Life of Pi: Close Reading

1. Life of Pi: Close Reading

4. Passage 2. Chapter 31; pg.93 Mr. and Mr. Kumar looked delighted. A zebra, you say?” said Mr. Kumar. “That’s right,” I replied. “It belongs to the same family as the ass and the horse.” “The Rolls-Royce of equids, said Mr. Kumar. “What a wondrous creature,” said Mr. Kumar. “This one’s a Grant’s zebra,” I said. Mr. Kumar said, “Equus burchelli boehmi.” Mr. Kumar said, “Allahu akbar.” I said, “It’s very pretty.” We looked on.

5. Passage 2. Chapter 31; pg.93 Mr. and Mr. Kumar looked delighted. A zebra, you say?” said Mr. Kumar. “That’s right,” I replied. “It belongs to the same family as the ass and the horse.” “The Rolls-Royce of equids, said Mr. Kumar. “What a wondrous creature,” said Mr. Kumar. “This one’s a Grant’s zebra,” I said. Mr. Kumar said, “Equus burchelli boehmi.” Mr. Kumar said, “Allahu akbar.” I said, “It’s very pretty.” We looked on.

8. Passage 4. Chapter 34; pgs. 99-100 A deputation of three Americans came. I was very curious. I had never seen real live Americans. They were pink, fat, friendly, very competent and sweated profusely. They examined our animals. They put most of them to sleep and then applied stethoscopes to hearts, examined urine and feces as if horoscopes, drew blood in syringes and analyse it, fondled humps and bumps, tapped teeth, blinded eyes with flashlights, pinched skins, stroked and pulled hairs. Poor animals. They must have thought they were being drafted into the U.S. Army. We got big smiles from the Americans and bone-crushing handshakes. The result was that the animals, like us, got their working papers. They were future Yankees, and we, future Canucks.

9. Passage 5. Chapter 1; pgs. 3-4 Is this passage funny? How does the humour fail, or how does it succeed? 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 the most relaxed sense. It moves through the bough of a tree in its characteristic upside-down position at the speed of roughly 400 meters an hour. On the ground, it crawls to its next tree at the rate of 250 meters an hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated cheetah. Unmotivated, it covers four to five meters in an hour.