Life of Pi

Life of Pi was published in 2001 and is a Canadian novel by Yann Martel. It was rejected by several London publishers before Knopf Canada took it, and it went on to win the Man Booker Prize the following year and to sell many millions of copies. The French translation, L'Histoire de Pi, went on to be chosen for a French-language reading competition. The book opens with a note from the author describing meetings and events that are themselves part of the fiction, which sets up one of its subjects: how a story is told shapes what a reader is able to believe about it.

The novel has three movements. The first is Pi's childhood in Pondicherry, where his father runs a zoo and Pi takes up Hinduism, Christianity and Islam in turn while the adults around him try to keep up. The second is the shipwreck and the long drift, told as practical survival: fresh water, food, the inventory of a lifeboat, and the problem of sharing it with a 450-pound tiger. The third returns to Pi as an adult being interviewed about what happened to him.

The tiger is why the novel is remembered. Richard Parker is neither tamed nor explained, and the relationship between the boy and the animal is worked out in detail across the middle of the book, which is why it is described as an adventure as often as it is described as a philosophical novel. It was adapted into a feature film in 2012, and it continues to be read and taught as a book about belief, storytelling and the relativity of truth.