Life of Pi Notes

Yann Martel: Life of Pi - Author's Note

In the spring of 1996, Yann Martel's second novel was unsuccessful. Feeling restless and with some money, he flew to Bombay, India for inspiration. India was chosen as a change of scenery and culture. He initially envisioned writing in a hill station with tea estates, but the novel he was working on died. The author realized the story was emotionally dead.

The Search for a Story

Martel mailed his failed novel notes to a fictitious address. Still restless, he explored southern India. He traveled to Pondicherry, a Union Territory and former French colony. There, at the Indian Coffee House, he met Francis Adirubasamy, an elderly man who offered him a story to make him believe in God. This man told him about the main character and urged him to speak to him directly. This will led to the story of Piscine Molitor Patel.

Finding Mr. Patel

Later in Toronto, Martel found Mr. Patel and met with him many times, reviewing his diary and newspaper clippings. After a year, Martel received a tape and report from the Japanese Ministry of Transport, solidifying his belief in the story's power to inspire faith. He acknowledges Mr. Patel and Mr. Adirubasamy and thanks Mr. Kazuhiko Oda, Mr. Hiroshi Watanabe, and Mr. Tomohiro Okamoto. He also thanks Mr. Moacyr Scliar for the spark of life and the Canada Council for the Arts.

PART ONE - Toronto and Pondicherry - CHAPTER I

Suffering led the main character back to life through academic study and religion. He studied at the University of Toronto, double-majoring in religious studies and zoology. His religious studies thesis concerned Isaac Luria's cosmogony theory. His zoology thesis analyzed the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. He studied sloths in Brazil.

The three-toed sloth is slow and spends 20 hours a day asleep. It is slowest on the ground only covering 4 to 5 meters an hour. Its senses are dull. To awaken one, two or three nudges will suffice. It is not well-informed about the outside world, with senses rated low by Beebe. They can sniff and avoid decayed branches, but often fall to the ground clinging to them.

The sloth survives by being slow, avoiding predators like jaguars, ocelots, harpy eagles, and anacondas. Algae in its hairs help it blend with the environment. The narrator felt they were in the presence of upside-down yogis and hermits. Religious-studies students reminded him of sloths. Scientists are friendly, atheistic, beer-drinking lots. The narrator was a very good student but was denied the Governor General's Academic Medal by a beef-eating pink boy. He states: Each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity-it's envy. He loves Canada and misses India.

CHAPTER 2-6

Richard Parker has stayed with him. He misses him and still sees him in his dreams. The doctors and nurses at the hospital in Mexico were incredibly kind. The narrator felt the words, "Fresh off the boat, are you?" wounded him deeply. He now lives in Scarborough and is a small, slim man. He was named after a swimming pool. His parents never took to the water. Francis Adirubasamy (Mamaji) was a champion swimmer who tried to teach his parents to swim. The narrator remained faithful to his aquatic guru. He visited the ashram swimming pool three times a week throughout his childhood. Swimming instruction was gruelling, but there was pleasure in it. The narrator's gift to Mamaji one birthday was two full lengths of credible butterfly.

Mamaji studied in Paris and told stories about swimming pools and swimming competitions, including the Piscine Deligny (cold and dirty), Piscines Chateau-Landon, Rouvet or du boulevard de la Gare (indoor pools with roofs), Piscines Hebert, Ledru-Rollin and Butte-aux-Cailles (bright, modern pools) and the Piscine Molitor (the crowning aquatic glory of Paris). He got his name, Piscine Molitor Patel, from the last pool mentioned.

Pondicherry entered the Union of India on November 1, 1954. The Pondicherry Botanical Garden provided land for a new zoo. The zoo was huge, but seemed to get smaller as the narrator grew older. Before moving to Pondicherry, Father ran a large hotel in Madras. Running a zoo is a hotelkeeper's worst nightmare. To the narrator, it was paradise on earth. His alarm clock was a pride of lions. Breakfast was punctuated by the shrieks and cries of monkeys and birds. He left for school under the gaze of animals. Every morning he had one last impression that was both ordinary and unforgettable. He spent more hours than he can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet.

Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. Animals are territorial. A biologically sound zoo enclosure is just another territory, peculiar only in its size and in its proximity to human territory.

CHAPTER 5-6

When your name is Bob no one asks you,