which his father explains the aggressive biological features of each animal.
Pi is raised as a Hindu and practices vegetarianism. At the age of fourteen, he investigates Christianity and Islam, and decides to become an adherent of all three religions, much to his parents' dismay (and his religious mentors' frustration), saying he "just wants to love God". He tries to understand God through the lens of each religion, and comes to recognize benefits in each.
A few years later in February 1976, during the period when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declares "The Emergency", Pi's father decides to sell the zoo and emigrate with his wife and sons to Canada.
Part two
The second part of the novel begins in July 1977 with Pi's family aboard the Tsimtsum, a Japanese freighter that is transporting animals from their zoo to North America. A few days out of port from Manila, the ship encounters a storm and sinks. Pi manages to escape in a small lifeboat, only to learn that the boat also holds a spotted hyena, an injured Grant's zebra, and an orangutan named Orange Juice. Much to the boy's distress, the hyena kills the zebra and then Orange Juice. A tiger has been hiding under the boat's tarpaulin: it is Richard Parker, who had boarded the lifeboat with ambivalent assistance from Pi himself sometime before the hyena attack. Suddenly emerging from his hideaway, Richard Parker kills and eats the hyena.