Ça Vaut le Coup—A Review of the Life of Pi by Yann Martel

“It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.”

Granted, I hadn't seen Life of Pi before reading the book (well, maybe I'd seen the trailer, but that's besides the point), and I only knew that there was a tiger in the book, because the cover had a tiger. I usually don't go into reading a book blindly. However, since this is a required read, I did just that.

Now, a good chunk of the book was extremely boring. You learn about Pi's backstory and the events of his life that lead up to his untimely adventure that encompasses the second half of the book. For instance, we are looking through his eyes as he questions religion for the first time, as he grows up in a zoo in India, how he was named after the French word for "swimming pool", and as he attempts to form a relationship with a tiger named Richard Park that won't actually develope until the latter half of the book.

Yet I couldn't help but find the second half of the book to be sort of interesting. It showed how bonds are formed and broken, how the human body can be tested to the extreme, and how the mind works in mysterious ways when a person is left alone with only the company of four random animasls.

Now, if you would be so kind, refer to the quote I posted at the beginning of this review. That comes from the end of the book, when Pi's lifeboat finally reaches the shores Mexico and he steps—or crawls, really—off the boat, Richard Parker, the only animal that managed to survive along with Pi, runs off into the jungle. Before he disappears from sight, he stops and hesitates. Pi hopes that he'll turn around, come back maybe, but then he's gone. That's when Pi learns that it is important in life "to conclude things properly." Afterwards, he cries because of the loss of the person who he considered to be his friend, his only friend.

Pi does not feel as if he had the chance to conclude everything. It was kind of like, "That's it?" in his mind. "After all we've been through, that's it?" That's why that quote stuck with me. It is important in life to conclude things properly, because only then can you truly let go without being full of remorse. In this case, moreover, Pi feels empty inside, like a void, because he never concluded his relationship with the tiger.

Another quote that I liked was, "You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it." And if you think about the book as a whole, this pretty much encompasses Pi's frame of mind. Pi is thrown so much in this book, whether it is religion, home life, or living with a tiger on a life boat. Through all of these situations, Pi reaches a low, but manages to turn it into a high through adaptations. He is definitely one of the strongest lead characters I've ever read about it. Most people would've lost all of their humanity (and with Pi, it's questionable sometimes), but he still manages to live a life and learn a lesson from everything he experiences.

I think I can say, along with Pi, that the journey was long and hard, full of challenge and question and near-death experiences, but in the end it was worth it.

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