Life of 4/1 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + 4/9 - 4/11 + 4/13 - ...

Life of Pi
Yann Martel

I had to read this book because I needed some fiction to balance my literary diet. And I heard it was great. A story about a shipwrecked Indian boy spending 227 days afloat in a life boat on the Pacific ocean with an adult male Bengal tiger for company has to be good. Even if it is semi-allegorical and/or fableized.

But I was pretty disappointed.

It's not that the book didn't deliver the promised fun shipwrecked-with-a-man-eater excitement. It's just that the rest of the book was terrible. The book comes in three parts: A long-winded and dry prelude which lasts nearly a third of the book; the shipwreck and survival section, which takes up the bulk of the rest of the book; and the cadenza, wrapping up loose ends and applying a good Hollywood ending.

I'm surprised that many people got through the first third. I'm pretty thick skinned about plotless writing; I devour Jared Diamond and Edward Abbey. But this still tested my mettle. The problem is that Yann Martel tries his hand at pursuasive writing, completely forgetting that he's writing a novel and that he is a novelist. I itallicized that last sentence because that is all he appears to be. His arguments are so ludicrous; filled with naive generalizations, ignorant statements, and some of the worse logic I've ever seen in copyrighted publication. He just has no idea what he's talking about, but he still talks about it, Krishna only knows why.

The first and third segments have a bit of dialog. I had to put the book down occasionally during these parts and check the front cover just to make sure I hadn't accidentally started reading a George Lucas book [a classy literary reference if I've seen one]. The dialog was impressively contrived and laborious. I often pondered whether the author was trying to create a nightmarish world of stilted communication in order to do something the English professorial types would have fun with. But I decided against that. I think Yann Martel just lacks any subtlety at all, and doesn't really care whether his characters seem real.

On the issue of subtlety, I think that the lack of it destroyed an otherwise cute and gratifying surprise ending. Throughout the book the author felt need it to pound into our heads every time he did something he thought was clever, and the ending was no exception. He leaves nothing of the nearly-perplexing and interesting ending to the imagination. After being bludgeoned repeatedly throughout the book with banal psuedoreligious pandering, the reader deserves a gentle, subtle, thoughtful ending.

I grant fiction writers almost infinite freedom to stretch credulity with the setup of the plot. What's the fun of fiction if they can't? So I have no bones to pick about the fantastic nature of the story itself, it is the book's main draw. But I did find Yann Martel's extensions and details so outrageous that it detracted from the story. I think he intended the book to have a "choose for yourself" type ending, like K-PAX, but unlike K-PAX one of the possibilities is so impossible and fantastical that it isn't an option. So you're forced to choose the other option [and if you missed the choice, he has a clunky dialogue that forces you to interpret it this way]. It's just not fun, it leaves the reader with no space for imagination or intrigue.

So, I don't know what all the fuss is about. The book is fun-you should read it-but the claim on the back of my edition that Yann Martel is the "greatest living writer of the generation born in the sixties" is absurd. I'm not sure that he's the greatest author born in 1963 in Salamanca with the surname of Martel, but I'll need to do some more research before I can say that for sure.