Life of Pi
Jul. 22nd, 2008 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranThis is a great book. I read it in about four days, which is slow for me, but I'd really didn't have any time. Left to my devices, I would have devoured it in an afternoon.
It's the sort of book that makes me feel good about reading and makes me want to write. It's also fascinating from a writing point of view, because everywhere I look, I see either things that I understand and recognize as clever, or things that make me say "I don't know how to do that".
For a book supposedly "about" a boy stuck on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan and a Bengal tiger (that's not giving anything away, that's all on the back cover), where do you think you would start? If it was me, I'd probably start off with the boy staring into the tiger's eyes as the giant waves roll up and down and the lifeboat pitches so that one moment there's sky behind the tiger's head and one moment there's blue water, while the zebra and the orang-utan cower in fear and the hyena lurks off to one side.
I probably wouldn't start with 93 pages of rumination on religion and zoos before the first sign of any jeopardy.
And yet, it works, and it works brilliantly. Each page makes you want to read on, faster and faster, driven by a hunger for knowledge and experience as much as for knowing how it ends. And this book, like all good books, possibly, certainly delivers an experience.
It's the sort of book that makes me feel good about reading and makes me want to write. It's also fascinating from a writing point of view, because everywhere I look, I see either things that I understand and recognize as clever, or things that make me say "I don't know how to do that".
For a book supposedly "about" a boy stuck on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan and a Bengal tiger (that's not giving anything away, that's all on the back cover), where do you think you would start? If it was me, I'd probably start off with the boy staring into the tiger's eyes as the giant waves roll up and down and the lifeboat pitches so that one moment there's sky behind the tiger's head and one moment there's blue water, while the zebra and the orang-utan cower in fear and the hyena lurks off to one side.
I probably wouldn't start with 93 pages of rumination on religion and zoos before the first sign of any jeopardy.
And yet, it works, and it works brilliantly. Each page makes you want to read on, faster and faster, driven by a hunger for knowledge and experience as much as for knowing how it ends. And this book, like all good books, possibly, certainly delivers an experience.
