Life of Pi – Yann Martel

…and it is making me bleed with passion, delirious with admiration, sad with sorrow, frightened of the bleaky unknown and carried away with a million unworded emotions that gnaw, stifle, and lacerate me unceasing! There is joy, elation, at times estatic and there is that emptiness in the stomach that makes me squeamish and queasy and weak at my knees. What a graceful journey! What an intense masterpiece. Charismatic!

Yann Martel you rock!! I adore your writing your passion for quest and undying desire for life. I am loving it but deep down I take the story very personally and sometimes the pain is so vivid it hurts excruciatingly. I feel the profuse bleeding as if from my own body. There is not much I can do at times like these but just shut the book close and place it squarely on my lap, shut my eyes and let my mind wander just a smidgeon of what Pi went through! Sigh!… It makes my hair stand – electrified! It makes me proud, joyful, morose, empathetic! Martel’s words paint every scene in an absolute meticulous rendition of what the moment had possibly been… right from the hyena gnawing at the entrails of the live zebra, massacred to the ground to the locusts of flying fish and dorados snapping overboard. The book is full of captivating anecdotes and it is truly difficult to single out one. Here is something that made me pause last night!

Suddenly a bolt struck much closer. Perhaps it was meant for us: we had just fallen off the crest of a swell and were sinking down its back when its top was hit. There was an explosion of hot air and hot water. For two, perhaps three, a gigantic blinding white shard of glass from a broken cosmic window danced in the sky, insubstantial yet overwhelmingly powerful. Ten thousand trumpets and twenty thousand drums could not have made as much noise as that bolt of lightening: it was positively deafening. The sea turned white and all colour disappeared. Everything was either pure white light or pure black shadow. The light did not seem to illuminate so much as to penetrate. As quickly as it has appeared, the bolt vanished — the spray of hot water had not finished landing upon us and already it was gone. The punished swell returned to black and rolled on indifferently.
I was dazed, thunderstuck — nearly in the true sense of the word. But not afraid.

How is that some people write such transforming masterpieces? How do some talk with such blithel non-subservientness about religion, despair and joy, and why is that some can relate every passing detail of their childhood so open and valorously. What a touch down! What a remarkable sassy dialog. I think I know the answer to some and the fact that these thoughts come to mind is a reminder of how in places I have felt the pain like Pi did! After all I grew up in India.

I have been reading — ‘Life of Pi’ rather slowly. Thanks Maxine for lending me this invaluable treasure. And to you Piscine Molitor Patel for sharing this journey with the world — the sanctuary of Richard Parker, the chaperon of the mystic deep, the unceasing sentinel of the endless oceanic sojourn …and thus endeth my long drawn screed.