Context
Yann Martel was born on June 25, 1963, in Salamanca, Spain, to Canadian parents. When Martel was a young boy, his parents joined the Canadian Foreign Services, and the family moved frequently, living in Alaska, France, Costa Rica, Ontario, and British Columbia. Martel went on to study philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, where he discovered a love for writing. After graduating in 1985, Martel lived with his parents and worked a number of odd jobs while continuing to write fiction. He published a collection of short stories, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, in 199360字日记 and a novel, 裸女生Self, in 1996, but neither book received much critical or commercial attention. In 2002, however, Martel’s international literary reputation was aled with the publication of Life of Pi, a runaway bestller that went on to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize (awarded each year to the best English-language novel written by a Commonwealth or Irish author) and had since been translated into thirty languages. Fox 2000 pictures bought the screen rights to Martel’s novel, and a feature film is expected in 海底椰片2008.
杨利伟事迹
Life of Pi is t against the tumultuous period of Indian history known as the Emergency. In 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty of charges related to her 诸葛亮教学1971 election campaign and was ordered to resign. Instead—and in respon to a rising tide of strikes and protests that were paralyzing the government—Gandhi declared a state of emergency, suspending constitutional rights and giving herlf the power to rule by decree. The Emergency lasted for eighteen months and was officially ended in March 1977 when Gandhi called for a new round of elections. The historical legacy of the Emergency has been highly controversial: while civil liberties in this emerging democracy were verely curtailed and Gandhi’s political opponents found themlves jailed, abud, and tortured, India’s economy experienced a much-needed stabilization and growth. In Life of Pi, Piscine (Pi) Molitor Patel’s father, a zookeeper in Pondicherry, India, grows nervous about the current political situation. Speculating that Gandhi might try to take over his zoo and faced with depressing economic conditions, Pi’s father decides to ll off his zoo animals and move his family to Canada, thus tting the main action of the novel into motion.
表白该怎么说Though only a relatively brief ction of Life of Pi is actually t in India, the country’s eclectic makeup is reflected throughout the novel. Pi is raid as a Hindu but as a young boy discovers both Christianity and Islam and decides to practice all three religions simultaneously. In the Author’s Note, an elderly Indian man describes the story of Pi as “a story that will make you believe in God,” and Life of Pi continuously grapples with questions of faith; as an adherent to the three most prominent religions in India, Pi provides a unique perspective on issues of Indian spirituality. India’s diver culture is further reflected in Martel’s choice of Pondicherry as a tting. India was a British colony for nearly two hundred years, and conquently most of the nation has been deeply influenced by British culture. However, Pondicherry, a tiny city in southern India, was once the capital of French India and as such has retained a uniquely French flavor that ts it apart from the rest of the nation. Perhaps reflecting Yann Martel’s own nomadic childhood, Pi Patel pointedly begins his life in a diver cultural tting before encountering French, Mexican, Japane, and Canadian characters along his journey.
Life of Pi can be characterized as a postcolonial novel, becau of its post-Independence
Indian tting as well as its Canadian authorship. Like many postcolonial novels, such as tho of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez, Life of Pi can also be classified as a work of magical realism, a literary genre in which fantastical elements—such as animals with human personalities or an island with cannibalistic trees—appear in an otherwi realistic tting. Martel’s novel could equally be described as a bildungsroman (a coming-of-age tale) or an adventure story. Life of Pi 夏夜的萤火虫even flirts with nonfiction genres. The Author’s Note, for example, claims that the story of Piscine Molitor Patel is a true story that the author, Yann Martel, heard while backpacking through Pondicherry, and the novel, with its first-person narrator, is structured as a memoir. At the end of the novel, we are prented with interview transcripts, another genre of nonfiction writing. This mixing of fiction and nonfiction reflects the twist ending of the novel, in which the veracity of Pi’s fantastical story is called into doubt and the reader, like Pi’s Japane interrogators, is forced to confront unttling questions about the nature of truth itlf.
Many critics have noted the book’s remblance to Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea. Both novels feature an epic struggle between man and beast. In The O
ld Man and the Sea, a fisherman struggles to pull in a mighty marlin, while in Life of Pi, Pi and Richard Parker struggle for dominance on the lifeboat. Both the fisherman and Pi learn to respect their animal counterparts; each pair is connected in their mutual suffering, strength, and resolve. Although they are opponents, they are also partners, allies, even doubles. Furthermore, both novels emphasize the importance of endurance. Becau death and destruction are inevitable, both novels prent life as a choice between only two options: defeat or endurance until destruction. Enduring against all odds elevates both human characters to the status of heroes.
龙船调
