Beatrice & Virgil (edition 2010)

Weird. Not terribly captivating. Some elements similar to [b:Life of Pi|4214|Life of Pi|Yann Martel|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266448756s/4214.jpg|1392700], like the prominence of animals, a metanarrative, shock. Not nearly as good, however.
What I don't get is the coincidence? of the taxidermist's seeking Henry out about a book/play that was so similar to Henry's own rejected flip book. Plus the coincidence of the taxidermist being in the same neighbourhood as Henry, but delivering the first letter through the publisher. That was strange.
I also didn't understand why some of the literary devices were over-explained, as if the reader would miss the point (like Burnam Wood coming to Dunsinane...was it necessary to explain that's from Macbeth?). ( )

What begins as an entertaining exercise in "ego" quickly becomes SO much more.

The novel's protagonist is an eerily familiar author who is in a holding pattern following the wild success of his first book --a fabulist narrative featuring animals as the main characters. "Henry" recedes from public life while politely continuing to answer his fan mail which, on one occasion, includes some oddly compelling script-pages from a play-in-progress and a plea for writerly help to complete it.

Henry meets the playwright, a gruff and talented taxidermist, and begins to suspect that the play in question might be an attempt at something he had recently failed to find: a new way to discuss the Holocaust.

The play-within-the-book is largely a dialog between Beatrice, a donkey and Virgil, a howler monkey. It is parceled out to the reader(s) in a disjointed fashion which heightens its dreamlike surrealism, its uncomfortable but thought-provoking beauty, and its author's quiet desperation.

The back-and-forth between Henry and the taxidermist is tense and mysterious and yields vapors of revelation that eventually coalesce into a surprising (and somewhat horrific) ending.

I love the way the scope of this book grows using simple tools and spare prose. Martel artfully explores the difficulties of his core themes without alienating the reader or going too far over her/his head. This is an impressive trick done expertly. Highly recommended! ( )

wow. simply, wow. ( )

This is no Life of Pi, but there is plenty of brilliance in this disturbing, intensely compelling, ugly story. ( )

Intensely interesting and readable, with a powerful ending.

---

p. 7 But behind serious nonfiction lies the same fact and preoccupation as behind fiction - of being human and what it means...

p. 10 A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.

p. 16 "Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meanings bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian."

p. 30 There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.

p. 97 "I wanted to see if something could be saved once the irreparable had been done."

p. 102 "To my mind, faith is like being in the sun. When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow? Can you shake that area of darkness that clings to you, always shaped like you, as if constantly to remind you of yourself? You can't. This shadow is doubt. And it goes wherever you go as long as you stay in the sun. And who wouldn't want to be in the sun?"

p. 127 "Or that entirely different kind of pain, , the one that injures no particular organ yet kills the spirit that links them?"

p. 128 In that moment the world shattered like a pane of glass, so that everything looked exactly as it had earlier, and yet was different, now clear and newly sharp with menace. ( )

I don't have a lot of reviews (okay, 1) under my belt, so I don't want to come off as the sort of person who only has something to say when it is negative, and I don't know why I find it so much easier to vocalize disgust than admiration, but instead of letting this review devolve into group-therapy, let's crucify this book!

I am one of the few people who missed out on the Life of Pi boat, so I haven't any point of Martel-reference here, but I would say the emotional/intellectual equivalent to reading Beatrice and Virgil is this: a decidedly cool acquaintance whom your more-or-less eager to impress invites you to an art exhibit at a hip yet-not-too-crassly-publicity-seeking gallery you have maybe heard about from people at some of the "better" parties. You, of course, readily agree. He, grinning in an elusively, sardonically, enviably post-modern way, ushers you into the gallery and there you discover the exhibit is entirely composed of pictorial, sculptural, and mixed-media representations (along with some sort of "found-art" real-life, embalmed pieces) of still-born fetuses. And you may not know art, but you sure as hell know what you like, and it is neither this exhibit, nor the douche bag who took you there.

And that is what this novel is. A wholly unique conception, rich down to its very unknowable depths with potential, aborted before it had time to gestate into a complete (or even completely new) thing.

Another reviewer said that she felt Beatrice and Virgil was too poorly written to handle the ambitiousness of its theme. I agree. I (in unattractive, hateful obsession) read every syndicated/major-press review I could find of this book, and while it is almost uniformly lambasted, I found myself actually taking umbrage to the NY Times review which accused Martel of trivializing the Holocaust. He doesn't do that... or, at least, he never means to. Not any more than every secondary school history teacher you ever had meant to, in showing you endless pictorial and literary representations of the numbing inhumanity of that event. We can't help trivializing the Holocaust. We can't conceive of or internalize that kind of enormity. I'm not sure we're meant to be able to... It's kind of like Beatrice and Virgil trying to come up with a "sewing kit" while you read on, painfully, through all of their grotesquely inadequate post-modern attempts...

So, I guess that last statement pretty much sums it up: a grotesquely inadequate post-modern attempt.

And now I have use the word "post modern" enough that even I cannot know what I am talking about anymore, much less anybody else, and I feel pretty confident in my immunity against contradiction.

I think I hated the "games" at the end most of all. And the blank "Game 13" the very, very most. Some passages from the text of the (contrite?) Nazi's plays were actually moving, especially the description of a pear's consummate, sensual perfection, and tempted me to give this novel two stars, but I am so, SO generally repulsed I can't credit them with any really redeeming literary value. Value, yes. Redeeming value, no.

Edit/post-viewing-of-author-interview addition: nod to reality T.V. as culture-changing, high-art-shaping phenomenon - BOO, Mr. Martel, many emphatic boos! I come to literary novels to escape just that species of insipid, lowest-common-denominator entertainment that permeates The Real World. (Pun, PUN!) To escape escapism. Otherwise, I guess I would read romance novels. Your attempt to be hip and relevant fell flat - came off as lazy and coat-tail-riding. One more BOO, and I am done.

I swear, I am really done actively hating this book... maybe. ( )

I enjoyed Life of Pi - I liked this work as well, but for different reasons. It read a little faster than Life of Pi, to me, because portions of the book were in play format, and they go quickly. The allegorical/symbolic nature of the book really sold the book for me, in that it was solid enough that you understood the importance of the symbolism to the work (and the author), but subtle enough that you weren't being beaten over the head with it, which I think tends to diminish the power of symbolism if you're being smacked with it. The ending ending (yes, I used ending twice for a purpose, but I don't want to tell why so as not to spoil) was very powerful. ( )

I don't have a lot of reviews (okay, 1) under my belt, so I don't want to come off as the sort of person who only has something to say when it is negative, and I don't know why I find it so much easier to vocalize disgust than admiration, but instead of letting this review devolve into group-therapy, let's crucify this book!

I am one of the few people who missed out on the Life of Pi boat, so I haven't any point of Martel-reference here, but I would say the emotional/intellectual equivalent to reading Beatrice and Virgil is this: a decidedly cool acquaintance whom your more-or-less eager to impress invites you to an art exhibit at a hip yet-not-too-crassly-publicity-seeking gallery you have maybe heard about from people at some of the "better" parties. You, of course, readily agree. He, grinning in an elusively, sardonically, enviably post-modern way, ushers you into the gallery and there you discover the exhibit is entirely composed of pictorial, sculptural, and mixed-media representations (along with some sort of "found-art" real-life, embalmed pieces) of still-born fetuses. And you may not know art, but you sure as hell know what you like, and it is neither this exhibit, nor the douche bag who took you there.

And that is what this novel is. A wholly unique conception, rich down to its very unknowable depths with potential, aborted before it had time to gestate into a complete (or even completely new) thing.

Another reviewer said that she felt Beatrice and Virgil was too poorly written to handle the ambitiousness of its theme. I agree. I (in unattractive, hateful obsession) read every syndicated/major-press review I could find of this book, and while it is almost uniformly lambasted, I found myself actually taking umbrage to the NY Times review which accused Martel of trivializing the Holocaust. He doesn't do that... or, at least, he never means to. Not any more than every secondary school history teacher you ever had meant to, in showing you endless pictorial and literary representations of the numbing inhumanity of that event. We can't help trivializing the Holocaust. We can't conceive of or internalize that kind of enormity. I'm not sure we're meant to be able to... It's kind of like Beatrice and Virgil trying to come up with a "sewing kit" while you read on, painfully, through all of their grotesquely inadequate post-modern attempts...

So, I guess that last statement pretty much sums it up: a grotesquely inadequate post-modern attempt.

And now I have use the word "post modern" enough that even I cannot know what I am talking about anymore, much less anybody else, and I feel pretty confident in my immunity against contradiction.

I think I hated the "games" at the end most of all. And the blank "Game 13" the very, very most. Some passages from the text of the (contrite?) Nazi's plays were actually moving, especially the description of a pear's consummate, sensual perfection, and tempted me to give this novel two stars, but I am so, SO generally repulsed I can't credit them with any really redeeming literary value. Value, yes. Redeeming value, no.

Edit/post-viewing-of-author-interview addition: nod to reality T.V. as culture-changing, high-art-shaping phenomenon - BOO, Mr. Martel, many emphatic boos! I come to literary novels to escape just that species of insipid, lowest-common-denominator entertainment that permeates The Real World. (Pun, PUN!) To escape escapism. Otherwise, I guess I would read romance novels. Your attempt to be hip and relevant fell flat - came off as lazy and coat-tail-riding. One more BOO, and I am done.

I swear, I am really done actively hating this book... maybe. ( )

Unfortunately I ended up unimpressed by this novel. Martel made an attempt to try a new way to write of "the horrors" of the holocaust but in the end it just didn't work. It worked for the first 150 pages or so and then it stopped working. The story was so slow moving that I felt like Martel was trying to make the reader think more than he was trying to tell a story and then the ending was something out of a bad crime novel. It just didn't fit.

I don't really recommend this book and I especially don't recommend it for anyone who can't deal with reading about animal cruelty. There is a brief period where Martel is describing torture of a donkey and it made me cringe (and I don't cringe easily!) ( )

This was well-written, but the narrative lacked any kind of punch. The taxidermist was so clearly a former Nazi, and his play wasn't nearly compelling enough to explain the narrator's interest in him or blindness toward what he is (although I did like the description of the pear).

The book tries too hard to be too clever. Both main characters having the same name; narrator Henry's book-publishing ideas (which feel a little too auto-biographical); the classical references. All in all, just a huge disappointment. It could have been better. ( )

http://www.monniblog.com/2010/05/beatrice-virgil-by-yann-martel/ ( )

I love Yann Martel. This book switches back and forth between sinister and "you're just being paranoid". And then the ending comes out of nowhere! Loved it. ( )

My second time with the author and this time I have to say, I was less than impressed. An interesting idea of a play, within in the story but in the end it didn't work for me. There were too many elements that didn't work for me.

One of my biggest issues was the story within the story. Sometimes it works, and other times like in this case, it doesn't. The two stories didn't seem to join together properly, the devices to bring the main story and the story within the story didn't seem to fit together. It felt it was forced for the sake of things, and both stories seemed to be sacrificed in plot and development of characters to make room for the other. I also wasn't a fan of the characters and found that there development didn't go anywhere. It felt like Henry the writer was in the same place as he was at the beginning of the book, and I found that overall, he was a unlikeable character. Because Henry was the narrator of the book, I think it also affected how I felt about it and how it was told.

Yann Martel is a good writer, and he does like to make a metaphorical point about an important subject, and make the reader think abstractly, but in this book, I found that all of that was lost in the plot devices meant to bring it to the reader. In the end, definitely not the book for me.

Also on my book review blog Jules' Book Reviews - Beatrice and Virgil ( )

http://www.cozylittlebookjournal.com/2010/09/beatrice-virgil-by-yann-martel.html

I think perhaps I should sit with this book a while before writing about it.

Delicately crafted and filled with meta-story, it is a multi-layered tale of deceptive simplicity. It is about the Holocaust--sort of--but not really. It is essentially about story-telling. How does one speak of--or write about --unspeakable horror? Can the author's own history and bias ever be separated from the story he tells? Should it be?

The entire novel feels like a thought experiment--one that will linger in my brain for some time to come.

I really must get around to reading The Life of Pi!

UPDATE: The Life of Pi was not as good asBeatrice & Virgil, as it turns out. It was okay, but Beatrice & Virgil was superb. ( )

When Beatrice and Virgil was released in 2010, it received scathing reviews from critics. I had received an advanced reader's edition of Yann Martel's book, but after seeing such bad reviews, my copy of Beatrice and Virgil got relegated to the back of my shelf. When looking for a short book to read, I found it and decided to give it a whirl, half expecting to stop after a few pages. Well, I finished the book in two sittings.

Beatrice and Virgil is a cerebral, philosophical novel that, at its core, is a Holocaust story. Henry is the narrator, and he is a highly successful author who wants to write a story about the Holocaust that is creative but raw. He comes up with a "flip book" that is part essay, part fiction. Certain that he created something brilliant, Henry was devastated to learn that his book would not be accepted by his publisher. Restless, Henry moves, takes up a job at a chocolate store and spends time answering fan letters. One day, he received a cryptic letter from someone locally, asking for help. Henry seeks out his fan, and he strikes up an odd friendship with the man, also named Henry, who was a taxidermist.

I won't reveal too much more about the plot, but suffice it to say that the last few pages had an unexpected turn. At least this reader didn't see it coming.

Critics blasted Martel for writing a Holocaust story as an animal allegory, trivializing these events through the torture of a donkey and a Howler monkey. I think the critics missed the point. Just like his main character, Martel devised a creative but raw story about the Holocaust that is provocative and gripping. There are parts of Beatrice and Virgil that will grab you by the throat (and be warned: a heart-wrenching scene of animal cruelty). By the end of the book, I felt quite convinced that Martel pulled it off.

So, decide for yourself if you think Beatrice and Virgil is a work of creativity or trivialization. For me, it was a work of pure creativity.

FTC: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review on my blog. ( )

Wow. Started slow and slightly boring and at the end quickly built with an unexpected twist to a serious crescendo, the rapidity of which both left one reeling and slightly unsatisfied. Overall I would recommend. ( )

http://www.stensrude.com/wred.html#martelbeatrice ( )

I thought this was a remarkable book. While not as gripping or perhaps quite as well-constructed as Life of Pi, which remains one of the most engaging and original books I've read, it was clever both in style and content and interesting in the point it tackles - that of how the Holocaust is represented (or not) in cultural media, especially in comparison to other historical events. ( )

Really enjoyed this lively and surprising story which is loosely connected to his other novel -- Life of Pi -- which I adored. ( )

I have read the reviews which complain of the derivative nature of the book ('Waiting for Godot' etc)and the obviousness of the allegory, and I concur to a degree, but Martel does have a narrative and descriptive power that keeps me fixed and fascinated; in this case horrified too, particularly by the skinning of the red fox and the casual violence of the boy near the end of the story. The taxidermist Henry is well drawn in being so faintly drawn - his passive menace reminded me for some reason of the murderer Dr Harold Shipman. This story is no 'Life of Pi', but it offers something different and is a worthwhile read. ( )

This novel is both disturbing and intriguing. In a well written story, Martel brings us to the precipice of human nature and proclivity for evil, and the likeness to the nature of animals. The book was difficult for me, with a couple of false starts, but once it got to rolling, I was in until the unexpected finish.

This is a great book for rhetoric discussions with so many underlying currents running through the seemingly ambiguous storyline about an accomplished author and his friendship with a man who stuffs dead things for a living. It makes the reader think, engage in real thought while reading - long after the reading is completed.

It is definitely one you have to read for yourself and a book you will always remember having read.

First let me say that I have not yet had the opportunity to read Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”, so I am unable to make any comparisons between the two works. So this works stands alone in my mind. That being said, I very rarely write a one-star rating for a book, and I waffled between one and two stars for this one. On the one hand, I thought this was a unique approach to the genocide of the Holocaust, and on the other hand, the whole metaphor completely disturbed, perhaps even disgusted me on several levels.

The central question that the protagonist, Henry, explores is whether he can write a piece of metaphorical fiction about such a serious topic as the Holocaust, in the same way that George Orwell did when he addressed totalitarianism in “Animal Farm.” Although his attempt at doing this is turned down by his publisher, he ultimately has an unusual series of encounters with a taxidermist who is writing a play about the brutal extermination of animals in something called “The Horrors.” So this is the metaphor for the Holocaust, in parable format. A creative idea, yet I just didn’t like the metaphor comparing Holocaust victims to donkeys and other animals. …and the fate of Erasmus and Mendelssohn along with vivid description of animal brutality just made me sick to my stomach.

I know a great deal about the Holocaust and have read many books, both fiction and non-fiction, pertaining to this and other horrific genocides so I am fully in touch with the details of these events. But this particular story just really made me feel very sad & upset, without adding anything to my understanding of and already existing empathy for the victims of the Holocaust. ( )

Yann Martel`s use of images is deeply embedded in mythology, i.e. he is an author who seems to understand the link between words and the creatures behind them. A monkey on an ass´back is an image that cast long shadows not only in greco-christian culture, it is a poignant image whatever reference culture the reader has. The questions he wants us to answer in this book is: Who is the taxidermist if we (the readers) leave the ass as an ass and the monkey as a monkey? And what become of the world (hint; the taxidermist´s hidden past) if interpretation (of history/humanity i.e. leadership in the world) is left with "taxidermists"? Yann Martel work is original, therefore it is timeless.
He certainly has managed to lift the problem of Holocost, of evil, to a philosophical level. Only by understanding the banality of evil, might we prevent a new Holocost in the future. ( )

There is a certain level of awe-inspiring coordination that takes place during catastrophes. In particularly bad disasters, teams of people and dogs come out to try and locate survivors and victims. This book reminded me of them, the cadaver dogs and their handlers. What they do takes skill, hard work, and a lot of compassion - yet I wish they didn't have to exist. It would be nice if we lived in a world where all endings of life were humane, peaceful, and understandable - but we don't. In the same way, "Beatrice and Virgil" made me reflect on a kind of horror that we rarely face or even acknowledge. There are obvious references to the Holocaust in this story but it is bigger than that if we let it be so. All the bad things that we inflict upon one another also need to be faced, or else can't prevent them from happening.

I cried when I read this book, but I don't regret it - this is the kind of story that needs to be read. ( )

I didn't really know what to expect. I know the novel got pretty panned by critics when it came out. I'm not even sure why I picked it up - I wasn't that much of a fan of Life of Pi, which I thought was too contrived. And then it took me awhile to warm up to this novel, which starts a bit too randomly, a bit too cute, a bit too cloyingly, and somewhere near the middle I was starting to lose patience. But then it picks up again. The end, the games for Gustav, were some of the most troubling things I have ever read. Not necessarily in a bad way, but just in that sort of dug into your soul way. If it weren't for the last twenty of so pages, I think I would have rated this far lower, maybe 2, 2.5? And you need the rest of the novel to get to the last twenty pages.

Pleasantly surprised I guess is the more concise way to put it. I was pleasantly surprised. ( )