Spellbinding magic realism
13 October 2013, 18:01 PM
UPDATED
14 October 2013, 18:50 PM
Life of Pi by Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize in 2002. It became a literary blockbuster success which soared on to bestseller lists after it was published in the United States in 2002 and sold more than 185,000 copies in hardcover. In paperback it sold nearly two million copies. It won the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award, in November of that year.
Bizarre and astonishing storytelling. At times you don't know whether to put down the book in absolute disgust or to go on reading, hoping to be rewarded with something more plausible. One has to suspend disbelief to be able to complete reading the book. Surreal, phantasmagoric, an affront to your intelligence – yet spellbinding. A difficult book to review or to explain, even to describe – but an experience quite out of the ordinary, nevertheless.
Macabre, zany, hilarious. Made me retch and almost throw up – a number of times.
Life of Pi is an implausible story of a 16 year-old boy Molitor Piscine Patel, who is shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on his family's migratory trip out of Pondicherry, India, to Toronto, Canada.
Pi's father runs the Pondicherry Zoo with its menagerie of typical zoo inmates – where Pi and his brother are having a quite typical and enjoyable upbringing. Financial misfortunes lead to the closing down of the Zoo when Pi's father decides to give away the animals to various zoos around the globe and to migrate with his wife and two sons to Toronto, Canada.
The story is a wonderful rollercoaster ride that can only be born of the mind of a hallucinatory writer. Philosophical, poignant, comic, uproariously hilarious at times – it keeps the reader's attention riveted.
Magic realism in the narration of the improbable, hypothetical and fantastic story keeps the reader spellbound.
Seven years after publishing Life of Pi Yann Martel has sold a manuscript for his follow-up for around $3 million. Martel's third novel, as yet untitled, is to be published in the United States sometime next year. Like Life of Pi, the new book is an allegory — this time about the Holocaust — involving animals. It relates the story of an encounter between a famous writer and a taxidermist who is writing a play that features dialogue between a donkey and a monkey, both imprinted on a shirt.
Hmmm. Now, does that sound interesting!
Yawn.
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