posted
Anybody read this one? I'd like to hear your thoughts. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Reminded me in some way of the movie Big Fish.
Posts: 292 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Interesting that you would compare it to BIG FISH. (Because they both question the reality of a character's stories, thereby dealing with the question of "what is truth?")
posted
Exactly. But as a writer, I find this theme fascinating. Just like these characters, we tell lies that are the truth. The most powerful fiction is always that which says something about humanity or how the world works.
Posts: 292 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
I've never read "Life of Pi," but I really enjoyed the movie, "Big Fish." A fascinating theme and one of a painfully small number of movies that has lately challenged the audience to do more than simply observe with the wit of a 5-year-old.
Posts: 3567 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
Haven't read it yet - Sitting in the pile on the floor. Getting there.
However, the person who lent it to me expressed the opinion that it was so unblieveable it detracted from the story for them. Rather than take them in the direction of asking, What is truth? It just made them turn off.
I didn't find that with Big Fish. Did the people who've read the book find that at all too?
posted
I haven't seen Big Fish but I have read Life of Pi and I quite enjoyed it. From a writing point of view I thought it was cleverly put together too. The way some of the chapters were out of sync chronologically and a couple of them repeated bits and pieces from earlier on really helped me get a feel for the character and how he was feeling.
Posts: 156 | Registered: Nov 2003
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At the end of the book, some people tell Pi that they don't believe his story, so he tells them a version that they can believe. To me, the sad thing was that the version they could believe was ugly and sordid (too "real world" for me, I guess). I liked the first version better.
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Exactly. I felt the story was incredibly believable. He had all the knowledge he needed to survive how he did. 100 pages of story before he even gets shipwrecked saw to that.
When the alternate explanation was given at the end, I didn't believe it. I'm still left wondering, which story was an alteration of the truth to avoid giving the listener/reader something that was too hard to digest.
[This message has been edited by TheoPhileo (edited July 24, 2004).]
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I believe the tiger story was the true one, mainly because of all the stuff he said about religions and believing and so forth in the first part of the book. If you look at the tiger story as a kind of analog for spiritual truth, and the other story as the kind of story the nonreligious prefer to believe, then the whole book is a kind of discussion on the deliberate blindness of people who are afraid to believe in things greater than themselves and in the human potential for greatness. Those with such fears would rather see the sordid and petty and ugly in humanity--because it justifies their own lack of effort, perhaps?
Posts: 8826 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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