I'm sorry, but I had to force myself to finish reading Life of Pi despite several strong recommendations given my interest in animal behavior. It was written in a juvenile style that is appropriate to the thesis of the novel, but off-putting to me given my preference for adult literature. ...
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I'm sorry, but I had to force myself to finish reading Life of Pi despite several strong recommendations given my interest in animal behavior. It was written in a juvenile style that is appropriate to the thesis of the novel, but off-putting to me given my preference for adult literature. I read the entire novel, every word, nevertheless and I bother to review. Besides the writing, I was revolted by the scenes of animal depravity which struck me as over-the-top for literature even if mildly accurate in fact. I have no sympathy for the religious angles, of Pi trying to reconcile for himself the manifest incomparability of Christian, Muslim, and Hindu religious belief. All are utter nonsense to one of my mentality even as I believe I have some good sense of their nature as belief systems held by almost the entire world of 6,500,000,000 people today. I focus my criticism on its treatment of the conditioning of the tiger, Richard Parker. The novel was entirely inadequate in describing how one conditions behavior with signals/rewards and threats/punishments. I will grant that author Martel seems to appreciate the concept of conditioned behavior, at least in some vague way. I also can actually believe that the basic theme of surviving in a life boat alone with a tiger is conceivable, thanks in part to this story. But the point of the animal/human angle is what? That people are animals? Ho hum--educated people have known this at least since Darwin. That animals are not people? Again, serious literature has made this clear since probably history began, but surely made completely obvious since the romantic rebellion against science, perhaps best exemplified by surrealism such as Kafka's novel, Metamorphosis. People are animals; animals are not people. I guess that this is still mystifying to the naive and thus worthy of further blathering on and on. There may be an audience for this, but it is not an educated, adult one. As one final criticism, I note that as I read I underlined on each page the first mention of a species, then went back through the entire book to count them, the point being how so few were even mentioned, let alone given some worthy treatment as 'miracles' of nature as a scientist understands animals. Every word of this book could simply contain the name of a species instead of a word of this story and this would not be but a small fraction of the species we know exist and will likely reproduce their kind for eons beyond human survival, if history proves. Thus, Life of Pi is extremely naive on several levels. Readers of this review should not trust my opinion but rather spend their precious time to educate themselves about biology and in particular animal behavior as innate and conditioned responding. At best I can hope that the novel strikes some chord in the naive reader to really learn about tigers, cats, mammals, and people.
