少年Pi的奇幻漂流 (Life of Pi )(Yann Martel)英文文字版 Yann Martel

原名: Life of Pi

作者: Yann Martel

图书分类: 文学

资源格式: PDF

版本: 英文文字版

出版社: Harvest Books

书号: 9780156027328

发行时间: 2003年05月01日

地区: 加拿大

语言: 英文

简介: 

内容简介

本书获2002年度英国布克奖；被评为亚马逊网站2002年度最佳图书、《纽约时报》年度杰出图书、《出版家周刊》年度最佳图书、《洛杉矶时报》年度最佳小说；2004年又获德国图书奖。
　　无论从什么方面来看，本书都是一部奇特的小说。它是一个扣人心弦的历险故事，一个关于人类在宇宙中的位置的寓言，一部引人入胜的超小说……机智使它更有活力，恐怖为它增添了趣味，它是一位不同寻常的天才的作品。
　　我不能说这部小说是一部伟大的文学作品，马特尔也称不上是一位伟大的作家，但他却是一个讲故事的高手。小说的开篇序言亦真亦假，以第一人称叙述，讲述的基本上是马特尔自己的经历:第一本小说出版后如石牛入水，只卖出几百本后就无人问津；第二部小说刚刚开头就文思枯竭，于是，作者离开加拿大前往印度寻找灵感。他在喜马拉雅山下的咖啡馆中遇到一人，此位印度智者说:“我有一个故事，这个故事可以让你相信上帝。”接着此人介绍了一位他们家的世交，现住加拿大的帕特尔。作者回到加拿大，找到帕特尔，听帕特尔讲述他一生的故事，于是，形成此书。
　　小说第一部分写的是“作者”在加拿大采访帕特尔，帕特尔对于他少年时代在印度生活的回忆，他的父母、哥哥以及叔伯亲戚，他的学校老师以及家庭的朋友，他们家的动物园中的各种动物。在加拿大，每次书中的“我“去采访他，总是逐渐发现帕特尔的一些私人生活，先是发现他并不是孤身一人，他有一位妻子；然后又发现他还有一个十来岁的儿子，采访将近结束时，人们意识到帕特尔还有一位可爱的四岁的女儿。“我”颇为感慨:“至少，这个故事有一个幸福的结局。”但是这第一部分中很大一部分文字，都让人觉得冗长乏味。值得一提的是帕特尔的名字，他大号派西尼·莫利托·帕特尔（PiscineMolitorPatel），是取法国巴黎一家游泳池之名，但是Piscine与英文小便同音，于是帕特尔从小在学校中就常常遭到同学取笑，于是，他决定把自己的名字简化成Pi，自以为是酷名字。
　　阅读这部小说的最好忠告，是耐心，等到小说的第一部分收了尾，帕特尔的父亲决定全家带着动物移民加拿大，他们所乘坐的日本货船漂荡在太平洋上时，马特尔的叙述就充满了你无法拒绝不能释手的魅力。
　　日本货轮失事，帕特尔被两名水手当做诱饵扔到救生艇中去喂鬣狗，他侥幸落在救生艇的舱盖布上得以生存，于是，他开始了在海上漂泊227天的历程，与他同时处在救生艇中的，除了那只鬣狗外，还有一只断了一条腿的斑马、一只猩猩以及一只成年孟加拉虎，由于海关官员的失误，这只孟加拉虎注册了一个正儿八经的绅士的名字：理查德·帕克。在救生艇上的最初三天，鬣狗咬死了猩猩，活吃了斑马，理查德·帕克咬死了鬣狗。接着，16岁的少年帕特尔海上生存的故事，就是如何对付理查德·帕克的故事。
　　一开始，帕特尔满脑子想的是如何把老虎置于死地，夺回他在救生艇上的生存空间，他想了六种对付老虎的计策，第一，把它推下救生艇；第二，用救生艇储藏室中的六针吗啡把它置于死地；第三，用所有能弄到手的武器来攻击它；第四，用东西把它噎死；第五，给它下毒，在它身上放火，电死它；第六，与它打消耗战。然而，仔细考虑后，这六点都没有用。帕特尔意识到，如果和理查德·帕克斗争，输的只是他自己；他注意到，老虎在海浪平静吃饱了救生艇上的动物残骸之后，竟然如同一只可爱的大猫一样向他表示友善。最后，帕特尔得出结论，他的生路只有一条，那就是要保证理查德·帕克的食物和饮水，只要老虎不饿，他就没有危险。帕特尔从救生艇储藏室中找出钓竿，取出海水淡化器，这位生来素食长大的少年开始成为海上垂钓解剖海龟和大小鱼类的能手。此外，帕特尔还根据他从小在动物园中长大所积累的经验，开始了驯虎的过程，他一是利用老虎晕船的短处，二是让老虎明白，他是食物和水的来源，他甚至通过把玩理查德·帕克的粪便来打败老虎耀武扬威的士气，逐渐，理查德·帕克终于明白了在救生艇中帕特尔是老大，他是老二。马特尔关于驯虎的描绘经过最细致的调查研究，读后让你油然而生想当马戏团驯兽员的欲望。更重要的是，这驯虎的过程也是少年帕特尔演变成成年男人的过程。

作者简介

　　扬·马特尔（Yann Martel），加拿大作家，1963年出生于西班牙，父母是加拿大人。他要哥斯达黎加、法国、墨西哥和加拿大长大。大学哲学系毕业后，他做过洗碗工、植树工和保安。之后他开始写作。当他不住在别处的时候，就住在蒙特利尔。

★NOMINEE 2001 – Governor General’s Literary Award
　　★WINNER 2001 – Hugh MacLennan Prize
　　★WINNER 2002 – Booker Prize
　　★NOMINEE 2001 – Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book
　　"Life of Pi is a terrific book.It’s fresh,original,smart,devious,and crammed with abosorbing lore." –MARGARET ATWOOD

　　Life of Pi is a masterful and utterly original novel that is at once the story of a young castaway who faces immeasurable hardships on the high seas, and a meditation on religion, faith, art and life that is as witty as it is profound. Using the threads of all of our best stories, Yann Martel has woven a glorious spiritual adventure that makes us question what it means to be alive, and to believe.

　　Growing up in Pondicherry, India, Piscine Molitor Patel — known as Pi — has a rich life. Bookish by nature, young Pi acquires a broad knowledge of not only the great religious texts but of all literature, and has a great curiosity about how the world works. His family runs the local zoo, and he spends many of his days among goats, hippos, swans, and bears, developing his own theories about the nature of animals and how human nature conforms to it. Pi’s family life is quite happy, even though his brother picks on him and his parents aren’t quite sure how to accept his decision to simultaneously embrace and practise three religions — Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.

　　But despite the lush and nurturing variety of Pi’s world, there are broad political changes afoot in India, and when Pi is sixteen his parents decide that the family needs to escape to a better life. Choosing to move to Canada, they close the zoo, pack their belongings, and board a Japanese cargo ship called the Tsimtsum. Travelling with them are many of their animals, bound for zoos in North America. However, they have only just begun their journey when the ship sinks, taking the dreams of the Patel family down with it. Only Pi survives, cast adrift in a lifeboat with the unlikeliest of travelling companions: a zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

　　Thus begins Pi Patel’s epic, 227-day voyage across the Pacific, and the powerful story of faith and survival at the heart of Life of Pi. Worn and scared, oscillating between hope and despair, Pi is witness to the playing out of the food chain, quite aware of his new position within it. When only the tiger is left of the seafaring menagerie, Pi realizes that his survival depends on his ability to assert his own will, and sets upon a grand and ordered scheme to keep from being Richard Parker’s next meal.

　　As the days pass, Pi fights both boredom and terror by throwing himself into the practical details of surviving on the open sea — catching fish, collecting rain water, protecting himself from the sun — all the while ensuring that the tiger is also kept alive, and knows that Pi is the key to his survival. The castaways face gruelling pain in their brushes with starvation, illness, and the storms that lash the small boat, but there is also the solace of beauty: the rainbow hues of a dorado’s death-throes, the peaceful eye of a looming whale, the shimmering blues of the ocean’s swells. Hope is fleeting, however, and despite adapting his religious practices to his daily routine, Pi feels the constant, pressing weight of despair. It is during the most hopeless and gruelling days of his voyage that Pi whittles to the core of his beliefs, casts off his own assumptions, and faces his underlying terrors head-on.

　　As Yann Martel has said in one interview, “The theme of this novel can be summarized in three lines. Life is a story. You can choose your story. And a story with an imaginative overlay is the better story.” And for Martel, the greatest imaginative overlay is religion. “God is a shorthand for anything that is beyond the material — any greater pattern of meaning.” In Life of Pi, the question of stories, and of what stories to believe, is front and centre from the beginning, when the author tells us how he was led to Pi Patel and to this novel: in an Indian coffee house, a gentleman told him, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” And as this novel comes to its brilliant conclusion, Pi shows us that the story with the imaginative overlay is also the story that contains the most truth.

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作者简介

　　Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of peripatetic Canadian parents. He grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario and Mexico, and has continued travelling as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. After studying philosophy at Trent University and while doing various odd jobs — tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard — he began to write. He is the prize-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of short stories, and of Self, a novel, both of them published internationally.
　　He has been living from his writing since the age of 27. He divides his time between yoga, writing and volunteering in a palliative care unit. Yann Martel lives in Montreal.

With over 1250 reviews already registered for LIFE OF PI, I first thought there could be nothing more to say about this marvelous novel. But after scanning the most recent 100 reviews, I began to wonder what book many of those reviewers had read. Had I relied on 98 of those reviews, I would have expected a far different book than the one I actually read.

Let’s begin with what LIFE OF PI isn’t. It’s not a Man against Nature survival story. It’s not a story about zoos or wild animals or animal husbandry. It’s not ROBINSON CRUSOE or SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON. It’s not a literary version of CASTAWAY or OPEN WATER, and it’s not a "triumph against all odds, happily ever after" rescue story. To classify it as such would be like classifying THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA as a story about a poor fisherman or MOBY DICK as a sea story. Or THE TRIAL as a courtroom drama, THE PLAGUE as a story of an epidemic, HEART OF DARKNESS as a story about slavery, or ANIMAL FARM as an animal adventure.

Martel’s story line is already well-known: a fifteen-year-old boy, the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, India survives a shipwreck several days out of Manila. He is the lone human survivor, but his lifeboat is occupied by a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, an injured zebra, a hyena, and an orangutan. In relatively short order and true Darwinian fashion, their numbers are reduced to just two: the boy Piscene Molitor Patel, and the tiger, Richard Parker. By dint of his zoo exposure and a fortuitously positioned tarpaulin, Pi (as he is called) manages to establish his own territory on the lifeboat and even gains alpha dominance over Richard Parker. At various points in their 227-day ordeal, Pi and the tiger miss being rescued by an oil tanker, meet up with another shipwreck survivor, and discover an extraordinary algae island before finally reaching safety.

When Pi retells the entire story to two representatives of the Japanese Ministry of Transport searching for the cause of the sinking, they express deep disbelief, so he offers them a second, far more mundane but believable story that parallels the first one. They can choose to believe the more fantastical first one despite its seeming irrationality (Pi is, after all, an irrational number) and its necessary leap of faith, or they can accept the second, far more rational version, more heavily grounded in our everyday experiences.

LIFE OF PI is an allegory, the symbolic expression of a deeper meaning through a tale acted out by humans, animals, and in this case, even plant life. Yann Martel has crafted a magnificently unlikely tale involving zoology and botany, religious experience, and ocean survival skills to explore the meaning of stories in our lives, whether they are inspired by religion to explain the purpose of life or generated by our own psyches as a way to understand and interpret the world around us.

Martel employs a number of religious themes and devices to introduce religion as one of mankind’s primary filters for interpreting reality. Pi’s active adoption and participation in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity establish him as a character able to relate his story through the lens of the world’s three major religions. Prayer and religious references abound, and his adventures bring to mind such Old Testament scenes as the Garden of Eden, Daniel and the lion’s den, the trials of Job, and even Jonah and the whale. Accepting Pi’s survival story as true, without supporting evidence, is little different than accepting New Testament stories about Jesus. They are matters of faith, not empiricism.

In the end, however, LIFE OF PI takes a broader view. All people are storytellers, casting their experiences and even their own life events in story form. Martel’s message is that all humans use stories to process the reality around them, from the stories that comprise history to those that explain the actions and behaviors of our families and friends. We could never process the chaotic stream of events from everyday life without stories to help us categorize and compartmentalize them. Yet we all choose our own stories to accomplish this – some based on faith and religion, some based on empiricism and science. The approach we choose dictates our interpretation of the world around us.

LIFE OF PI bears a faint resemblance to the movie BIG FISH, also a story about storytelling and how we understand and rationalize our own lives through tales both mundane and tall. Martel’s book is structured as a story within a story within a story, planned and executed in precisely 100 chapters as a mathematical counterpoint to the endlessly irrational and nonrepeating value of pi. The book is alternately harrowing and amusing, deeply rational and scientific but wildly mystical and improbable. It is also hugely entertaining and highly readable, as fluid as the water in which Pi floats. Anyone who enjoys literature as a vehicle for contemplating the human condition should find in LIFE OF PI a delicious treat.

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