＂Life of Pi could renew your faith in the ability of novelists
to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life.＂—
The New York Times Book Review
＂A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of
fiction.＂— Los Angeles Times Book Review
＂A gripping adventure story . . . Laced with wit, spiced with
terror, it''s a book by an extraordinary talent.＂— St. Paul
Pioneer-Press
＂A terrific book . . . Fresh, original, smart, devious, and
crammed with absorbing lore
內容簡介：
The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge
of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is
sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a
Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new
homes.
The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only
companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard
Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all
but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist
with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they
finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the
jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who
interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell
them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story,
a story much less fantastical, much more conventional--but is it
more true?
Yann Martel''s imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a
magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling
about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious
son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry,
India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting
"religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to
Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they
hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck,
Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot
lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick
orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker "His
head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth". It
sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don''t burst
into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature.
After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the
boat''s sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through
shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an
overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi
recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly
cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to
survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that night was the
worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that
I''ve made none the champion."
An award winner in Canada and winner of the 2002 Man Booker
Prize, Life of Pi, Yann Martel''s second novel, should prove to be
a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi
recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a
book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read
again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time."
It''s safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a
book. --Brad Thomas Parso
關於作者：
Yann Martel, the child of diplomats, grew up in Costa Rica,
France, Mexico, Alaska, and Canada and as an adult has spent time
in Iran, Turkey, and India. After studying philosophy at Trent
University, he worked at odd jobs until he began making a living as
a writer at the age of twenty-seven. He lives in Montreal.
內容試閱：
CHAPTER 1
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
Academic study and the steady, mindful practice of religion
slowly brought me back to life. I have remained a faithful Hindu,
Christian and Muslim. I decided to stay in Toronto. After one year
of high school, I attended the University of Toronto and took a
double-major Bachelor''s degree. My majors were religious studies
and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned
certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great
sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed. My zoology thesis was a
functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I
chose the sloth because its demeanour-calm, quiet and
introspective-did something to soothe my shattered self.
There are two-toed sloths and there are three-toed sloths, the
case being determined by the forepaws of the animals, since all
sloths have three claws on their hind paws. I had the great luck
one summer of studying the three-toed sloth in situ in the
equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing creature.
Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average
twenty hours a day. Our team tested the sleep habits of five wild
three-toed sloths by placing on their heads, in the early evening
after they had fallen asleep, bright red plastic dishes filled with
water. We found them still in place late the next morning, the
water of the dishes swarming with insects. The sloth is at its
busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in a most relaxed
sense. It moves along the bough of a tree in its characteristic
upside-down position at the speed of roughly 400 metres an hour. On
the ground, it crawls to its next tree at the rate of 250 metres an
hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated
cheetah. Unmotivated, it covers four to five metres in an
hour.
The three-toed sloth is not well informed about the outside
world. On a scale of 2 to 10, where 2 represents unusual dullness
and 10 extreme acuity, Beebe 1926 gave the sloth''s senses of
taste, touch, sight and hearing a rating of 2, and its sense of
smell a rating of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth
in the wild, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it; it
will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should
look about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a
Magoo-like blur. As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as
uninterested in sound. Beebe reported that firing guns next to
sleeping or feeding sloths elicited little reaction. And the
sloth''s slightly better sense of smell should not be overestimated.
They are said to be able to sniff and avoid decayed branches, but
Bullock 1968 reported that sloths fall to the ground clinging to
decayed branches "often".
How does it survive, you might ask.
Precisely by being so slow. Sleepiness and slothfulness keep it
out of harm''s way, away from the notice of jaguars, ocelots, harpy
eagles and anacondas. A sloth''s hairs shelter an algae that is
brown during the dry season and green during the wet season, so the
animal blends in with the surrounding moss and foliage and looks
like a nest of white ants or of squirrels, or like nothing at all
but part of a tree.
The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect
harmony with its environment. "A good-natured smile is forever on
its lips," reported Tirler 1966. I have seen that smile with my
own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and
emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil,
looking up at sloths in repose, I felt I was in the presence of
upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer,
wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach
of my scientific probing.
Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow
religious-studies students-muddled agnostics who didn''t know which
way was up, in the thrall of reason, that fool''s gold for the
bright-reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed
sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me
of God.
I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a
friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds
are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not
preoccupied with science.
I was a very good student, if I may say so myself. I was tops at
St. Michael''s College four years in a row. I got every possible
student award from the Department of Zoology. If I got none from
the Department of Religious Studies, it is simply because there are
no student awards in this department the rewards of religious
study are not in mortal hands, we all know that. I would have
received the Governor General''s Academic Medal, the University of
Toronto''s highest undergraduate award, of which no small number of
illustrious Canadians have been recipients, were it not for a
beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a
temperament of unbearable good cheer.
I still smart a little at the slight. When you''ve suffered a
great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and
trifling. My life is like a memento mori painting from European
art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of
the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and I
say, "You''ve got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but
I don''t believe in death. Move on!" The skull snickers and moves
ever closer, but that doesn''t surprise me. The reason death sticks
so closely to life isn''t biological necessity-it''s envy. Life is so
beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous,
possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over
oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and
gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud. The pink boy also got
the nod from the Rhodes Scholarship committee. I love him and I
hope his time at Oxford was a rich experience. If Lakshmi, goddess
of wealth, one day favours me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on the
list of cities I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca,
Varanasi, Jerusalem and Paris.
I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a
noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if
he''s not careful.
I love Canada. I miss the heat of India, the food, the house
lizards on the walls, the musicals on the silver screen, the cows
wandering the streets, the crows cawing, even the talk of cricket
matches, but I love Canada. It is a great country much too cold for
good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad
hairdos. Anyway, I have nothing to go home to in Pondicherry.
Richard Parker has stayed with me. I''ve never forgotten him. Dare
I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams.
They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such
is the strangeness of the human heart. I still cannot understand
how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of
goodbye, without looking back even once. That pain is like an axe
that chops at my heart.
The doctors and nurses at the hospital in Mexico were incredibly
kind to me. And the patients, too. Victims of cancer or car
accidents, once they heard my story, they hobbled and wheeled over
to see me, they and their families, though none of them spoke
English and I spoke no Spanish. They smiled at me, shook my hand,
patted me on the head, left gifts of food and clothing on my bed.
They moved me to uncontrollable fits of laughing and crying.
Within a couple of days I could stand, even make two, three
steps, despite nausea, dizziness and general weakness. Blood tests
revealed that I was anemic, and that my level of sodium was very
high and my potassium low. My body retained fluids and my legs
swelled up tremendously. I looked as if I had been grafted with a
pair of elephant legs. My urine was a deep, dark yellow going on to
brown. After a week or so, I could walk just about normally and I
could wear shoes if I didn''t lace them up. My skin healed, though I
still have scars on my shoulders and back.
The first time I turned a tap on, its noisy, wasteful,
superabundant gush was such a shock that I became incoherent and my
legs collapsed beneath me and I fainted in the arms of a
nurse.
The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada I used my
fingers. The waiter looked at me critically and said, "Fresh off
the boat, are you?" I blanched. My fingers, which a second before
had been taste buds savouring the food a little ahead of my mouth,
became dirty under his gaze. They froze like criminals caught in
the act. I didn''t dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my
napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were
like nails being driven into my flesh. I picked up the knife and
fork. I had hardly ever used such instruments. My hands trembled.
My sambar lost its taste.
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