Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Blurb:

After the sinking of a cargo ship, a slitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only urvivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan - and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and beloved works of fiction in recent years.

Reflection:
I enjoyed this book but I think the movie was better. The effect of images makes the story more enchanting and captures you imagination. Not that this book did not do this but at times I was a little bored. Understandably so when nothing is always happening when you are stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, even with a tiger.
Martel was trying to make the reader think that this event actually happened which confused me a little bit but once you got past that it was good and made it more realistic.
I thought the beginning was a little bit stretched. Although talking about his childhood and how he came to be of 3 different religions, I found it pointless because all of the time in the boat he barely made mention to religion.
I thought that religion would be a key topic within the book, especially when he had no one else to look to but Martel seemed to think that this wasn't important and I thought he could have done more with that beginning.
When Pi lost both his parents and brother, Martel did not comprehensively describe the pain that Pi would have gone through. This might have been because Pi was malnourished and lacking water, but even so, when Pi landed on the carnivorous island and had plenty to eat and drink, surely he would be reminiscing over their time as a family and he would have shown some pain. But this was not the case.
I also thought that the ending was quite abrupt as suddenly we went from Pi leaving the island in fear of his life to him washing up on the shores of Mexico. This would indicate that the carnivorous island was not far from the shore of Mexico but in that case surely it would have been found by fishermen?
I did like the ending though how, against all likelihoods and beliefs, the two reporters believed Pi's story, no matter how unrealistically it might have seemed.
This book was hard to read because some of the language I did not understand quite so well but I think it has benefited my reading abilities quite comprehensively.