Recent reads

The books were sitting in a stack on my sister’s desk on top of a book of mine I was reclaiming. So I took hers along with mine. They were a couple of books that have been talked about so much I wasn’t sure I even wanted to read them, but I never like feeling left out of a conversation. So I finally got around to reading the Life of Pi and Home a couple weeks ago.

I first picked up Life of Pi by Yann Martel once at a library three moves ago and never got past the introduction. It sounded so artificially heavy: “This is a story that will make you believe in God,” the storyteller says. I’m still trying to figure out how it does that. Because Pi survives? Because he returns to civilization and lives a relatively normal life with a wife and kids after his traumatic experience at sea? Because he wants to love God as best as he can so he incorporates Christian, Muslim, and Hindu practices into his worship?


Although I sound critical, I actually enjoyed reading the book. It’s a much more interesting sea survival book than the biggest section of Robinson Crusoe, even though both provide a lot of details about their work to survive. So it made pretty good beach reading: I’m ready for a shipwreck. While my sister kept her eyes on her baby and my kids too, I sat on the beach and got some reading done in her unread book, a pastime I haven’t been able to indulge in much since I started having babies.

Having recently visited a couple of zoos, I also took pleasure in the comments about the wild animals appreciating their confinement, easy meals, and the feeling of safety – a sentiment similar to the idea expressed so well in a Right to Be Merry that true freedom often comes from limited choices (choices being something I've been struggling with lately).


But if this is a story that is to make me believe in God, why doesn’t Pi examine what his teachers share about the afterlife? Why was there no conflict in Pi’s heart about what might happen to his soul if he were to be eaten by the tiger or die of exposure/starvation/shark attack? I kept wondering if Pi would make a choice like his teachers wanted him to do, but perhaps his cobbled together faith is all about surviving the present moment in life and finding happiness in this world, which often seems as devoid of interest but full of potential beauty as the open sea.

(On the riddle at the end: I vote on the first version of the story, over the second, more plausible edition Pi tells his examiners. Why not let the symbols be real?)

Marked passages: “The agnostic fails to choose, while the atheist could make a leap of faith.”


“Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating it when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious. . . You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point when you’re at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you’re the luckiest peson on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish.”


“For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.”
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I actually read Home by Marianne Robinson before I read Pi.  Robinson's Gilead got a lot of press when it came out, so when my mom got ahold of a copy last summer, I started it, but ended up skimming to the end because it moved so slowly. Home, likewise, moves slowly, as it unfolds the relationship between Jack, Glory, and Pastor Boughton as the pastor is dying, Jack is drying out, and Glory is recovering from a failed love affair. I wonder if both books would have functioned better as novellas.

There’s something to be said for the slow pace, revealing bits and pieces of each character’s story and personality gradually. It allowed the characters to come into their own, so the reader gets to know them as they grow in knowledge of themselves. I liked the characters and grew interested in their relationship and where they might head. The pastor faces his ambivalent feelings toward his wayward son, whom it is both “a curse and an affliction” to love, a familiar feeling, although I'm not sure I'd articulate it thus.

It wasn’t clear until the very end whether or not Jack would stick to his sobriety. He was a man to be pitied, but it was eventually clear that he also had an admirable side. He struggles with faith honestly, and believes himself damned even though he doubts Scripture. So is it this belief in damnation that compels him to commit sins greater than the prior ones? It seemed like there were a couple of points where Robinson suggests he’s manic depressive or something similar, as if to give him an excuse for his recurring failures, despite his brains and genes.
Even so, Robinson doesn’t go for the easy resolution – although redemption is there waiting for Jack. Glory does seem to come to terms with her need to accept and give help to her family, and to be thankful for the grace to be present for her nephew. I loved the emphasis on family as a vehicle of grace, but I’m pretty sure I won’t ever pick this book up to read it again.


A couple good quotes: “Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them like an exile? . . . That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise , other the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.”


“The Lord does work through human beings, through families. . . Part of it is giving care and another part is accepting it. That second part is difficult and very important . . . That’s what the family is for. . . Calvin says it is the Providence of God that we look after those nearest to us. So it is the will of God that we help our brothers, and it is equally the will of God that we accept their help and receive the blessing of it.”