I was looking forward to reading the Booker prizewinning "Life of Pi", but I was really disappointed. It was all so tedious. No plot, no characters, just a pretty obnoxious boy on a lifeboat with a tiger. I never want to know about a book before I read it, so when it starts with AUTHOR'S NOTE, I am prepared to take it as just that. So when the author describes his meeting with Piscine Patel, I am expecting a factual account this man's experiences, or because it is a novel, at least a story based on them. No. This is all fiction, Pi does not exist.
I guess it was always in the back of my mind that this was all imagined, but the "trick" at the start seems pointless. We are left in no doubt that this is all fiction with the hallucinatory sections halfway through, and I felt let down. In the end I just did not care either way. I had already fast forwarded through the first third of the book about Pi's childhood. Interminable facts about the swimming pools of Paris, Zoology and Hinduism was all so boring. It gets better with the shipwreck, becomes gruesome with the animals on the boat, then more interesting as Pi comes to terms with his situation and how he will survive, descends into farce with meeting a man on a raft and later visiting an island (his interaction with some meerkats is quite amusing).
At least we get some dialogue at the end of the book as Pi meets two interrogators from the insurance company, and this crackles in places. But overall, despite it's originality, this was a hard read. And I definitely could have done without (the) author's note.
It was so nice to read next such a wonderful book as "The Secret Life of Bees". Sweet, gentle and beautifully written this book still has lots of incident, great dialogue and terrific characters. It is narrated by fourteen year old Lily and the author, Sue Monk Kidd, is great at describing her feelings as her story unfolds. "That night it felt strange to be in the honey house by myself. I missed Rosaleen's snoring the way you'd miss the ocean waves after you'd gotten used to sleeping with them"........ "Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier".
Set in a mid sixties summer in South Carolina, the racial tensions of the time form a disturbing backdrop to the novel, and the nasty bits are written with great sensitivity. And the book has a good atmosphere of a hot July in the deep south. This time the factual stuff about bees and honey making was done so well. Just little bits at a time. Someone asked in this was really chick lit. But there is no romance, unless you count the minor subplot of June and Neil. And one major thread in Lily's back story is left unresolved, so no glib ending. OK, there are some things which if you think hard are too unreal, but just let go and be taken along on a warm and uplifting journey, what more can you ask?
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