你一直在玩

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2002.

Love the cover: the ocean blue, the white boat, the Bengal tiger, the black boy Pi, and hundreds of various marine animals.

 

Although the book I read actually looks like this:

THE most interesting book I finished reading recently. 100 chapters, 350+ pages, thousands of weird new words that even KINGSOFT couldn’t resolve…there could’ve been no way for me to finish reading it, if not because of its own magic. And it does have that magic.

The Robertson family survived thirty-eight days at sea. Captain Bligh of the celebrated mutinous Bounty and his fellow castaways survived forty-seven days. Steven Callahan survived seventy-six. Owen Chase, whose account of the sinking of the whaling ship Essex by a whale inspired Herman Melville, survived eighty-three days at sea with two mates, interrupted by a one-week stay on an inhospitable island. The Bailey family survived 118 days. I have heard of a Korean merchant sailor named Poon, I believe, who survived the Pacific for 173 days in the 1950s. I survived 227 days. That’s how long my trial lasted, over seven months.

It was one early morning, already very hot outside, when I was still in bed reading.The cars were blaring outside as loudly as possible. When I reached page 210, read the above lines, I felt I was hit by a gush of strong emotion, like punched heavily right into my heart. 227 days, can you imagine? A 16-year-old boy (with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker), constrained to a small lifeboat and self-made raft, drifting and bobbing on the endless Pacific Ocean. Uh….I know, it’s only fictional. But it was written in such an original and realistic way, that I was always tricked into believing that this was a true story. Totally believable.
Humour could be sensed all over the book: I laughed out loud(while there was nobody around) about once every three pages, and giggled even more.

Part One. Toronto and Pondicherry
Pi is the name of our main character, an Indian boy originally named ”Piscine”, who shortened his name to avoid certain embarrassment: piscine sounds like pissing. (More similar names are used by his classmates, like, Omega, Delta, Gamma, Upsilon…)
Pi’s family (one father+one mother+two boys) owns a zoo in India, where Pi and the readers first learn about all those animals: chimpanzees, slothes, hyenas, orang-utans, otters, rhinoceros, gibbons…and many more (which I am still not able to spell out correctly).
This part also talks a lot about religion: the Islam, the Hinduism, and the Christianism. The lovely boy happens to be extreme loyal believer of all three religions, which makes him a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Christian…Funny questions and scenes are aroused due to his tri-religion.

Part Two. the Pacific Ocean
Pi is orphaned by a storm, which takes away the whole crew and his family, when the whole family are a ship moving to Canada, all along with thousands of zoo animals they possess. Pi is thrown into a lifeboat minutes before their ship sinks to the bottom of the sea. There are four animals aboard at first: a Bengal tiger, a orang-utans, a hyena, and a zebra.
It got a bit boring reading this part of story. The first part only took me several days, but this second one…several months. (Anyway…that was during a rough period, hard for me to calm down, ay back, and do any reading before getting exhausted and impatient.) So, reasonable enough, if reading such a story about drifting on the ocean for 227 days could get so boring, how about actually living it once for real?  haha.
Drifting, fishing, taming the tiger, collecting rain water…turtles, swordfish, flying fish…man-eating island…

Part Three Mexico
Happy ending, finally. A twist here, though.

ok…just stop here.