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Plot
The novel Life of Pi is divided up into three parts. The first section of the story is about the main character, Pi as an adult reflecting on his childhood in Pondicherry, India. Pi has many passions throughout his youth including zoology, mainly due to his father's ownership of a zoo. Another of his interests include religion. Pi was born as a Hindu. At the age of 14, he adds the religious beliefs of Christianity. And lastly at the age of 15, adds the Islamic religion. Pi experiments with all of his newly inherited religions at different times and finds ways to jointly express them as he matures through boyhood. Things, unfortunately, in India are not running as smooth as Pi's family would like. This is due to the Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, who proposes martial law. Pi and the rest of his family decide to leave their home land of India and head out. They sell some of the animals from the zoo, pack up their personal values, say their goodbyes, and load up the ship along with some of the animals they decided to keep. They board the Japanese cargo ship and set sail for the foreign land of Canada.

Major themes
Life of Pi, according to Yann Martel, can be summarized in three statements- "Life is a story... You can choose your story... A story with God is the better story." A reoccurring theme throughout the novel seems to be believability. Pi at the end of the book asks the two investigators "If you stumble about believability, what are you living for?" According to Gordon Houser there are two main themes of the book: "that all life is interdependent, and that we live and breathe via belief."

Style
Gordon Houser describes Martel's writing style as "deceptively simple." He explains that "Martel lets the winsome plot carry us" along the journey, "while winking...[at] thoughts [of] question humans have pondered for centuries."

Background
In an interview, Martel says, "[Life of] Pi was inspired by two things... India and [a] review." The review was about "a Brazilian novel [written] by a man named Moacyr Scliar." He says he forgot about the review but later remembered the story when he went to India which centralizes around religion and contains a lot of animals. "The idea of a religious boy in a lifeboat with a wild animal struck me as a perfect metaphor for the human condition," says Martel. He put a lot of time and effort into researching certain subjects about his novel. He went to India 3 times; doing the majority of his research the second time and touched up on some details the third time. Martel states in an interview with PBS, "I read books on zoo biology and animal psychology." He also studied and read sections of the Bible and Koran.

Publication history
Life of Pi has "sold more than 2 million copies" and has been translated in over "40 languages."

Reception
With writing a book comes the critics and their criticism. Joel J. Miller feels like the novel Life of Pi did not live up to its standards. His main issue with the novel dealt with the religious aspect of the story. Miller says, "the issue for me is how this drama is supposed to prove the reality of God." "Pi constructs his own version of God... The problem is that it no more honors the Jesus Pi claims to love." Life of Pi mainly received a lot of of praise. In her review, Jane Bates states, that the novel made her experience emotions "that ranged from joy t terror and unbearable sadness." She goes on to say, the novel "did not request but require my full engagement and commitment to read it from cover to cover." Another article claimed the novel to be a "dreamlike novel", "mesmeric", and to have a "dazzlingly inventive narrative."

Awards
Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi was the "winner of the 2002 Booker Prize."

Adaptations
Life of Pi began as a book, but later was adapted into different forms of entertainment. "Ang Lee's Life of Pi [which] won many accolades, including Oscars for Best Director, cinematography, and visual effects" was "adapted from Yann Martel's best selling 2001 novel." The book and the film differ in many ways. In an interview Martel states that when you are watching the movie "[You] are no longer seeing it from Pi's perspective, [but in an] omniscient perspective." Martel also says that when you are "adapting a novel to the screen [you must] translate the voice [and] sort of retell the story."