Review of: Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Let me start this review with praise. I picked up Yann Martel's Life of Pi with high expectations. I had heard many good things about it, and if they weren't enough, I could simply look on the cover. The front proudly boasted that the book was the winner of the Man Booker Prize, and the back raved with such reviews as: "Let me tell you a secret:the name of the greatest living writer of the generation born in the sixties is Yann Martel"(L'Humanite' in France) and "Pi is Martel's triumph."(The Globe and Mail in Toronto) The book was a selection of both the Book-Of-The-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. Apparently, the story would make me believe in God.Yet I didn't make it past page 49. I gave it a chance, I really did. If I hadn't, I would have stopped reading earlier. Much earlier. Everything about it was short, from the first sentence (My suffering left me sad and gloomy) to the irresistable About The Author: Yann Martel lives in Montreal. Honestly, who wouldn't want to read it? The description(A boy, A tiger, And the vast Pacific Ocean) made me think that the book would be about a boy's journey in the Pacific Ocean in a boat, with a tiger. That sounds incredilbe, right? But no. The book is basically an autobiography, with long, tragic sections about this boy's religion, and his name, and how his father fed a goat to a tiger while he and his brother watched. All I got from it was that the boy lived in a zoo, he made himself a nickname in school, and that he was very confused about his religious self. One passage, a flashback to Martel writing the book(one would assume) described how this man had Buddha, Christ, Ganesha, the Virgin Mary, Kaaba, Shiva as Nataraja, Krishna, Lakshmi, Shakti as Parvarti, Hindu symbols, the Arabic word for God, and a Bible in his home. Chapter 16, which spans through pages 47-50, ponders what it means to be Catholic, Hindu, Christian, and Muslim. Three full pages consisting of nothing but religion. I was utterly perplexed. How can one person speak so much about religion? I didn't finish that chapter. I closed the book and thought for long moments about how I had been lied to. I did not pick it up again. My theory is if you start a book and don't like it, keep reading. If you continue disliking it, keep reading. On the third try, put it down. And that is exactly what I did.
(Here I'm going to be geeky and give it a starred rating)Life of Pi by Yann Martel: *