Life of Pi

I finished Life of Pi several weeks ago and am just now getting around to responding to popular demand and posting my thoughts about it.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and was glad I read it. The basic setup is that the main character, Pi, and his family are moving from India to Canada and are taking their zoo animals with them; Pi's father is a zookeeper. The ship they travel on sinks in the Pacific, and Pi is left on a lifeboat with zoo animals as his only companions. The book gets a lot of mileage out of the sheer novelty of this. It surprised me how many times it can be funny to see nautical terms and zoo animals in the same sentence, like, "That was a cramped space; between the broad back of the zebra and the sides of the buoyancy tanks that went all around the boat beneath the benches, there wasn't much room left for a hyena."

Martel also tries to get some comic mileage out of having Pi be (or claim to be) Christian, Hindu, and Muslim at the same time. This is occasionally, but only occasionally very funny, and unlike the zoo animals, it doesn't have any real relation to the plot itself. While having a hyena on a lifeboat actually influences the events that take place, having a Hindu aboard apparently does not.

My only complaint is about the ending, which was very disappointing, in that some of the magic of the rest of the book disappears.