The Pirate Who Does Not Know The Value Of Pi

The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi is a poem-novel about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot who, after capturing a certain quantity of prizes, are shipwrecked on a deserted island, where they proceed to discuss whether they would have been able to make themselves understood by people indigenous to the island, had there been any. Eugene Ostashevsky’s first large-scale project since The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, it pursues the themes of emigration, incomprehension, and the otherness of others in a far more complicated and persistent way than its predecessor. Characterized by multilingual punning, humor puerile and set-theoretical, philosophical irony and narratological handicaps, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi draws on early modern texts about pirates and animal intelligence, 1960s Russian folklore, old-school hip-hop, game theory, controversies of copyright, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, abbreviated as PI.