Life of Pi.. Why?

Boy was I glad this was an amazing book.

As a working mom, it's disappointing to plod through "yet another" hopeful fifteen minutes of bedtime peace without some type of satisfaction, but also because I am dedicated (there is NO way that I am not finding out what this book is about) I will grind through a good portion before I give up. In fact, I hate giving up. As a reader and a fan of good books, I always hope that my effort will be rewarded. In this case, it was!

The beginning of the book is nothing like the end. The writing is fluid, and reads like good prose, and there are interesting universal observances about life, as seen through the eyes of a zookeeper's son. You'd think that this boy's life is, apart from his heritage and occupation, rather ordinary. But the story builds ever so carefully to a near fantastic situation: adrift, at sea, with wild animals as companions.

We meet our hero as a East Indian zookeeper's son, and he is experiencing a crossroads (if you will permit me this) of religion... potentially scattered, I thought, but oh, well, I got my children into bed before 8:30pm, darn it, I need some kind of reward, so keep reading...

My effort (or faith... hee hee ) was rewarded by the slow evolution of this young man's journey toward God. There is an interesting sidebar of characters of a priest, a guru, etc. who meet and argue over the young man's 'actual' faith. I imagine we can spend hours rolling around in the mud of the religious themes that naturally abound in the book, but, to heck with it, this book is fascinating on many different levels.

The book is well written, because although we begin at a rather slow pace about the ins and outs of zookeeping, we then find ourselves transported adroitly into the life of a desperate castaway, whose zookeeper experience possibly saves him from death on the open sea.

I was a little confused when the hero complains of his misguided efforts to save "Richard Parker" until the narrator eventually reveals to me that Richard Parker is the name of a Bengal tiger. I was impatient with this, finding no value to the sloooooowwww tease of the revelation, so I am telling you now who Richard Parker is. An interesting, bordering on weird, story origin: zookeeping, it's this zookeeper background which is excellent prepartion for our hero's eventual conquest of the tiger... or is it of himself?

We are left wondering, even at the very end, exactly who the tiger is. So, after reading it, is it the Lady? or the Tiger?