內容簡介
The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes.
The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional--but is it more true?
《少年pi的奇幻漂流》是作者馬特爾的第二部小說,但是一麵市便驚艷國際文壇,獲奬無數,成為暢銷書。《少年pi的奇幻漂流》是一關於成長、冒險、希望、奇跡、生存和信心的奇特的小說,在美國、加拿大、德國、英國等歐美國傢進入瞭高中生必讀書目。這本書描述瞭16歲的印度少年和一隻孟加拉虎共同在太平洋漂流227天後獲得重生的神奇經曆。如真似幻的海上曆險與天真、殘酷並存的人性矛盾,在書中不但巧妙契閤,更激蕩齣高潮不斷的閱讀驚喜。
小說內容關於冒險、希望、奇跡、生存和信心,是一個能讓人産生信仰的故事,同時也會讓讀者重新認識文學並相信文學的力量。書中如真似幻的海上曆險與天真、殘酷並存的人性矛盾,巧妙契閤,更激蕩齣高潮不斷的閱讀驚喜。讀者讀過此書後必將引發深深的思考,無論是開放式的結局還是小說對於信仰、生存,乃至人與動物、人與人、人與世界的關係的展現,都會成為每一個讀者深思的問題。難得的是,這樣一本蘊含悠遠、包羅萬象的書確是非常好讀,敘述行雲流水,文字不艱澀不花哨,語言樸實且有力量,好讀且讓人欲罷不能。
作者簡介
Yann Martel, the son of diplomats, was born in Spain in 1963. He grew up in Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Alaska, and Canada and as an adult has spent time in Iran, Turkey, and India. After studying philosophy in college, he worked at various odd jobs until he began earning his living as a writer at the age of twenty-seven. He lives in Montreal.
揚·馬特爾(Yann Martel),一九六三年齣生於西班牙,父母是加拿大人。幼時曾旅居哥斯達黎加、法國、墨西哥、加拿大,成年後作客伊朗、土耳其及印度。畢業於加拿大特倫特大學哲學係,其後從事過各種稀奇古怪的行業,包括植樹工、洗碗工、保安等。
內頁插圖
精彩書評
Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker ("His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth"). It sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don't burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion."
An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a book.
--Brad Thomas Parsons
A fabulous romp through an imagination by turns ecstatic, cunning, despairing and resilient, this novel is an impressive achievement "a story that will make you believe in God," as one character says. The peripatetic Pi (ne the much-taunted Piscine) Patel spends a beguiling boyhood in Pondicherry, India, as the son of a zookeeper. Growing up beside the wild beasts, Pi gathers an encyclopedic knowledge of the animal world. His curious mind also makes the leap from his native Hinduism to Christianity and Islam, all three of which he practices with joyous abandon. In his 16th year, Pi sets sail with his family and some of their menagerie to start a new life in Canada. Halfway to Midway Island, the ship sinks into the Pacific, leaving Pi stranded on a life raft with a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After the beast dispatches the others, Pi is left to survive for 227 days with his large feline companion on the 26-foot-long raft, using all his knowledge, wits and faith to keep himself alive. The scenes flow together effortlessly, and the sharp observations of the young narrator keep the tale brisk and engaging. Martel's potentially unbelievable plot line soon demolishes the reader's defenses, cleverly set up by events of young Pi's life that almost naturally lead to his biggest ordeal. This richly patterned work, Martel's second novel, won Canada's 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. In it, Martel displays the clever voice and tremendous storytelling skills of an emerging master.
--Publishers Weekly
美國總統奧巴馬曾在和女兒共讀此書之後寫信給作者馬特爾,稱此書是“對上帝之存在的優雅證明,完美展示瞭故事的力量”。
許多年來最奇特然而也是最容易讀的一部小說……《少年PI的奇幻漂流》將奇談、寓言和道德故事糅閤在瞭一起。
——《經濟學人》
我們需要這個故事,當然不是為瞭掩飾我們的獸性,更是為瞭對我們的人性懷有信心。
——作傢周國平
PI不讀“屁”,讀“派”,就是圓周率π,一個最真實最神秘的數字。
——書評人 小寶
我願意把它看做一本人和世界(宇宙)的關係的小說。如果真的2012是末日,這本書可以留給任何幸存下來的人,它有太多的含義。
——雕塑傢 嚮京
精彩書摘
CHAPTER 1My 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.
I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.
I love Canada. I miss the heat of India, the food, the house lizards on the walls, the musicals on the silver screen, the cows wandering the streets, the crows cawing, even the talk of cricket matches, but I love Canada. It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos. Anyway, I have nothing to go home to in Pondicherry.
Richard Parker has stayed with me. I've never forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. That pain is like an axe that chops at my heart.
The doctors and nurses at the hospital in Mexico were incredibly kind to me. And the patients, too. Victims of cancer or car accidents, once they heard my story, they hobbled and wheeled over to see me, they and their families, though none of them spoke English and I spoke no Spanish. They smiled at me, shook my hand, patted me on the head, left gifts of food and clothing on my bed. They moved me to uncontrollable fits of laughing and crying.
Within a couple of days I could stand, even make two, three steps, despite nausea, dizziness and general weakness. Blood tests revealed that I was anemic, and that my level of sodium was very high and my potassium low. My body retained fluids and my legs swelled up tremendously. I looked as if I had been grafted with a pair of elephant legs. My urine was a deep, dark yellow going on to brown. After a week or so, I could walk just about normally and I could wear shoes if I didn't lace them up. My skin healed, though I still have scars on my shoulders and back.
The first time I turned a tap on, its noisy, wasteful, superabundant gush was such a shock that I became incoherent and my legs collapsed beneath me and I fainted in the arms of a nurse.
The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada I used my fingers. The waiter looked at me critically and said, "Fresh off the boat, are you?" I blanched. My fingers, which a second before had been taste buds savouring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gaze. They froze like criminals caught in the act. I didn't dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh. I picked up the knife and fork. I had hardly ever used such instruments. My hands trembled. My sambar lost its taste.
前言/序言
《迷失的航程:大洋深處的智慧與生存》 內容簡介: 這是一部關於人類精神韌性與自然界宏大力量的史詩級敘事,它深入探討瞭在極端環境下,個體如何構建意義、保持人性,並在看似絕望的境地中尋找到生存的火花。故事的主角並非一個普通的旅行者,而是一個對知識有著無盡渴求的年輕學者——亞曆山大·範德比爾特。他原本計劃進行一次橫跨印度洋的學術考察,旨在記錄並分析那些被主流科學界忽視的古代航海知識與民間傳說。 亞曆山大的旅程始於孟買一個陰雨連綿的清晨,他帶著一箱珍貴的航海日誌、一套復雜的天文觀測儀器,以及對未知世界的無限憧憬,登上瞭名為“赫爾墨斯之翼”的仿古帆船。這艘船與其說是一艘現代交通工具,不如說是一座漂浮的圖書館,船上載滿瞭關於古代地理學、星象學、海洋生物學以及失落文明的文獻。 然而,命運的巨手在太平洋赤道附近無情地撥動瞭航嚮。一場罕見的、史無前例的“靜默風暴”——一場沒有雷鳴電閃,卻以絕對力量撕裂一切的低氣壓現象——突襲瞭“赫爾墨斯之翼”。船體在巨浪中解體,亞曆山大在混亂中幸存,卻發現自己被睏在瞭一個由殘骸拼湊而成的簡陋木筏上。 荒野中的哲學思辨 接下來的故事,是對人類生存本能最殘酷的考驗。亞曆山大發現自己並非獨自漂流。與他同舟的,是來自不同背景、擁有截然不同生存哲學的幸存者。其中包括:一位嚴謹的法國植物學傢,他對如何從海水中提取淡水有著近乎偏執的研究;一位沉默寡言的日本漁民,他似乎與海洋有著一種原始的、無需言語的默契;以及一位來自西伯利亞的退役工程師,他堅信隻有精確的數學計算纔能抵抗混沌。 這艘小小的“浮動避難所”成為瞭一個微縮的社會,充滿瞭潛在的衝突與閤作的需要。他們的目標從最初的“活下去”,逐漸演變為“如何有尊嚴地活下去”。 亞曆山大被迫放棄他過去所有的學術理論。他必須快速學習如何辨識洋流的微妙變化,如何利用星辰的位置來修正他們幾乎完全偏離的航綫。他利用從船上搶救下來的航海日誌碎片,試圖重構齣被遺忘的導航技術。他開始對“知識”的定義産生動搖——是書本上的文字更有價值,還是那份從風暴中幸存下來的直覺更為可靠? 人性的光譜與生存的代價 隨著時間的推移,食物和淡水的稀缺性將人性的光譜拉伸到瞭極限。亞曆山大目睹瞭恐懼如何腐蝕理智,也見證瞭友誼如何在最不可能的環境中開花結果。法國植物學傢因過度追求效率而變得冷酷無情,他的“理性”最終成為瞭團隊中的一個不穩定因素。而日本漁民的沉靜,則在關鍵時刻挽救瞭所有人的性命,他的行動準則植根於對海洋的深刻敬畏,而非對人類文明規則的遵循。 書中詳盡地描繪瞭他們捕獵的掙紮——如何利用一塊反光的金屬碎片吸引遠處的魚群,如何在夜間忍受飢餓帶來的幻覺。這些生存細節被作者以極其寫實且充滿感官衝擊力的方式呈現,讓讀者仿佛能感受到烈日灼燒皮膚的痛楚,以及海風中鹹澀的氣味。 更深層次的探討在於“敘事”的力量。麵對永無止境的藍色虛空,每個人都在努力構建一個讓自己能夠接受的“現實”。亞曆山大開始質疑,他們所經曆的一切,是否真的是客觀發生的?還是為瞭在精神上存活,他們集體或個體地編織瞭一個可以承受的故事版本?他開始記錄那些“難以置信”的事件——那些關於深海生物的奇異光影,那些仿佛在與他們對話的鯨群。 對自然秩序的反思 這部作品並非僅僅是關於漂流,它更是對人類中心主義的深刻反思。在浩瀚的海洋麵前,人類的科學、宗教和文明顯得如此渺小和脆弱。亞曆山大從一開始的徵服自然者的心態,轉變為謙卑的觀察者。他開始理解海洋的運作遵循著一套自身嚴密的、古老的邏輯,這種邏輯並不以人類的福祉為中心。 故事的高潮部分,描繪瞭一場關於“選擇”的道德睏境。當一個艱難的生存抉擇擺在所有人麵前時,亞曆山大必須決定,是遵循他所學的“文明”倫理,還是采納更原始、更殘酷的生存法則。他的選擇,揭示瞭他在這場漂流中學到的最寶貴的“真理”——真正的生存,是關於適應,而非抵抗。 最終,當一艘遙遠的貨輪齣現在地平綫上時,幸存者們麵臨的最後一個考驗是如何將他們在大海上構建的那個“真實”,轉化為外界世界可以理解和接受的版本。他們帶迴的,不僅僅是肉體的創傷,更是關於信仰、關於故事、關於人類精神在孤寂中能達到的極限的深刻洞察。 《迷失的航程》是一部關於地理冒險、心理深度和存在主義探索的傑作,它將引導讀者進入一個關於信念與現實交織的境界,迫使我們重新審視自己麵對逆境時的內在指南針。這部作品挑戰瞭我們對“真實”的定義,並頌揚瞭人類在最黑暗的時刻所展現齣的,對意義和聯係的永恒追求。