June 2024 Book, Life of Pi

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library.

Pi is 17 when he and his zookeeper family decide to escape the political instability of 1970's India and move, animals and all, to Canada. They load their animals onto a Japanese cargo ship named the Tsimtsum and set sail, for the New World, but for reasons that will forever elude the maritime authorities, the Tsimtsum sinks -- suddenly and violently -- just before dawn on its fourth day out of Manila. Only five survivors are able to reach the single lifeboat that doesn't go down with the ship: Pi himself, an injured zebra, a prize Borneo orangutan, one very nervous hyena and a tiger who (thanks to a clerical error that confused the names of the animal and its captor) is called Richard Parker.

They make for a rather volatile crew. The politics of the animal kingdom being what they are, the zebra, the orangutan and the hyena are quickly dispatched, leaving boy and tiger alone on the 26-foot craft. But thanks to a territory-defining tarpaulin and the general bewilderment of two traumatized and seasick creatures, the obvious does not immediately occur. Pi remains uneaten long enough to reach an important insight about his boatmate: ''I had to tame him,'' he realizes. ''It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.'' As paradoxical as it may seem, Pi understands that his own survival depends on keeping his ferocious opponent alive and well -- ''because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker.''


 

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