Thoughts on 'Pi' (part 1)

In my mind, Life of Pi generated one of the better Page Turners discussions of late, despite there being only four of us present. As I am yet to finish the novel, I will hold my comments until I complete the experience (nearly there!), but I am very keen to record the thoughts of those who couldn't make the meeting, yet felt compelled to write their thoughts down. If anyone else has thoughts, please either post or send to me for posting!

Helen
What did I think? I think I got some of the point of the book. To start with I should mark the spot at which I stopped believing the "story" which was when he got off the lifeboat onto the floating island of seaweed and it was so big that it had palm trees growing on it. At that point I thought to myself...well now he is clearly hallucinating/dreaming. Which brings me to what I think is the point of the book at the end - how we all have different belief systems based on our experience/information/knowledge collected over a lifetime. I'm sure other readers will have stopped believing at a different point from me.


That's all well and good - and I did already know this (anyone who has done the Forum will know about filters) but I don't think I got much more out of it than that.

The other idea, that a story is more or less believable if it is more or less pallatable seems obvious - but I found the less nice story he told more believeable, is that the way everyone else felt?

With all the religion at the start, I'm guessing there is supposed to be some revelation about this at the end and I got nothing?!!Was it just trying to say that all religions have stories that are just metaphors and should not be interpreted as fact..or that the reason we have different religions is that people develop with different filters and need to find "their" explanation?

Really disappointed to miss this discussion as I was hoping this would reveal something for me.

Nat
I really enjoyed reading 'Life of Pi'. This was an interesting and well written book with quite a twist at the end.

I found the beginning of the book a bit drawn out and spent about the beginning quarter wondering when the story was going to start. I also found that the religious discussion over done and generally difficult to relate to. I found the interludes with the author injecting himself into the story confusing and detracting, particularly in the beginning.

The survival part of the story was riveting and, although I was under no illusions that it was true, was very well told. The imagery in the story was particularly well done. Some of my favourites:

Chapter 3: "deep pleasure of doing a stroke with increasing ease and speed, over and over, till hypnosis practically, the water turning from molten lead to liquid light" (I like this one because I'm a swimmer...)

Chapter 4: "it was a huge zoo... Now it's so small it fits in my head"

Chapter 25: "For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart."

Chapter 61: "I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious" Actually, on reflection, I think this quote wins the irony award.

Chapter 82: "I ate like an animal, that this noisy, frantic, unchewing wolfing-down of mine was exactly the way Richard Parker ate."

Chapter 92: "... strength and comfort seemed to be physically pouring into my system through my eyes."

Chapter 92: "I felt even my soul had been corroded by salt"

In the face of such beautiful phrasing, the whole overt religious mentions are coarse, unnecessary and I felt detracted from the story. I even thought in the early part of the book that he was kind of cynical about organised religion, viewing it as a competition between who had the better story. But maybe that was the point? That organised religion gets in the way of communing with G-d?

The humour was pretty good too and I guess important in such a sad story:

Chapter 3: "The porters... were... friendly in an ill-tempered way"

Chapter 34: "the paperwork involved in trading a shrew weighs more than an elephant, that the paperwork involved in trading an elephant weighs more than a whale, and that you must never try to trade a whale, never."

Chapter ??: "The only reason I didn't stand up and beat it [the hyena] off the lifeboat with a stick was lack of strength and a stick..."

Chapter 77: "I was at the mercy of turtle meat for smiles"

The part where he is waiting at the zoo for Mr Kumar and meets the other Mr Kumar is really very funny and extremely cleverly written, so you don't know throughout the entire exchange which one is speaking.

This is the sort of story that once you reach the end makes you want to go back to the beginning and read it again with different eyes. Magnificent choice.

Currently Reading . . .

We are now reading Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, selected by Erin.

Wikipedia describes it as 'a factual adventure novel'.
Fantastic Fiction says: Life of Pi is a tale of disaster at sea. Both a boys' own adventure (for grown-ups) and a meditation on faith and the value of religious metaphor, it was one of the most extraordinary and original novels of 2002.

Hmmm. Get reading folks, because this one looks to be interesting!!

NOTE: Meeting is Wednesday 31 March, owing to Easter.

Possession: A Romance

We discussed Possession: A Romance by A.S.Byatt last week. Of the six of us present, three had finished the book (including me!), one had nearly finished, one had read a small amount and seen the movie, and our host had seen the movie. (I too had seen the movie.)

It was a very weighty book to try to discuss in our usual time period of around an hour and a half, and as a result we jumped from topic to topic quite erratically as ideas formed and people bubbled over trying to express their opinions. I'm not sure how we would have coped with a larger group!

Somewhat inevitably, we discussed the poetry -- both in terms of how it was used to add atmosphere, texture and information, and whether it was necessary to read it all from end-to-end. I believe we were divided on that point. I personally found that experiencing the poems via the audio presentation was vastly easier and thus more enjoyable than reading them in the conventional manner, and I think the other audio listeners found this as well. And while it was certainly possible to enjoy the novel without reading them, I think they are an integral part of the whole and therefore enhanced the novel considerably. The bitterness of Mummy Possest gives great insight into Ash's feelings, for example. And those short, sad poems by Christabel left with Sabine's journal are also very revealing. (It was pointed out that most of the novel's complexity is derived from the poems, journals and letters. Without them you're left with little more than a slightly predictable plot hinged on coincidence!)

We also talked over several of the relationships -- Roland and Maud's is perhaps the central one for which the entire novel was declared an 'enormous foreplay' by one of our group. Certainly they spend an awfully long time getting to the point! In a podcast interview with Byatt she said that the novel had to end with Roland 'possessing' Maud to give the whole thing symmetry. She added that one of the sub-themes of the novel was exploring the effect overt 1980s feminism might have on a woman -- does it inhibit or enable? In Maud's case it was the former. Hence the waiting.

On the subject of the portrayal of academia, we discussed whether Roland's initial act of stealing the draft letters was reprehensible or not. I confess I lean a little to the side of not -- to my mind it's a bit like the proverbial tree in the forest. (i.e. if no-one knows they're there, does it actually matter?) Others thought the opposite! The discovery of the letters and the quest they engendered are for me at the heart of the story, and are what made me love the movie when I first saw it, which led me to select this book to read. Like Roland, like Maud, I wanted to know! I can clearly imagine the excitement they must have felt at such a momentous discovery!

Obviously we talked about all sorts of other things as well. I could go on about this novel for hours . . . about how I shared Roland's bereftness when all the others got in on the act and took the secret away from him and Maud . . . about how the plot relied a little too heavily on coincidence . . . about the fascinating characters of Leonora Stern and Beatrice Nest . . . about the various meanings of 'possession' and how they are explored . . . about the difference between feeling connected through words, as opposed to through artifacts . . .

As usual, my take on the novel is fairly analytical in terms of craft. I stand in awe of Byatt and her ability to create such a complex and convincing world -- she wrote all the Victorian poetry in two distinct voices, plus fairy tales, journal entries, letters etc in more voices again. Moreover, she says she wrote them in-situ, not after the fact, so they are integral building blocks of the story. But it's not just the poems. In fact, they might almost have been easy in comparison with all the other sources she created -- such as excerpts from Cropper's The great ventriloquist. This is replete with academic theory and analysis that sounds convincing enough to an ignoramus like me.

The novel is also rich with subtext and symbolism, and I'm sure I missed most of it. But for instance most of the characters are defined by colour -- Christabel (and Maud) is green because that's evidently the colour of fairies; Ellen Ash is white. I confess the colours were revealed to me in the podcast, so now I'll have to read it again to take more notice! (A very interesting thing Byatt said was that she sees novels in colours -- like an abstract painting -- and she can't write without knowing what colour it is . . .)

The final thing I am going to share is Byatt's inspiration for the novel. She was sitting in the British Museum library watching a Coleridge scholar pacing around the catalogues, and started wondering whether the woman had an original thought, or whether it was all the poet. Does he possess her, or does she possess him?

For those that are interested, here's the link to the podcast.

Here's a link to my (very different) post on Possession on Forge and Brew.

Currently Reading . . .

The book for September is POSSESSION, by A.S.Byatt. Winner of 1990 Man Booker Prize.

If you haven't already started, get reading now, because it's >500 pages long!!

currently reading . . .

Meeting in 2 weeks!