I had heard from others that this book was great; in fact, I’d even heard it being described as a masterpiece. So there was really not choice in the matter, I had to read this book. But then I found out that this would be one of the books assigned for English class, so I procrastinated until last week.
Basically, the story follows an Indian boy named Piscine Molitor Patel. His family decides to immigrate to Canada but their ship sinks and Piscine (Pi) finds himself stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat with a tiger, a zebra, an orangutan and a hyena.
I’ve always had a problem with novels that lack in plot and try to make up for it by adding in a bunch of pointless imagery and metaphors. I am glad that this book was not one of them. “Life of Pi” is truly a deep novel. The story is very abstract and presents metaphors and symbolism that I’m still trying to understand.
Bottom Line – Yann Martel shows us metaphors done right. “Life of Pi” definitely scores high on the deepness scale. But was it entertaining? Was it a page turner? Unfortunately the answer is no, so I give it a 7.5/10
