Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Martel, Yann - Roz Kaveney (review date 19 July 2002)

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Roz Kaveney (review date 19 July 2002)

SOURCE: Kaveney, Roz. “Guess Who's for Dinner.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5180 (19 July 2002): 25.

[In the following mixed review of The Life of Pi, Kaveney argues that the discussions of religious issues within the novel are unconvincing.]

Sometimes, the best part of a novel is not the elaborate constructions which go to create a plausible fictional world, but the single mad sentence that might be used to pitch the screenplay in Hollywood. In the case of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the thing that makes the book memorable is not the overly cute, bordering on patronizing, narrative of how his hero Pi came to take his name, adopt many religions and grow up in Pondicherry as the son of a zoo-keeper. It is the story of how he manages to survive for eight-and-a-half months in an open boat in the Pacific in the company of an adult Bengal tiger, keeping both his sanity and all of his...

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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