He prays to Jesus and Mary, Allah, Krishna and Vishnu. In addition to his own native Hindu beliefs, Pi adds Christianity and Islam, and happily integrates them into his daily life. To everyone’s horror, he systematically samples religions like canapés on a cosmic platter. Pi is a person dedicated to finding his connection to the Eternal. The “story” of Pi Patel, teenaged son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, India, is a simple one. ve question for man is: Is he related to the Infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life.” This book goes where few books have gone before, bravely embarking on a metaphysical trek that explores the deepest of life’s mysteries while remaining an exciting Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not style saga of a shipwreck victim’s bizarre exigencies. An adventure yarn, an allegory and a series of essays on animal behavior, rolled into one - and much more beyond that. It’s a devotional book devised by a humanist, a philosophical treatise penned by a pragmatist. This is a map of the spiritual realm methodically charted by a scientist.

This is “Survivor” scripted by a philosopher. The unlikely bedfellows of existentialism and faith find common ground here. In Life of Pi, the theories of Darwin and the psychology of Jung happily go hand-in-hand, with Kierkegaard tagging along, too. The book is about all of these things - and about none of these things, really. A perusal of online booksellers reveals that this book can be categorized as a survival story, a tall tale, an action piece, a work about human/animal relationships, and a fiction about (1) India, (2) adolescence, (3) zoos and zoology, and (4) the Pacific Ocean, which indicates to this reviewer that book dealers are grasping at anything they can find to define what essentially defies definition. Likewise, there is no one answer to the question, “What is Life of Pi about?” There will be probably be as many answers to that question as there are people who read the book. The koans are simply tools to promote non-linear, out-of-the-box type thinking which will, according to the Eastern mystics, lead a seeker to a sense of oneness and harmony with the universe. There may be many - as many different ones as there are students seeking enlightenment - or there may be none. The trick of the koan is that there really isn’t one correct solution. Reviewing Yann Martel’s astounding Life of Pi is a great deal like trying to solve Zen koans, the ancient conundrums used by Buddhist teachers to facilitate their disciples in reaching a state of enlightenment. You cannot find any piece of meat that is not the best.’ At these words, the disciple received enlightenment.” He overheard a customer say to the butcher, ‘Give me the best piece of meat you have.’ The butcher replied, ‘Everything in my shop is the best. “One day a disciple was walking through the marketplace.

The pi book