I'm undecided on how I feel about this book. I'm sure there are so many layers I failed to pull back and understand, perhaps repeated readings will elaborate.
Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, has a brilliant way of taking a story, and making it about more then anything that was ever said in the book. He makes you think. He also has a thing with animals. As do the two main "human" characters in Beatrice and Virgil.
The first main human character is Henry a famous author who is trying to write another book, a flip book about the Holocaust. One side will be fiction, the other an essay. He spends 5 years endlessly researching and creating this work, only to have is slashed to the frays by his publishers. He moves and stops writing.
The second main human character is Henry the taxidermist. He is writing a play about a donkey and howler monkey named Beatrice and Virgil. He asks Henry for help. The play is mostly them talking about talking.
VIRGIL: We could do with a little good cheer.
BEATRICE: We could.
VIRGIL: Something funny.
BEATRICE: Something very funny.
VIRGIL: But not empty good cheer.
BEATRICE: No.
VIRGIL: Although better empty good cheer than no cheer at all.
BEATRICE: I don't think so. The contrast between despair and empty good cheer would only make the despair worse.
VIRGIL: But if empty good cheer were expressed in extremis, might the irony of it not push one to transcend despair and bring on genuine good cheer? At that critical moment, might empty good cheer not be the first rung on a philosophical ladder to complete cosmic realization?
BEATRICE: It's a remotes possibility.
VIRGIL: Why don't we try it? Why don't we agree to fall into empty good cheer when we are truly desperate, as a last resort?
BEATRICE: We can try?
VIRGIL: But are we truly desperate at this moment?
BEATRICE: (
with a trace of good cheer) No, we're not.
A line from the book that I liked goes like this: "Stories identify, unify, give meaning to. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense."
Yann Martels take on using stories to make sense of life is carried over from his first book, Life of Pi. In that book the boy talks about the people in the book as if they were animals, making their actions less horrible and traumatic to a young boys memory.
The same theory is used in Beatrice and Virgil.
Beatrice and Virgil is a donkey and a howler monkey that are the main characters of a play, in the play they are unwanted in society essentially because they are animals. The donkey is taken and beaten horrible, graphically described... it made me angry and moved in a this-is-horrible-i-hate-these-people-beating-him-this-is-disgusting kind of way. The play is essentially about the Holocaust.
But the book is a little confusing. There's so many ties going on. Both of the main human characters in the book are named Henry. Both try to write about the Holocaust. Both have used animals in their stories. Yann Martel is an author who writes using animals, writes a book about the Holocaust about two men also writing about the Holocaust using animals. The book and play aren't entirely about the Holocaust. More the victims of the Holocaust. The donkey and howler monkey. The taxidermist who is so closed about himself that you know nothing about him, except for his love of animal taxidermy and his play, ends up being reveled as a Nazi collaborator.
Sometimes throughout the book I felt like the Henry's were really one person, having two frames of mind with trying to write about the Holocaust.
The book leaves you with a strange taste in your mouth. You don't leave the story happy. You feel almost betrayed with the ending but the ending supports the tragedy of the book. I hate taxidermy, I hated it before and I hate it now.
The book invokes emotion.
