Q. Our book club read the book last month, and wondered if there were more "mystic" puns such as the use of Tsimtsum [the Jewish mystical term for God's withdrawal] as the ship's name? By the way, I was delighted to find out that "prusten" (a noisy sound used by tigers as a greeting) is a real word, and it seems to work with my cat. — Emily
A. Dear Emily, I don't know whether they would qualify as mystic puns, but:
I chose Pi as my main character's nickname because Pi, the number used so often in mathematics and engineering, is an irrational number; that is, a number that goes on forever without any discernable pattern. It stuck me that a number used to come to a rational, scientific understanding of things should be called "irrational." I thought religion is like that, too: It's something "irrational" that helps make sense of things. Along the same lines, I named my main character after a swimming pool to play on a contrast. A swimming pool ("piscine" in French) is a rectangular volume of water, a controlled volume of water. I liked the irony of a boy named after a rational volume of water being adrift in an uncontrollable volume of water, the Pacific. The two Mister Kumars — one the science teacher, the other the mystic baker — and the zebra. One archetypal man — Kumar is a very common name in India, one reality — a Grant's zebra, two understandings of that reality — one transcendental ("Allahu akbar," God is great), the other materialist (Equus burchelle boehmi, the scientific name for a Grant's zebra). The whole novel in one scene. How reality is an interpretation, a choice of readings, a choice of stories. The island winks at old, discredited proofs of God, notably by Paley, an English clergyman from the 18th century, the argument from design; that is, that if there is a design in nature, there must be one who designed it, just as if there is a watch, there must be a watchmaker. A beautiful proof that has an emotional, intuitive appeal but doesn't hold up logically. As for the other puns, I leave them to you to decipher.
