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 Parker. Martel...