Monday, August 22, 2016

BACK JACKET HACK-JOB #12: Life of Pi

A post by Mary Fan
Welcome back to our recurring blog segment, BACK JACKET HACK JOB! It's my turn to make a butchery of a book's back cover copy, and my chosen victim is one of my favorite books, LIFE OF PI by Yann Martel. Hope you get a good chuckle out of this unholy mess of a book description... I certainly had a good time writing it!

And now, with out further ado...

A shipwrecked Indian kid refuses to cooperate with authorities when asked about just what the hell happened to him. Instead, he tells them lie after lie about how he traveled across the ocean with a tiger and encountered a carnivorous island. Like, he comes up with some serious whoppers. Luckily, his background as a zookeeper's son means he knows enough about tigers to make the whole thing sound pretty damn believable. So much so that he probably had everyone fooled until the island turned up. No idea why he threw that in there and ruined his whole hustle.

When the authorities refuse to believe him, as most reasonable people would, he finally relents and says that he actually ended up on a lifeboat with three other people, and then everything turned into the Hunger Games because of one crazy dude who wanted to eat another dude. And of course, Pi won when he killed the crazy dude. Finally, he tries to justify his make believe by drawing some parallel to faith and religion, instead of just telling the truth: that he was trying to avoid telling the po-po that he flat-out murdered a guy at sea.

Whatever, man. You could've just confessed in the first place and saved us a hundred chapters.

4 comments:

Kimberly G. Giarratano said...

Okay, this made sense of a book I was sort of on the fence of reading. I think I'll just see the movie.

Carrie Beckort said...

OK, this made me laugh! I loved Life of Pi, and I think I might love your Hack just as much :) I haven't seen the movie yet, but it's on my DVR waiting for a night when I'm not the old person I am who has to go to bed before my kid...

Jonathan Schramm said...

Nice hack-job, Mary! I read the book and saw the movie. Actually one of those movies that rivals the book... Yeah, what a liar that Pi was. A modern day Ryan Lochte!

Brenda St John Brown said...

I love this! I've read the book and this sums it up perfectly! I have the movie on my to-watch list, although I can't really imagine how the intricacies of the book play out in the film. Then again...look at Harry Potter.

 
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