Articles liés à Life of Pi

Martel, Yann Life of Pi ISBN 13 : 9780156027328

Life of Pi - Couverture souple

 
9780156027328: Life of Pi
Afficher les exemplaires de cette édition ISBN
 
 
Life of Pi This brilliant novel combines the delight of Kipling's "Just So Stories" with the metaphysical adventure of "Jonah and the Whale, " as Pi, the son of a zookeeper, is marooned aboard a lifeboat with four wild animals. His knowledge and cunning allow him to coexist for 227 days with Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Full description

Les informations fournies dans la section « Synopsis » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Extrait :
Chapter 1

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

Academic study and the steady, mindful practice of religion slowly brought me back to life. I have remained a faithful Hindu, Christian and Muslim. I decided to stay in Toronto. After one year of high school, I attended the University of Toronto and took a double-major Bachelor’s degree. My majors were religious studies and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed. My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour — calm, quiet and introspective — did something to soothe my shattered self.

There are two-toed sloths and there are three-toed sloths, the case being determined by the forepaws of the animals, since all sloths have three claws on their hind paws. I had the great luck one summer of studying the three-toed sloth in situ in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day. Our team tested the sleep habits of five wild three-toed sloths by placing on their heads, in the early evening after they had fallen asleep, bright red plastic dishes filled with water. We found them still in place late the next morning, the water of the dishes swarming with insects. The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in a most relaxed sense. It moves along the bough of a tree in its characteristic upside-down position at the speed of roughly 400 metres an hour. On the ground, it crawls to its next tree at the rate of 250 metres an hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated cheetah. Unmotivated, it covers four to five metres in an hour.

The three-toed sloth is not well informed about the outside world. On a scale of 2 to 10, where 2 represents unusual dullness and 10 extreme acuity, Beebe (1926) gave the sloth’s senses of taste, touch, sight and hearing a rating of 2, and its sense of smell a rating of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth in the wild, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it; it will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should look about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a Magoo-like blur. As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound. Beebe reported that firing guns next to sleeping or feeding sloths elicited little reaction. And the sloth’s slightly better sense of smell should not be overestimated. They are said to be able to sniff and avoid decayed branches, but Bullock (1968) reported that sloths fall to the ground clinging to decayed branches “often”.

How does it survive, you might ask.

Precisely by being so slow. Sleepiness and slothfulness keep it out of harm’s way, away from the notice of jaguars, ocelots, harpy eagles and anacondas. A sloth’s hairs shelter an algae that is brown during the dry season and green during the wet season, so the animal blends in with the surrounding moss and foliage and looks like a nest of white ants or of squirrels, or like nothing at all but part of a tree.

The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. “A good-natured smile is forever on its lips,” reported Tirler (1966). I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at sloths in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing.

Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students–muddled agnostics who didn’t know which way was up, in the thrall of reason, that fool’s gold for the bright–reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.

I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

I was a very good student, if I may say so myself. I was tops at St. Michael’s College four years in a row. I got every possible student award from the Department of Zoology. If I got none from the Department of Religious Studies, it is simply because there are no student awards in this department (the rewards of religious study are not in mortal hands, we all know that). I would have received the Governor General’s Academic Medal, the University of Toronto’s highest undergraduate award, of which no small number of illustrious Canadians have been recipients, were it not for a beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament of unbearable good cheer.

I still smart a little at the slight. When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and I say, “You’ve got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death. Move on!” The skull snickers and moves ever closer, but that doesn’t surprise me. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity–it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud. The pink boy also got the nod from the Rhodes Scholarship committee. I love him and I hope his time at Oxford was a rich experience. If Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, one day favours me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on the list of cities I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca, Varanasi, Jerusalem and Paris.
Revue de presse :
PRAISE FOR LIFE OF PI

"Life of Pi could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life."— The New York Times Book Review

"A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction."— Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A gripping adventure story . . . Laced with wit, spiced with terror, it's a book by an extraordinary talent."— St. Paul Pioneer-Press

"A terrific book . . . Fresh, original, smart, devious, and crammed with absorbing lore."— Margaret Atwood

"An impassioned defense of zoos, a death-defying trans-Pacific sea adventure a la Kon-Tiki, and a hilarious shaggy-dog story . . . : This audacious novel manages to be all of these." — The New Yorker

"Readers familiar with Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and Carol Shields should learn to make room on the map of contemporary Canadian fiction for the formidable Yann Martel." — Chicago Tribune

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

  • ÉditeurMariner Books
  • Date d'édition2003
  • ISBN 10 0156027321
  • ISBN 13 9780156027328
  • ReliureBroché
  • Numéro d'édition1
  • Nombre de pages336
  • Evaluation vendeur

Frais de port : EUR 3,69
Vers Etats-Unis

Destinations, frais et délais

Ajouter au panier

Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9781786891686: Life Of Pi

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  ISBN 13 :  9781786891686
Editeur : Canongate Canons, 2018
Couverture souple

  • 9780151008117: Life of Pi

    Hought..., 2002
    Couverture rigide

  • 9780857865533: Life Of Pi

    Canong..., 2012
    Couverture souple

  • 9780156030205: Life of Pi: Student Edition

    Marine..., 2004
    Couverture souple

  • 9781910173206: Life of Pi (Scholastic Readers)

    Mary G..., 2014
    Couverture souple

Meilleurs résultats de recherche sur AbeBooks

Image d'archives

Yann Martel
Edité par Mariner Books Classics (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf paperback Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
KuleliBooks
(Phoenix, AZ, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre paperback. Etat : New. N° de réf. du vendeur 521X7W0003E6

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 1,98
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : EUR 3,69
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais
Image d'archives

Martel, Yann
Edité par Mariner Books Classics (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf Couverture souple Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Read&Dream
(SAINT LOUIS, MO, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre Etat : New. Safe and Secure Mailer. No Hassle Return. N° de réf. du vendeur 4JSHAO0043MC

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 6,07
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : EUR 3,69
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais
Image d'archives

Martel, Yann
Edité par Mariner Books Classics (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf paperback Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
RUSH HOUR BUSINESS
(Worcester, MA, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre paperback. Etat : New. N° de réf. du vendeur JERI-0373-03-25-2024

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 8,77
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : EUR 3,69
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais
Image d'archives

Yann Martel
Edité par Mariner Books (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf Paperback Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
upickbook
(Daly City, CA, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre Paperback. Etat : New. N° de réf. du vendeur mon0000003472

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 8,56
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : EUR 4,15
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais
Image fournie par le vendeur

Martel, Yann
Edité par Mariner Books (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf Soft Cover Quantité disponible : 10
Vendeur :
booksXpress
(Bayonne, NJ, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre Soft Cover. Etat : new. N° de réf. du vendeur 9780156027328

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 14,55
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : Gratuit
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais
Image fournie par le vendeur

Martel, Yann
Edité par Mariner Books 5/1/2003 (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf Paperback or Softback Quantité disponible : 5
Vendeur :
BargainBookStores
(Grand Rapids, MI, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre Paperback or Softback. Etat : New. Life of Pi 0.6. Book. N° de réf. du vendeur BBS-9780156027328

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 15,30
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : Gratuit
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais
Image d'archives

Yann Martel
Edité par Harper Collins Publishers (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf Couverture souple Quantité disponible : > 20
Vendeur :
INDOO
(Avenel, NJ, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre Etat : New. Brand New. N° de réf. du vendeur 0156027321

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 12,15
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : EUR 3,69
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais
Image fournie par le vendeur

Martel, Yann
Edité par Mariner Books Classics (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf Couverture souple Quantité disponible : 5
Vendeur :
GreatBookPrices
(Columbia, MD, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre Etat : New. N° de réf. du vendeur 1036841-n

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 13,73
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : EUR 2,44
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais
Image d'archives

Martel, Yann
Edité par Mariner Books Classics (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf Couverture souple Quantité disponible : > 20
Vendeur :
APlus Textbooks
(Alpharetta, GA, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre Etat : New. Multiple Copies Available - New Condition - Never Used - DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY CDs OR ACCESS CODES IF APPLICABLE. N° de réf. du vendeur 0156027321N

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 13,29
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : EUR 3,69
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais
Image d'archives

Martel, Yann
Edité par Mariner Books (2003)
ISBN 10 : 0156027321 ISBN 13 : 9780156027328
Neuf Paperback Quantité disponible : > 20
Vendeur :
Save With Sam
(North Miami, FL, Etats-Unis)
Evaluation vendeur

Description du livre Paperback. Etat : New. Brand New!. N° de réf. du vendeur 0156027321

Plus d'informations sur ce vendeur | Contacter le vendeur

Acheter neuf
EUR 17,60
Autre devise

Ajouter au panier

Frais de port : Gratuit
Vers Etats-Unis
Destinations, frais et délais

There are autres exemplaires de ce livre sont disponibles

Afficher tous les résultats pour ce livre