Life of Pi

All right, its been awhile since I made a post. I've been caught up doing school stuff. The good thing is that most of my school work involves reading books so I've found a lot of good new literature this semester. Eventually I will get it all up here.
You may have heard of Yann Martel's Life of Pi on Oprah or something like that. But believe me, its still worth reading. I read it for a literary theory class I'm in as a perfect example of post-structuralism in novels. Before reading it, I was not too familiar with theory but this book helped me to understand it.
I really like this book. There is all kinds of stuff going on in it. The story is about a boy named Pi who is raised in a zoo. Not in a cage, mind you, his family owns the zoo.
After telling about his childhood there, his family leaves India to go the America and the boat crashes en route. The rest of the book details Pi's survival story as he is shipwrecked and stuck on a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger. This sounds very far-fetched, and its supposed to.
The awesome thing about this book is it presents itself as a true story. Depending on the reader, this can be believed up to certain points. But eventually, nearly all readers, I would say, catch on to the absurdity of it all and see what Martel is doing. He presents Pi's story as true, but at the end of the book, makes the argument, and I agree with him, that even stories told as truth are always mixed with different interpretations and perspectives. In this way, every story that is ever told becomes fiction in the telling.
I don't want to ruin the ending for anyone that hasn't read it and might. Just keep in mind that on another level, this idea is also Martel's philosophy of religion and belief. When you see how things play out in the end, it is an interesting take on how to view faith and belief. Basically, Martel says, there are certain things that have definitely happened. For instance, we humans know we are here on earth. That's the fact. How we explain this differs from person to person. We can explain it through nothing but cold, hard facts, or as Martel calls it, "dry, yeastless factuality." Or, we can choose, say religion, which explains things in a more creative and uplifting way. Martel contends that to choose just the factuality is to deprive life of its wonder.
This is a great book. Its easy to read and has some very interesting ideas.