MindSpinner

I’m backtracking today, all the way to last summer, when I read Life of Pi and wrote to a friend about the book. I’m pasting part of the note below.

Why would I do this? For the sake of potential conversations about books, of course. I should be blogging about what I’m reading now (just finished The Kite Runner and Getting Things Done, am sixty or seventy pages into Scott Simon’s Pretty Birds), but this summer has not offered much time for reading and writing about reading, given a job change and a summer Web project, so I’m cheating.

No doubt, I am also posting this note because a casual acquaintance disparaged reading to me today as having little substantive relevance to “real life.” He thought I was nuts for putting a shared love of books high on my list of criteria for a successful relationship. I am in full defiance mode.

Here’s the greater part of the note.

Your ideas about Life of Pi brought me back to the novel and to the task of working out what to make of it, a task I had not (and still have not) finished. But I think I am making a start. (I am very happy at this sort of thing, like a child absorbed in building a sand castle with sand that actually holds a shape.)

I should read the novel all over again. (In fact, all bets are off until I do, and all sand castles merely hypothetical until shored up on every side with little sandy buttresses.)

My impression was that I began to expect one thing while I was reading or listening, and then the book became another, several times over. I do not think this was, in fact, a lack of unity or purpose; I think it is evidence that the story is not to be read merely as a remarkable story in the survival genre that swerves into magical realism here and there. I think it’s a story about stories and storytellers, the stories we choose to believe and the stories we don’t, the stories that we mistake for truths that are not, the truths that we dismiss as stories wen we shouldn’t, and most of all, the stories that are most worth telling and hearing and believing imaginatively, if not literally, as if reality isn’t the most important thing in the world after all.

There’s a tip-off in the close to the author’s note, which is itself a fiction, like Hawthorne’s “Customs House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter: “If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.” So maybe the book is about choosing what to believe and having worthwhile dreams. It’s a testament to a faith in stories and in truths that are not slave to mere “crude reality.”

There is the story of how bad zoos are, which is dismantled and replaced by another story of how bad zoos are not.

There are the stories which are the world’s great religions, stories which each in their own way point to God, and which therefore should not be dismissed, each by another.

There is the story of the boy and the tiger on the boat, which is worth telling and believing not because it is necessarily believable, but because it is a great story that speaks to faith, resourcefulness, and the potentially indomitable human spirit. So Martel makes us believe it for a bit by force of vividness and detail, then undoes the believing with the fantastic conversation between the blind Pi and his blind fellow shipwreck victim whose paths supposedly cross, and the story of the carnivorous island, which sounds like an episode from The Odyssey. (It reminds me of the island of Circe: this is a place that will devour you, a place you cannot stay.) Then we realize that the carnivorous island story does not have to be literally true; it can by mythically true of all sorts of situations we can encounter in crude reality, from a bad marriage to a bad job to a seductive addiction.

When the story of the French cook comes along, we find ourselves attempting to choose, as Pi suggests, the story we wish to believe. Both, of course, are fictions. Martel implies that the value of a story does not lie in whether or not it actually happened. The value of a story lies in whether it speaks to us dreams worth dreaming and beliefs that keep us afloat, or indomitable, and sometimes within reach of the divine.