Unbroken

By Laura Hillenbrand

Louis Zamperini is, among other things, one of the toughest people to ever walk the earth.  He knows this and wrote about his travails in Devil at my Heels, published in 1953 and re-edited and re-published in 2003.  When contacted by Laura Hillenbrand who was seeking to write his biography, he felt like he had already told the story and didn’t think there was anything left to say.  Just the same, he graciously sat through more than 70 interviews while she patiently asked him questions, reviewed volumes of documents she had unearthed, and double-checked the veracity of witness accounts.   Unbroken:  A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a masterful piece of research; beautifully written and lovingly shared. 

In his 95-plus years in this life Zamperini has been a juvenile delinquent, vagabond, high school track star, Olympic athlete, World War II bombardier, castaway, prisoner of war, husband, and inspirational speaker.  It is difficult to read Hillenbrand’s book and not imagine some invisible hand at work, keeping him from the brink of ruin or disaster or death until he found God in the person of Billy Graham.  He was born with a nose for trouble and the winged feet of Hermes, both of which would serve him well throughout a life of pain and hardship.  Zamperini had another quality, hidden away inside himself, which inspired Hillenbrand to be his biographer:  he had endured the worst of man-made, soul- and body-killing hells but somehow managed to preserve the tiniest kernel of himself.  Long after the hell of war was over and Louis Zamperini was on the precipice of self-destruction, he rediscovered that essential piece of himself and nursed it back to life.

Hillenbrand is best known for her biography of Seabiscuit, the legendary thoroughbred racehorse of the Depression era.  Like Unbroken, Seabiscuit is meticulously researched and a wonderfully told tale.  Reading the notes on sources in the back of these two books reveals the depth to which the author goes to learn about her subjects.  She tracks down every witness, living or dead, and finds every document which references them. While the amount of work that Hillenbrand puts into her books is staggering, her true gift is in knitting everything together to create personal histories that take readers deep into the lives of her subjects.  In the case of Louis Zamperini, Hillenbrand found information about him that he never knew existed, including diaries of fellow prisoners-of-war, and which touched him deeply.  Typically, biographers and journalists spend days and weeks on the road searching out information and conducting interviews.  Hillenbrand was unable to do that.  She had to talk her sources into boxing up and shipping irreplaceable documents, photographs, artifacts, etc., to the prison that is her life.  Hillenbrand suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a mysterious illness for which there is no known cause nor cure, and rarely leaves her house, let alone her bed.

There really is no way to appreciate what it is like to live with CFS other than to imagine having advanced rheumatoid arthritis, the flu, and a killer hangover at the same time, for weeks and months on end.  On good days, Hillenbrand can take a shower standing up, ride in a car, or take a very short walk.  Sadly, the good days are few and far between.  Until she was diagnosed, several doctors dismissed her as being a hypochondriac, despite raging fevers, swollen lymph nodes, and strep throat that would not respond to antibiotics.  Before collapsing at 19 years of age, Hillenbrand was a hard working and athletic college student.  She had dreams of becoming a history professor, but her illness forced her to drop out of Kenyon College and retreat to her mother’s home in the Washington, DC, suburbs.  That could have been the end of her story, but she wasn’t willing to give up on living a useful life.

This fighting spirit is what kept her college boyfriend of five months, Borden Flanagan, from leaving.  Not only did he remain committed during the months leading up to Hillenbrand’s diagnosis, he wanted to marry her and hoped one day to have children.  She, too, wished to marry but kept waiting for her illness to go into remission.  It never did; but no matter how sick she was, Hillenbrand found a way to keep working.  First it was writing for a horseracing magazine which never paid her what she was owed but did lead to better assignments, such as writing for Equus.  It was while reading about Seabiscuit for a piece for American Heritage that Hillenbrand became inspired to dig deeper into the story behind the legendary racehorse and the people who believed in him.   It took Hillenbrand ten years to write Seabiscuit as her disease ebbed and flowed, giving her brief periods of productivity in between relapses.  Even on her worst days, however, she tried to accomplish something.  When she submitted the manuscript for publication, she neglected to mention that she too sick to get out of bed most days.

After enduring years of condescension from the medical community, Hillenbrand eventually found a doctor who was able to help her manage her symptoms to a degree and this enabled her to continue striving.   In an essay she wrote for The New Yorker magazine, Hillenbrand describes how she was able to do the research and writing involved in Seabiscuit.  It was a matter of conserving and managing her strength and that required tremendous strategic thinking.  CFS limited the amount of energy Hillenbrand could expend on a given day, so she had to monitor herself carefully to assess what she could accomplish.  From her bedroom, she arranged for the Library of Congress to lend materials to her local public library.  When the materials arrived, she would go to the library and pore over them, taking detailed notes until the room began spinning.  Back in her room, if she couldn’t read, she would conduct interviews over the telephone, if she couldn’t talk, she would send emails.  Her research was so good and her questions so intriguing, that no one was put off by her reclusiveness.  Louis Zamperini did not find out that his biographer was bedridden until he read an article about her after Unbroken was published.  He sent her one of his Purple Hearts.

It was shortly after Seabiscuit was published that Flanagan confronted his feelings about spending his life with an invalid with whom he could never have children.  Hillenbrand’s success meant that she was no longer completely dependent on Flanagan, and the idea of being free tempted him.  When he finally worked up the courage to share his ambivalence with Hillenbrand, the two of them discovered strengths in each other that enabled them to forge a stronger and deeper relationship than either had thought possible.  He stayed and the two eventually married.

To Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers, Laura Hillenbrand is both hero and role model.  They write to her imploring her to do for CFS what she has done for Seabiscuit and Louis Zamperini.  What she has said is that she uses her subjects as a means of escaping the disease that changed her from being an active, vital person to a ghostly invalid.  It would take a biographer as skilled as Hillenbrand to bring her inner life to light and determine the degree to which fighting the disease makes her strong or her strength keeps the disease from winning.  Either way, Laura Hillenbrand is a champion.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

Life of Pi

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Book review by Teresa Friedlander, copyright 2009

A boy survives for 227 days on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean after the ship carrying him and his family, along with a collection of zoo animals, from India to Canada sinks. He washes ashore in Mexico and is rescued by fishermen. He is the sole survivor of the catastrophe and the only possible source of information about why the ship sank. Representatives of the Japanese owners of the ship interview him in the hospital where he is recovering and the boy tells them how he survived the ordeal. That is the story in 90 words of “dry, yeastless, factuality” as Pi would say.

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, is a much better telling of this same story. Actually, the book contains two versions of the story: the first recounted by Pi to the author and the second in response to doubts about the details of Pi’s story. The author (who is a fictional creation of Yann Martel) begins by telling his own story of how a bad case of writers’ block caused him to travel to India in search of inspiration. In Pondicherry, a town in a small former French colony in southeast India, the author meets a man by the name of Francis Adirubasamy who claims to know a story which he says “will make you believe in God”. Over tea, Mr. Adirubasamy tells the author the story of Pi and how the boy survived the sinking of the cargo ship, Tsimtsum. Intrigued, the author travels to Toronto, Canada, to meet Pi in person, and Pi, now a middle-aged man, agrees to tell the his story of survival. In 100 chapters.

Pi’s story is bracketed at the beginning by the “author’s note” and at the end by the transcript of the Japanese inquiry into the lost ship. These two sections serve to set the book up as a work of non-fiction, even though the reader understands that this is not the case. Life of Pi does not fit perfectly into a single genre: it has elements of magical realism and allegory, it is an epic tale of survival, and it is an analysis of man’s ongoing effort to rise above our animal instincts. Mr. Martel weaves information about post-colonial India, zoo-keeping practices, religious belief systems, and philosophy together to create one of the finest examples of story-telling published within the last decade.

Life of Pi appeals to a broad spectrum of readers thanks to Mr. Martel’s delightful writing style. Within the story are parables giving insight into Pi’s character as well as anecdotes which explain his religious beliefs (Hindu, Christian, and Muslim simultaneously), his name (Picine Molitar Patel), and his knowledge of animal behavior. The book is a pleasure to read for those seeking entertainment, but scratch the surface and Mr. Martel opens windows into ancient cultures, religions, and myths through the deft use of symbolism and bits of history. For example, the ill-fated ship was named Tsimtsum, a Kabalistic term in the Hebrew language describing how God withdrew from a part of infinity to enable our world to exist. The sinking of the Tsimtsum created a space for Pi’s story to unfold in the same way that Pi makes room within himself in order to survive the ordeal.

Pi, as a young boy, is wise and rational as well as emotionally innocent. He is curious and asks many questions in his search for deeper understanding. It is this aspect of his personality which saves him. In primary school, he suffers endless teasing about the name, Picine (French for swimming pool), which his school mates pronounce as “pissing”. In his first act of self-preservation, he decides to establish himself as Pi on the first day of his first year of middle school. In mathematics, pi (Π) is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and is usually expressed as 3.1415 or 22/7. This is important symbolically because pi (Π), which was discovered by the ancient Babylonians about 2000 years before the birth of Jesus, is always the same no matter how big or small the circle. Pi, the character, the deep thinker, loves this aspect of his new name.

Pi’s father owns a zoo and as a matter of his childrens' safety demonstrates the nature of predation by putting a live goat in a hungry tiger’s enclosure, with predictable results. Better to know first hand that predators kill without remorse, says the father to his sons, than to be misled by seemingly placid behavior. The Pondicherry Zoo is famous for its goats because they happily share an enclosure with a formerly lonely rhinoceros. This yields another lesson in which the father explains how surviving an extraordinary situation sometimes depends on unlikely alliances.

Survival is the most obvious theme of the book: surviving childhood humiliations, the everyday dangers of life, and extreme situations. Religious belief, or lack thereof, is a second theme Mr. Martel explores in Life of Pi. More important than both, however, is the uniquely human gift of storytelling. Stories – created, remembered, and passed on through time – differentiate us from animals because without stories and traditions to govern our decisions, we could only act instinctively. Pi practices three religions simultaneously because he cannot choose a favorite: he understands that they are all different versions of the same story of creation, sacrifice, morality, and salvation. Even atheists have faith – that there is no God – and therefore Pi feels kinship with them. It is the agnostics who do not believe in anything that Pi dismisses as having no imagination. Pi says to the author that “choosing to believe in nothing is like choosing immobility as a means of transportation”.

Pi’s story of survival begins when his family decides to close down their zoo and emigrate to Canada in order to escape Indira Gandhi’s heavy handed policies. Many of their animals must cross the ocean in order to reach their new homes and so the family sets up a temporary zoo in the hold of the cargo ship. One night, several days into the voyage, something goes wrong and Pi wakes up in time for the Chinese crew of the Tsimtsum to put an orange life vest on him and toss him into a lifeboat. As the ship sinks, he realizes he is not alone on the boat: there is a zebra with a broken leg and a snarling hyena. After the ship sinks, a tiger swims toward the lifeboat, climbs aboard, and hides under the boat’s canvas cover out of fear and seasickness. Soon an orangutan floating on a large bunch of bananas meets up with the lifeboat and the motley crew leave the detritus of the ship behind. Initially, the passengers on the lifeboat maintain a truce of sorts, but soon the hyena kills and eats the injured zebra. When his hunger returns, the hyena kills the orangutan. Meanwhile, Pi constructs a raft out of life preservers and exiles himself by means of a long rope to avoid being the hyena’s next meal. The tiger finally emerges from hiding and in a rage dispatches the hyena. Pi draws from his knowledge of zoology to establish a boundary enabling him and the tiger to share the forty foot boat. Pi maintains his status as zookeeper by catching fish and turtles for the tiger and in exchange the tiger doesn’t kill him.

The two strange bedfellows ride the Pacific Ocean currents and miraculously reach Mexico where the tiger escapes into the wilderness and a severely dehydrated and sunburned Pi is rescued by fishermen and taken to a hospital. When news of a Tsimtsum survivor reaches the ship’s Japanese owners, two representatives travel to Mexico to interview him. The Japanese listen politely to Pi’s story but question its veracity. Pi then tells them a different version of what happened. At the end, the reader, like the Japanese, can choose between the two stories. Pi recommends the better story.