Yann Martel- Life of Pi

Life of Pie

Cannongate

Yann Martel
2001

"I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality."

Okay, I've been lazy for far too long with this blog. My original excuse was that I moved house and didn't feel like writing anything while I was settling in, but to be honest it's just because I'm one of those people who finds it way easier to spend time reading or watching the work of others than actually composing something in my own words. That's probably why I write a book review blog. Anyway, now I'm finally forcing myself to catch up with the backlog of stuff I've read and haven't reviewed (so the Discworld stuff is going to have to wait), and it seems appropriate to start with a book that's soon to be released as a probably massive Hollywood blockbuster; Yann Martel's Life of Pi.

Before I started to read Pi, I wasn't honestly expecting to like it, because I'm constantly suspicious of any book I see that's been included and praised by a TV book club, because the type of people I've seen on those programs make me want to go to sleep for the rest of my life. I had the same problem with Cormac McCarthy's The Road before I read it, but I enjoyed that. So, after being promised it was brilliant, I gave Life of Pi a shot. Thankfully, it was brilliant.

I love this cover.

The initial attraction for most people to this book is its intriguing high-concept set-up; a young Indian boy named Piscine is shipwrecked on a lifeboat in the Pacific ocean with a Bengal tiger. It's very attention-grabbing, but obviously the reason why the book is such a successful and unclassifiable piece of work is because there's a great deal more than that. First of all, Martel presents the tale as a first-hand story being narrated to the author by Pi as an old man, recounting not just the primary tale but detailing his life from the beginning. From the beginning Pi is established as a very eccentric, but passionate and willful child (like Rudyard Kipling's Kim on Red Bull), who, despite being raised as Hindu, chooses to declare himself both a Christian and Muslim as well. Pi's family own and run a zoo in Pondicherry, India, and Pi enjoys an amazing childhood with the many animals he knows by name. But then the zoo is sold, and Pi learns he is to travel to Canada with his family on a large boat, with many of the zoo animals caged beneath deck. Guess what happens next?

As the ship sinks, Pi is thrown onto a lifeboat, alongside a Zebra with a broken leg, a ravenous hyena, an orangutang, and a  Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. What follows is a desperate fight for survival, with each day a battle of will and cunning between tiger and boy. Naturally events progress somewhat unexpectedly, but I'll stubbornly resist spoiling any of them. The third part of the book is different in style, as Pi has a long conversation with a third party of individuals in a manner which potentially changes the whole nature of the story we've just read. While I felt the main narrative was thrilling enough, it's this conclusion which elevated Life of Pi for me as something not just good, but great.

Hopefully at some point I'll re-read it, because it certainly seemed like a book that could improve and change with each revist, especially during the second reading when events can be approached in a much fuller context. Also, in hindsight I can see why Life of Pi was selected and highlighted by mainstream popular culture because it works well on several levels; not only as a surreal character odyssey but as an engaging human drama, and one that should be a pretty easy sell for the 20th Century Fox if they pitch it right. I'm pretty excited to see the film because a proper rendition of the novel could be stunning, but then I guess you should probably never get your hopes up in those cases.

Stephen Pinker- The Language Instinct

The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind

Penguin

Stephen Pinker
1994

"In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.”

I've had a somewhat spotty history with educational non-fiction books in the past; for some reason rather than do the decent, useful thing and absorb the potentially useful information like a pink sponge, my brain has a nasty habit of actively rebelling against things that have the bare-faced cheek to try and teach me anything, kind of like Homer Simpson running outside to chase a squirrel. Things like autobiographies are usually fine, and literature about pop-culture generally get a pass, but scientific fact is always at risk; for example, while I greatly enjoyed Richard Dawkins' fantastically argumentative The God Delusion, when I followed that up with his next book, the more science fact-based The Greatest Show on Earth, my attention struggled. The message? Pop-culture has destroyed my brain.

Nevertheless, linguistic psychologist Stephen Pinker's breakout (and highly regarded) publication captured my attention through its subject matter and promises of scientific revelation in the field of language. The premise of The Language Instinct is Pinker's highly developed take on a theory introduced by Noam Chompsky that the human capability for language exists innately, produced through evolutionary forces to exist as a genetic capability. I won't try to cover the rational or evidence that Pinker uses to argue his hypothesis, but his arguments are extensive, logical, written in an interesting fashion, and occasionally complicated enough for me to give up on trying to follow for the sake of assuming they're probably right.

It's a combination of the last two factors which were the key for me to proceed to the end of the book and emerge from it with a sense of satisfaction. Pinker's writing is generally very personable, sometimes funny, and clear without being condescending. He's like Dawkins in that respect. I can't say I massively enjoyed this book though, partially because Pinker sometimes does delve into the deep end of linguistics and semiotics, analyzing aspects of language in a very practical manner that cannot help but seem a little confusing and dull for anyone without a natural inclination towards such things. Despite my love of literature and wordplay that category includes me I'm afraid. While Pinker tries to include some amusing anecdotes, it seems that the well for such things is  a little shallow.

On the other hand, it seems churlish of me to criticism this book for not being entertaining enough, because that's not really the point; Stephen Pinker's task is to discuss some complicated science (of which he is clearly an expert) in a tone appealing enough for the layman to embrace without sacrificing the integrity of the subject. With that in mind I think he succeeded in creating a though-provoking and well-balanced book that isn't always as quite amusing as the reader might like but is certainly one that he or she can take a lot out of; including telling all of their friends that they've read it in order to sound clever at parties. 

Naomi Klein- No Logo

No Logo

Naomi Klein

1999

"The astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multi-national corporations over the last fifteen years can arguably be traced back to a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products." 

It was none other than comic book superstar author Grant Morrison who convinced me to read this book. Not personally, of course, but in his recent history of comic books/autobiography Supergods (to be reviewed here at some point), Morrison pointed to this vastly popular, now twelve-years-old negative dissection of the corporate culture of big brands as the definitive tome on the subject, and if the author of Final Crisis said so then who am I to argue? Morrison's not the only famous figure to have proclaimed No Logo as important reading; most notably career campaigners Radiohead recommended it to fans. It's not surprising, considering that, in the most simplistic fashion, 'billion dollar corporations are bad' isn't a hard statement to sell to the new new-age hippies of the twenty-first century, to whom buzzwords like globalisation immediately summon pessimistic connotations. This book has an immediate appeal, but is it any good?

First of all, I must confess that I'm not a politician. In fact, you might accuse me of barely being aware of anything that exists outside of the bubbles that are my personal life and entertainment culture, and so I headed into this book with a mixture of naivety and a vague cynicism regarding the notion of someone else trying to sway my opinion on a topic I know perilously little about. Some time later, when I was finished, I exited No Logo with... well, not a huge amount regarding actual personal feeling. The vague concepts surrounding extreme commercialism and massively huge brands were solidified somewhat with some genuinely interesting facts, figures, and human interest stories, but an actual sense of activism was almost completely lost on me, since No Logo does rather firmly establish, if unintentionally, that for the average person any acts of rebellion against these giants is like throwing rocks at the moon.

Naomi Klein writes with a personal, friendly tone that allows her to successfully mix up potentially dull facts and figures with heartfelt stories of victimized consumers and abused sweatshop workers that directly humanize the negative impact that the methods used by corporate giants to gain such huge lumps of cash and expand their territory. From her home country of Canada to the sweatshop factories of China, Klein finds people to talk to and subjects to talk about. There's so many contentious issues to highlight that she has plenty to write about, and does, but to varying levels of interest from this reader. In many ways it reminded me of Richard Dawkins' book on evolution The Greatest Show On Earth in that it's so completely dedicated to covering a massive topic that it doesn't really care about appealing to the casual reader in regards to homogenizing or downplaying elements that simply don't make for an interesting read. That's certainly admirable, but does ensure that some segments of this book are a drag.

Perhaps much of No Logo's success is that it manages to achieve its goal of 'taking aim' at its targets and throwing some explosive ammunition without seeming like a single-minded vendetta designed to appeal to a majority. Klein is a personable author who strikes this fine balance between propaganda and the rabbiting of fact through careful presentation, but I found it very hard to get exited or worked up about anything in this book, and towards the end found my inclination to read more to become less and less. Perhaps that's because I'm not quite the target audience and I was reading in the hope of being more impressed by the writing than its subject. Or perhaps, in the decade since original publication this post-9/11 world has inundated the media-absorbing public with other worrying topics that have taken the attention away from this subject. Either way, No Logo left me with some thoughtfulness and some respect for the presentational abilities of Naomi Klein, but sadly little else.