Life of Pi

I'm pretty late to the Life of Pi party- I feel like at this point, a few years after the film adaptation came out, everyone's pretty much done with this story. Despite being a huge phenomenon when it first came out, and then a big-budget movie adaptation a few years ago, I don't think I've heard anyone mention or recommend it for a while now. Still though, I finally got around to reading it, and I was a huge fan. I knew of the general plot beforehand- a freighter traveling from India to Canada carrying an entire zoo full of animals crashes somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the only two survivors are the zookeeper's teenage son and a full-grown Bengal tiger, stuck together aboard a tiny lifeboat. I thought this was all preposterous, assuming the book was about the two learning to coexist and become friends or something. Not the case! The tiger is a constant threat throughout the whole book, leading the boy to think strategically about how he can possibly stay alive with this man-eating beast living so close. Not only that, but the ability to survive with a tiger in the middle of the ocean for months is actually one of the most believable plot points in the whole novel, which grounds its survival themes as realistically as possible, while having our duo experience all sorts of surreal fantasies on the side. How much of it is real? How much is a hallucination, or a straight up lie by our narrator? In many books I've read before, these are questions I've had to ask. What's different about Life of Pi though is how fundamental it is to the story that there is no correct answer. It's possible that Yann Martel gave us an unreliable narrator, but ultimately that's okay! Not only that, but he draws some pretty huge religious conclusions from this, and it's easy to see why this made such a splash back in the early 2000's. I'm guessing anyone reading this has already read the novel or seen the movie, but just in case, I give Life of Pi my recommendation.