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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain on June 25, 1963. After studying philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, he worked at odd jobs and travelled widely before turning to writing. His works include Seven Stories, What Is Stephen Harper Reading?, and Beatrice and Virgil. He was awarded the Journey Prize for the title story in The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. His second novel, Life of Pi, won numerous awards including the 2002 Man Booker. He continued to make the bestseller list in 2018 with his title, The High Mountains of Portugal.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Megaselling Life of Pi author Martel addresses, in this clunky metanarrative, the violent legacy of the 20th century with an alter ego: Henry L'Hote, 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 chocolateria 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Whimsy takes a deadly serious turn in a novel that will enchant some readers and exasperate others. The Canadian author's previous novel (Life of Pi, 2001) won the Man Booker Prize, became a critically lauded bestseller and made legions of fans eager for a follow-up. Here it is, a meta-fictional shell game about a novelist who has experienced the same sort of success as Martel by writing a similar sort of animal-filled book, who attempts a follow-up (about the Holocaust) that mixes fact and fiction in a manner that advance readers find unsatisfying and who thus stops writing. His story reads something like a fable, since for the longest time the protagonist has only one name, Henry, and he and his wife move to a city that remains unidentified, though the narrative suggests it could be one of many. Instead of writing, Henry becomes involved with a chocolate shop and a theater troupe, and then he receives a package from a reader. The most accommodating bestselling author ever, Henry answers all his mail and goes to great lengths to track down the sender of this package, which contains a short story by Flaubert, a play with two charactersthe title characters of this noveland a plea for help. Henry's quest leads him to a mysterious taxidermist, also named Henry, whose shop seems to contain "all of creation stuffed into one large room," and who plies his trade in homage to Flaubert"to bear witness." Uh-oh, allegory alert! Like a Russian doll, the novel contains parables within parables, as the play's Beatrice and Virgil (from Dante, of course) turn out to be a donkey and a monkey, and their dialogue sounds like Aesop filtered through Samuel Beckett ("This road must lead somewhere"/ "Is it somewhere we want to be?"). Henry agrees to help with the play that has been the taxidermist's life's work, thus breaking the novelist's writer's block, though at a great price. As Henry asks Henry, "Symbolic of what?" Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Martel's mesmerizing Man Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi (2002) has become a cult classic, its richness of depth and meaning belying the startling basic story line of a young Indian man stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for 227 days. So it is with Martel's latest novel, also a fable-type story with iceberg-deep dimensions reaching far below the surface of its general premise. Henry, a young author, has written a book that has been successfully received, but the idea underpinning his follow-up work a combination of fiction and essays thematically linked by his concept that writers shy away from fictional depictions of the Holocaust in favor of strict documentation results in a manuscript deemed unacceptable by his publisher. Henry and his wife then flee their home country of Canada to live in one of those great cities of the world, which is never specified. One day Henry receives a packet of materials obviously sent by someone familiar with his once-celebrated status, and in tracking down the source of the packet, Henry encounters what will turn out to be a life-threatening acquaintance with a taxidermist, whose personality is as enigmatic as his stuffed creatures are haunting. Ultimately, Henry finds redemption in terms of his fiction writing but not before facing a leviathan-size example of the human capacity for inflicting cruelty, assuaging guilt, and engaging in creative deception.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
YANN MARTEL'S second novel, "Life of Pi," won him much acclaim, many readers and the 2002 Man Booker Prize. At least one reason for the book's appeal was a story easily reduced to a one-line pitch: An Indian boy is stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. Martel's latest novel demonstrates the same gift for vivid description and wholehearted feeling, but it's a lot more resistant to summary. "Beatrice and Virgil" is allusive, teasing, fragmentary. The central character, Henry, is a novelist who has won much acclaim, many readers and a lot of awards for his second novel, which featured wild animals. But when his next book, an attempt to find a new way of writing about the Holocaust, is rejected by his publisher, he stops writing and moves to a new city. One day he receives a strange piece of fan mail: a photocopy of Flaubert's short story "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator" - about a saint who in his youth enjoys massacring wild animals - accompanied by an enigmatic scrap of dialogue between two characters called Beatrice and Virgil. Enclosed in the package is a plea for Henry's help. When he tracks down the source of this mysterious communication, Henry discovers a taxidermist's shop. And Beatrice and Virgil - a donkey and a red howler monkey - turn out to be two of the specimens in the workshop behind the showroom. The taxidermist is trying to write a play that consists mostly of conversations between the monkey and the donkey, circling around events they refer to as "the Horrors." According to the taxidermist, this phrase describes the extermination of animals, but Henry comes to believe that, like himself, the taxidermist is trying to describe the Nazis' campaign to eliminate the Jews. As more of the play is revealed, there are increasing intimations of atrocity. (Readers should be warned that certain passages outdo the gruesome episode in "Life of Pi" in which a hyena devours a still-living zebra.) Early on, Henry mentions that he uses animals in his fiction because he believes his readers won't overload them with irony. But the function of Beatrice and Virgil is more complex than that. Among other things, they seem to represent Martel's approach to his theme, his wish to combine the mischievous energy of the monkey and the perseverance of the donkey. "Beatrice and Virgil" is a box of tricks, filled with historical and literary references. In "The Divine Comedy," Beatrice and Virgil are Dante's guides to paradise and hell. Visiting the taxidermist for the first time, Henry counts off house numbers - 1919, 1923, 1929, 1933 - that could be a timeline in the rise of Nazism. The novel is also deeply self-referential: the reader is plainly invited to identify Henry with Martel, but the taxidermist's first name is also Henry. And the time scheme is disjointed, with narratives within narratives. At times, the whole thing reads like an attempt to flesh out a dictionary definition of "postmodernism." Alongside all this trickiness, Martel places truisms and straightforward, unanalyzed emotions. He wants to testify both to the evils of the Holocaust and to "the simple joy" (he's very fond of the word "joy") of creative endeavors even as he acknowledges the difficulty of describing these subjects without resorting to cliché. But none of this comes as a revelation. He appears to want to embrace difficulty while retaining all the readers who loved the easy narrative of "Life of Pi." Although his ambition is admirable, the literary complexity and the simplicity of feeling Martel is aiming for don't comfortably mesh. "Beatrice and Virgil" has its rewards, but the frustrations are what stick in the mind. Robert Hanks is a freelance writer and broadcaster based in London.