Scooter Chronicles

This evening I finished the highly acclaimed novel “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel. This is the first book that we are reading for the Brew & Book Club.

WARNING: IF YOU ARE A MEMBER OF THE BREW & BOOK CLUB, YOU MAY NOT WANT TO READ THIS!

Of course, I don’t say a whole lot about it anyway that would give away anyhting.

From Amazon.Com and Brad Thomas Parsons, here is the set-up:

The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting “religions the way a dog attracts fleas.” Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker (”His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth”). It sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don’t burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat’s sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: “It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I’ve made none the champion.”

There is a lot to this book, though short. A lot to think about. A lot to miss. I am glad that this is going to be discussed. Everyone else’s insight should be very interesting. Martel has given the reader so much, and subtly at times, too. And if that wasn’t good enough, the last 30 pages has you guessing at everything that happens in the book. Makes you think even more about what this all means to Pi, and you the reader.

I am not sure how I feel about this book, or at least what to say about it. Quite frankly as I sit here and think about it, I want to discuss it. Shed more light on what I think. One thing that I keep thinking about was something said early in the book. It is “a story to make you believe in God.” Given my faith as it is, I don’t think this helped me. But what of someone that doesn’t?

I guess all I can say right now is that we picked one heck of a book to start this discussion group with.