Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Martel, Yann - Jean Smith (review date spring 2003)

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Jean Smith (review date spring 2003)

SOURCE: Smith, Jean. Review of The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. Review of Contemporary Fiction 23, no. 1 (spring 2003): 158-59.

[In the following review, Smith is generally critical of The Life of Pi, asserting that Martel offers a confused discourse on religious faith.]

This ultra-linear novel [Life of Pi] begins with, and not after, an author's note from which a word is used to summarize travel in India: “bamboozle”—soon put to use at a train station when a clerk claims, “There is no bamboozlement here.” Publisher's Weekly revealed the bamboozlement of their reviewer by referring to Martel's “captivating honesty about the genesis of his story.” Martel lifted the idea for this novel from one by Moacyr Scliar about a Jewish zookeeper who ends up in a lifeboat with a panther. Now we have Pi, an Indian teenager on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Cary Fagan (review date April 1993)
   2. Merna Summers (review date June 1993)
   3. A. C. (review date 27 May 1994)
   4. Greg Hollingshead (review date April 1996)
   5. Christine Hamelin (review date November 1996)
   6. Julian Ferraro (review date 22 November 1996)
   7. Nathan Whitlock (review date August 2001)
   8. Francis King (review date 18 May 2002)
   9. Francie Lin (review date 16 June 2002)
   10. Roz Kaveney (review date 19 July 2002)
   11. William Skidelsky (review date 29 July 2002)
   12. Charlotte Innes (review date 19 August 2002)
   13. Yann Martel and Sabine Sielke (interview date 2002)
   14. Gordon Houser (review date 8 February 2003)
   15. Pankaj Mishra (review date 27 March 2003)
   16. Elizabeth Palmberg (review date March-April 2003)
   17. Gerald T. Cobb (review date 14 April 2003)
   18. Randy Boyagoda (review date May 2003)
   19. Jean Smith (review date spring 2003)
   20. Linda M. Morra (review date summer 2003)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Yann Martel