Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel [Hardcover]

Yann Martel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 2010

Fate takes many forms. . . .
 
When Henry receives a letter from an elderly taxidermist, it poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulled further into the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey—named Beatrice and Virgil—and the epic journey they undertake together.

With all the spirit and originality that made Life of Pi so beloved, this brilliant new novel takes the reader on a haunting odyssey. On the way Martel asks profound questions about life and art, truth and deception, responsibility and complicity.
 

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Yann Martel on Animals and the Holocaust in Beatrice and Virgil

I often get asked the question why I use animals in my stories. Life of Pi was set in a zoo and featured a number of animals, and animals once again play a prominent role in my new novel, Beatrice and Virgil. Am I a great animal lover? Well, I suppose I am; nature is indeed beautiful. But the actual reason I like to use animals is because they help me tell my tale. People are cynical about people, but less so about wild animals. A rhinoceros dentist elicits less skepticism, in some ways, than a German dentist. I also use animals in my fiction because people rarely see animals as they truly are, biologically. Rather, they tend to project human traits onto them, seeing nobility in one species, cowardice in another, and so on. This is biological nonsense, of course; every species is and behaves as it needs to in order to survive. But this animal-as-canvas quality is useful for a storyteller. It means that an animal that people feel kindly towards becomes a character that readers feel kindly towards.

Why did I choose to write a novel about the Holocaust? There’s nothing personal to this interest; I’m neither Jewish, nor of German or eastern European extraction. I’m a complete outsider who’s been staring at this monstrous massacre of innocents since I first learned about it as a child living in France. It’s as an artist that I’ve kept coming back to the subject. What can I do as an artist about the Holocaust? I believe that if history does not express itself as art, it will not survive in common human memory. And so I took what I knew of the Holocaust, the cumulative knowledge of my reading and viewing and visiting (both to camps in Poland and Germany and to Yad Vashem in Israel and to various museums), and I set it next to that part of me that wants to understand through the imagination. Then I sat down and wrote Beatrice and Virgil.

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From Publishers Weekly

Megaselling Life of Pi author Martel addresses, in this clunky metanarrative, the violent legacy of the 20th century with an alter ego: Henry L'Hôte, an author with a very Martel-like CV who, after a massively successful first novel, gives up writing. Henry and his wife, Sarah, move to a big city (Perhaps it was New York. Perhaps it was Paris. Perhaps it was Berlin), where Henry finds satisfying work in a chocolatería and acting in an amateur theater troupe. All is well until he receives a package containing a short story by Flaubert and an excerpt from an unknown play. His curiosity about the sender leads him to a taxidermist named Henry who insists that Henry-the-author help him write a play about a monkey and a donkey. Henry-the-author is at first intrigued by sweet Beatrice, the donkey, and Virgil, her monkey companion, but the animals' increasing peril draws Henry into the taxidermist's brutally absurd world. Martel's aims are ambitious, but the prose is amateur and the characters thin, the coy self-referentiality grates, and the fable at the center of the novel is unbearably self-conscious. When Martel (rather energetically) tries to tug our heartstrings, we're likely to feel more manipulated than moved. (Apr.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (April 13, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400069262
• ISBN-13: 978-1400069262
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.9 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (169 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #297,152 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Yann Martel, the son of diplomats, was born in Spain in 1963. He grew up in Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Alaska, and Canada and as an adult has spent time in Iran, Turkey, and India. After studying philosophy in college, he worked at various odd jobs until he began earning his living as a writer at the age of twenty-seven. He lives in Montreal.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

90 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Holocaust in a suitcase, March 15, 2010

By 

Susan Tunis (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Coming in to this slight novel--barely more than a novella--all I knew was that it was Yann Martel's "Holocaust allegory," and that it had animal characters. Those animals are the eponymous Beatrice (a donkey) and Virgil (a howler monkey) but they're actually characters in a play within the novel. Let me back up...

The central character of Beatrice and Virgil is a novelist named Henry. Henry has written a very successful book that featured animals as characters. Henry's career, in short, is remarkably similar to that of Yann Martel. The beginning of the novel describes his travails while attempting to publish a follow up to his very successful book. Henry, who is not Jewish, wants to write about the Holocaust. He has noticed that almost all Holocaust fiction is in the style of historical realism. Henry believes there are other ways to have this dialogue, to tell this story. "Other events in history, including horrifying ones, had been treated by artists. To take just three well-known instances of artful witness: Orwell with Animal Farm, Camus with The Plague, Picasso with Guernica. In each case, the artist had taken a vast, sprawling tragedy, had found its heart and had represented it in a non-literal and compact way. The unwieldy encumbrance of history was packed into a suitcase. Art as suitcase, light, portable and essential--was such a treatment not possible, indeed, was it not necessary, with the greatest tragedy of Europe's Jews?"

It is this that Henry attempts, but fails, to write. Despite his exalted stature, he is told repeatedly that his book is unpublishable. At this point, sick of publishing and completely blocked, Henry decides to pursue other interests. He and his wife move to an unnamed major city in another county. He takes music lessons, acts in plays, and even waits on customers in a chocolatería. He's happy. And it's a pleasure to read about Henry. Sure, he's rich, talented, and free, but at heart he's an everyman and so darn likable.

Eventually, a series of events leads Henry to an acquaintance with a taxidermist, also coincidentally (?) named Henry. In most ways Henry the taxidermist is completely unlike Henry the novelist. He's older, dour, and very, very serious. But he, too, is a frustrated writer. He has been struggling for years on a play about Beatrice and Virgil. The characters are real in his mind, as they are literally two stuffed animals in his shop. Gradually Henry the novelist begins collaborating on the play, and sections of the play's text make up large portions of the novel. And the text is... well, I swear it sounds like Samuel Beckett wrote it. Beatrice and Virgil may as well have been renamed Vladimir and Estragon. Truly, if you have any appreciation of that sort of thing, it's an absolute joy to read.

And that's the thing: This light, short novel is a compelling and deceptively simple read. Other than novelist Henry's unpublished work, there's no further talk of the Holocaust until more than halfway through the novel. There's something going on a bit under the surface, but you can't really put your finger on it. And then novelist Henry says to his wife, "It's all quite fanciful, yet there are elements that remind me, well, that remind me of the Holocaust." She accuses him of seeing the Holocaust everywhere, and that's that. Mr. Martel's fanciful story of the novelist and the taxidermist and the donkey and the monkey continues. And slowly, gently, the real story being told becomes more and more self-evident. By the time I reached the end, I was well and truly chilled, with goosebumps breaking out all over.

Where the fictional Henry failed, Yann Martel has succeeded. It's a stealth allegory, and as I stated earlier, it's deceptively simple. Deceptive, because there's actually SO much going on in this little novel. There are cultural, literary, historic, and religious references. I was actually busy googling things as I read and there was much food for thought. It seems almost ridiculous to say this about another Yann Martel novel, but you want to read this with a friend or a book group. By the time you're done, there is so much you'll want to talk through and discuss. Highly, highly, highly recommended!

88 of 108 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Worth the Emotional Toll, April 20, 2010

By 

B. Case "InquiringMind" (Redondo Beach, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Every time I interact with a work of art that deals with the Holocaust -- be it a film, documentary, novel, painting, photomontage -- I am left traumatized, exhausted, and drained of emotion. Sometimes it takes me days to recover. When faced with yet another major artistic work on the Holocaust, I always pause and ask myself if I want to go through that emotional rollercoaster again. Will this work of art help me better understand? Will it bring me closer to the truth? Is this new work of art worth the pain?

Unfortunately, Yann Martel's new Holocaust novel, "Beatrice and Virgil," is not worth it.

In many ways it is an arresting work that pulled me inside and kept me compulsively reading. It beguiled. It charmed. It triggered an abundance of tantalizing intellectual associations. But, it is a very odd book: an absurdist allegorical play with animal characters, contained within a thinly disguised memoir, enveloped within an odd fictional mystery, and the whole work is interlaced with fascinating, obtuse, intellectual essays. The writing is at times utterly mesmerizing and brilliant; at other times, it is downright boring. Again and again, the book begs the reader to discover where this is all leading. And then finally, in the last 30 pages or so, the reader is hit over the head with an emotional sledgehammer so effectively that the pain of this Holocaust encounter put me in a state of shock. Frankly, I felt manipulated and conned.

So, if this appeals to you, go ahead and read it. For those that loved "Life of Pi," this is nothing like that book. The novel is odd and wonderful, but it also misses the mark. I will not recommend it to my friends, and it is not a work that I would enjoy discussing with a book club.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Could be more than five, or fewer, April 11, 2010

By 

Thomas F. Dillingham (Columbia, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Yann Martel's new novel deserves much more thorough and lengthy discussion than is possible in a brief Amazon review. The complexity and high ambition of the novel are impressive, almost overwhelming. At the same time, its flaws must be recognized, and the serious questions it raises (but may not confront satisfactorily) must be acknowledged.

Martel here attempts a direct challenge to the famous remark by Theodor Adorno (to paraphrase--after Auschwitz, poetry is no longer possible) by writing a work of fiction about the Holocaust, even though the author is not himself a Holocaust survivor. I had a colleague who taught "literature of the Holocaust," but always refused to include any fictional narratives--only factual, truthful, survivors' narratives were allowed in his course. He felt the reality of the Holocaust was such that no fiction could convey it and no writer of fiction had the moral right to attempt it. Martel does not so much contradict that view as explore its implications in the intricate self-reflexive novel he has created. His narrator, Henry, has written a novel the characters of which are animals--a work received favorably enough to make him financially secure--but he is "blocked" since his more recent effort--a novel about the Holocaust that he wants to be published in tandem with an essay on the subject. His editors have concluded that the work is umpublishable because it would never sell--people would not understand what it was.

This Henry receives a manuscript from another Henry, a mysterious man who makes his living as a taxidermist and has written a play--Beatrice and Virgil--in which two animal characters, a howler monkey and a donkey, contemplate the fate of life on earth following some (at first) unexplained calamity. Excerpts from the play appear at intervals throughout the novel, not in the actual order they would appear in the play, but as the taxidermist chooses to offer them; as a result, we gradually learn the nature of the story of Beatrice and Virgil, but not in chronological order. The taxidermist has also provided (perhaps as a kind of predecessor work) a copy of Flaubert's "Julien l'Hopitalier." When Henry the first author visits the taxidermist, a series of encounters and disturbing revelations ensue, all forcing Henry to confront and attempt to understand his relationship to this play--which reads very much like one of Samuel Beckett's major works--Endgame, most obviously, and Waiting for Godot, as well, as played by, however, two quite innocent animals. At the same time, Henry the author is rehearsing his role in the classic play, Nathan the Wise.

As is obvious, this is a novel rich in allusions and connections with other works of literature. It becomes increasingly clear that the taxidermist is also, symbolically, confronting the facts of the Holocaust through his beautiful and deeply sad, emotionally wrenching, portrayal of the two animals confronting their loneliness, isolation, rejection, mortality.

I can imagine some negative responses to this work--some who might find it too precious, too "intellectual," and especially in its final pages, perhaps too manipulative. The questions about its effectiveness are legitimate--I felt for a while at the end that I was unsatisfied, disappointed that it had not been more carefully and fully developed through its final pages. But I also felt that my disappointment was partly that I was wishing it were still going on.

I don't want to provide any further details about the ways the story unfolds. I would want to encourage readers to encounter it on their own. Its richness and fascination will certainly carry any reader along, and I feel that most readers will find themselves both moved and stirred up by the implications, the challenging questions, of this intense and beautiful work.