Life of Pi + Common Nonsense

Life of Pi, novel by Yann Martell

I kept seeing this book in every thrift store I ever went to, so I finally got it and read it. I hated it so much I wish I hadn't even bothered. But at least it caused a strong enough impression that I felt I needed to write about it.

The book begins well enough. There are long descriptions of animals and animal life, which are actually fascinating. The author then describes his quest to find a religion at a very young age, and this part sounds quite uninformed and simplistic. If I hadn't read later that this book was the author's attempt to make sense to his life through some kind of search for spirituality, I would seriously consider that this was his attempt to demonstrate how silly and petty religions were, and, therefore, unnecessary.

The actual plot of the book doesn't start until almost midway through it, when the boat that Pi's family took to move to Canada, along with most of the animals from their Indian zoo, sinks, and the only survivors are Pi, a tiger, a hyena, and a gorilla. The hyena and the gorilla die soon, leaving him alone with the tiger for over 200 days at sea. The story then becomes a long laundry list of things he does in order to keep Richard Parker (the tiger) and himself alive. This is where my biggest problem begins, since the descriptions of the gutting of the fish and the turtles he kills to survive are so sickening that it seems that the author is enjoying himself by picturing the readers' disgusted faces. You would never think that gutting a fish could be so gory and gross.

The story reads to me almost like a very simple Gulliver's Travels: The hero finds himself cast away, washed into semi-magical worlds with monsters he needs to deal with. There are no political criticism as in Gulliver, and the magical places are limited to two: the sea and the man-eating island.

There are great parts in the book, like the already mentioned brief lectures on animals. The dialogue between Pi and Richard Parker before reaching the carnivorous island is pretty nice, if nothing more than adorable. The conversation between Pi and the officials from the Japanese maritime department in the third part of the book is also very cute.

After finishing the book I read that this is a rip off of a Brazilian book, Max and the Cats. Martell said he didn't read the book before writing Life of Pi, but only a review of it, but he even included the book in his list of acknowledgements. Both books' plots seem so similar that it's hard to believe Martell didn't simply steal the idea. Authors steal from each other all the time in the literary world, a clear example is Poe, to whom Longfellow repeatedly accused of plagiarism, or Shakespeare, who based most of his plays on stories that already existed; but when you take something that's already out there and make something that is not very good, it doesn't say much about you as an author. But that's me. The book got a bunch of awards, so I guess a lot of people liked it. And yet, the fact that you can so easily find it in every thrift store shows me that people are not that crazy about keeping it or re-reading it after they bought it.

Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance

I'm very torn about this book. It's brilliantly well researched, and the amount of juicy information is astonishing. The book basically reinforces with lots of facts what everybody knows, that Glenn Beck is a hypocritical, opportunistic, and Machiavellian showman who will do anything and take any position that he needs to in order to make a buck and to grow his own myth.

Unfortunately, the author resorts to name calling and hypothetical situations to make some of his strongest points. For example, in the first chapter, Zaitchik transcribes things that Beck was thinking! Then, in location 194*, he writes, "For Beck, August 28, 2010, has been along (sic) time coming. He has waited years for his spotlight on the National Mall." How the heck does this guy know that? Did Beck ever say it, write it, hint it? Nope. Zaitchik speculated it. He goes on, "In the winter of 2003, clear Channel's D.C. affiliate, WTNT, declined to host Beck's traveling Rally for America pro-war road show. 'We support Glen wholeheartedly,' said the station's marketing director at the time, 'but does D.C. really need another rally?' Beck marched on, eyes on the price." Again, how does he know this? I know it isn't a big deal, everybody does this kind of thing when trying to make a point, but the problem is that he uses a lot of these subtle hypothetical situations to make us believe that Beck actually said and thought those things, when there isn't proof that he did.

The church's baseless name calling also got on my nerves. I know I'm biased on this aspect, but he totally lost me here. In location 3872, Zaitchik writes, "Mormon culture is more than aggressively anti-intellectual; it is infantilizing." The citation for this leads you to a study that shows that Utahans take, in average, more anti-depressed than the average American. So, what does that have anything to do with the church being infantilizing? I had a sociology professor who argued that this was true because Mormons don't drink alcohol, smoke, or use drugs, which are anti-depressants themselves, while it's easy to rationalize that a medication you get from the doctor is OK to take. So I guess we're even with the rest of America in that sense. But why the cheap shot? A few paragraphs before, he adds: "Mainstream Mormonism is the closest thing the United States has to a Disney religion, with an orthodox culture that has replaced the tragic sensibility with a masochistic addiction to uplift." The reason for this? The church produces G-rated movies with a positive message. The nerve of those nasty, nasty Mormons! Finally, he writes "Church officials gave speeches naming feminists, intellectuals, and gays and lesbians as the three greatest enemies of the church." The source for this? Conspicuously absent.

My point is, when you get such broad conclusions from individual, anecdotal information, it's hard to take the author seriously about his other conclusions, making the tremendous effort he made in researching this book somewhat pointless. It's still interesting to read, but I'd take everything with a grain of salt. I read "Over the Cliff. How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane," and I thought that the conclusions drawn in that book were much more fair, even if they were pretty harsh as well. I heard there's another book about Beck, Tears of a Clown. I would like to check it out, but reading another whole book on Beck's life seems kind of pointless. Maybe I should have gone with that one instead.

Finally, what's with that cover? Is it supposed to be funny? "Oh, I don't agree with that guy, so let's just put tape on his mouth." And then what? I know we all like to fantasise about things that could happen to people we intensely dislike, but putting this out there doesn't help our position, it makes us look silly and petty.

* I read this on my Kindle app, which doesn't have pages but "locations." I hate it, but there's no way around it.