Life of Pi

Zusatztext Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction "Let me tell you a secret: the name of the greatest living writer of the generation born in the sixties is Yann Martel."-- L'Humanité "A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction and its human creators! and in the original power of storytellers like Martel." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review “If this century produces a classic work of survival literature! Martel is surely a contender.’--The Nation "Beautifully fantastical and spirited." -- Salon "Martel displays the clever voice and tremendous storytelling skills of an emerging master." --Publishers Weekly "[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 "Audacious! exhilarating . . . wonderful. The book's middle section might be the most gripping 200 pages in recent Canadian fiction. It also stands up against some of Martel's more obvious influences: Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ! the novels of H. G. Wells! certain stretches of Moby Dick ."-- Quill & Quire Informationen zum Autor YANN MARTEL was born in Spain in 1963 of Canadian parents. Life of Pi won the 2002 Man Booker Prize (among other honors) and was adapted to the screen in the Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee. Martel is also the author of the novels The High Mountains of Portugal, Beatrice and Virgil, and Self, the collection of stories The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and a collection of letters to the prime minister of Canada, What Is Stephen Harper Reading?. He lives in Saskatchewan, Canada. 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, tw...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Yann Martel
• Verlag: Houghton Mifflin
• Sprache: Englisch
• Altersempfehlung: ab 14 Jahren
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 01.12.2007
• EAN: 9780156035880
• ISBN: 978-0-15-603588-0
• Abmessung: 108 mm x 177 mm x 27 mm
• Serie: Mariner Books
• Thema: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur