Shipwreck with Tiger
Life of Pi (English title Life of Pi ) is an in 2001 published novel of Canadian writer Yann Martel . The German translation by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié was published in 2003 by S. Fischer Verlag . In 2002 Yann Martel received the Booker Prize for this novel . In 2012 the novel was made into a film by the Taiwanese director Ang Lee under the title Life of Pi: Shipwreck with Tiger .
content
The story is about a now grown man who tells an author about his youth: Piscine Molitor Patel, called Pi, is the son of the zoo director in Pondicherry, India . He was already a devout Hindu when he learned about Christianity and was baptized. He later adopted Islam as the third religion . When his father decides to emigrate to Canada for economic reasons, the family embarks on a Japanese freighter with half the zoo. On the open sea they get caught in a severe storm. The ship capsizes and sinks. Only the teenage Pi, a zebra , an orangutan , a spotted hyena and a Bengal tiger named "Richard Parker" can escape the sinking of their ship in a lifeboat. The fight for survival that follows begins with the hyena first tearing off the zebra's broken leg and eating it. Later it gradually devours the rest of the zebra as well. Next comes the orangutan's turn. Until then the tiger had been hidden under a tarpaulin and had remained motionless there because it was seasick. After recovering, the tiger eats the hyena.
Pi rescues himself on a raft that he built from oars and life jackets and attached to the lifeboat. Separated from the boat by a long rope and protected from Richard Parker, the boy now begins to tame the predator by feeding it fish, which he fishes from his safe island and throws into the boat. He also uses his susceptibility to seasickness to his advantage by making the boat sway so violently with rhythmic movements that the tiger instantly feels sick whenever the animal threatens to become aggressive.
Months go by. The two become partners, more and more dependent on each other, but also more and more emaciated and weaker. Pi goes blind temporarily, his eyes dry up. A French shipwrecked man appears in a second lifeboat, who confesses that he has already killed a man and a woman. When he climbs over in Pi's boat, he insidiously attacks the weakened Pi, but is immediately grabbed and eaten by the tiger lurking under the tarpaulin.
Finally, Pi and Richard Parker end up stranded on an island made of algae , for the two of them a kind of plenty of milk and honey, teeming with meerkats . The starved tiger eats its fill from the animals, Pi also feeds on the sweet algae, which also contain plenty of fresh water. Paradise suddenly comes to an end when Pi notices that the algae turn into dangerous carnivorous plants at night . He moves on in the lifeboat, taking the tiger with him.
After 227 days at sea, the two are driven on the Mexican coast. Richard Parker disappears, never to be seen again, in the nearby jungle , and Pi is taken to the hospital. Two employees of the Japanese Ministry of Transport visit him there to find out more about the sinking of the freighter. But they do not take away his adventurous animal story: Neither the tiger nor the French shipwrecked or the carnivorous algae island are plausible. "If you only want to admit what you can believe, what are you living for?" Replies Pi. When they ask him not to tell stories, but rather what really happened, he replies that ultimately everything what one reports becomes a story. Nonetheless, he responds to their request and tells them a second variant of his odyssey, this time without animals: On the lifeboat, next to Pi, there is now a French cook, a sailor who broke his leg when falling into the lifeboat, and Pi's mother. The cook amputates the sailor's leg to use as bait for the fish. Slowly the sailor dies and the cook eats the sailor's meat. After the cook also killed Pi's mother, he is finally killed in an argument with Pi. In the solitude that now begins, Pi turns to God .
At the end of his story , Pi lets the author decide which is the true and better story. When the latter admitted that he could not see the truth, but that the story with the animals was probably the better one, he replied: "And it is the same with God".
success
The book was number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list for a week in 2003 .
reception
The novel was received differently by the critics. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung sees Martel's form of dealing with religion as an empty “postmodern remix religiosity”. The FAZ writes that the descriptions in theological , zoological and nautical technical terms are at best "enchanting descriptions of nature and animals".
Awards
- 2004: German Book Prize (category fiction)
background
In Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Report of Arthur Gordon Pym , which also deals with a shipwreck, the first-person narrator's dog is called "Tiger" and one of the four survivors of the shipwreck, which is later eaten by his fellow sufferers, carries the name "Richard Parker".
A classic precedent from British law ( "Queen against Dudley and Stephens" ) contains the complex of topics, which is used here as a variant without animals of the story. In the real precedent, one of those involved is also called "Richard Parker".
The carnivorous island is reminiscent of the Gourmetica Insularis from Walter Moers' Die 13½ Leben des Käpt'n Blaubär .
literature
- Alexandra Tischel: Monkeys like us. What the literature says about our closest relatives. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2018, ISBN 978-3-476-04598-0 , pp. 9-20.