by Yann Martel
I've been excited about this book since it first came out in hardcover last April, when I immediately put it on my "to buy when in paperback" list. I did buy it, but unfortunately like so many other books I buy it sat for several months on my bookshelf while life constantly got in the way of me reading it. But I did, finally, and it was worth the wait.
Beatrice and Virgil is a novel, about a man (a famous writer actually) who tries to write a book about the holocaust, fails, and gives up writing. Following his failure, this man, Henry, and his wife decide to pack up and take an adventure. "They settled in one of those great cities of the world that is a world unto itself... Perhaps it was New York. Perhaps it was Paris. Perhaps it was Berlin." His wife gets a job as a nurse under a work visa and he began taking music lessons, learning Spanish, acting with an amateur acting troupe, and working at a local chocolateria.
All the time, he's getting letters from people who have read his book (the one he's famous for). His book (as far as I can tell) uses animals to tell the story rather than humans. One day, he receives a letter that is more like a packet... inside it contains a photocopy of Gustave Flaubert's short story "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator," a ext from a play, and a short note.
Flaubert's story — a tale about a boy who loves killing animals, eventually kills his parents, repents and then is borne to heaven as a saint — has been heavily highlighted by the sender, but only those sections dealing with the killing of the animals. Henry is intrigued, but only mildly so. The play extract is of a scene where two characters, Beatrice and Virgil, discuss a pear, or more to the point, Virgil describes a pear to Beatrice, who has never seen one before. (This made me want to eat a pear so badly I ached inside.) The note asks for his help.
Henry decides to respond to the letter, and since its writer happens to live only a few blocks away, he decides to deliver it in person, although he's only planning to anonymously drop the letter off. But, the address takes him to a taxidermy shop and he's curious, so he goes in.
What follows that fateful decision is a journey through the twisted mind of an old taxidermist and his play "A 20th Century Shirt: A Play in Two Acts," about a donkey named Beatrice and a howler monkey named Virgil. As the book progresses, we get to read more and more snippets of the play, and start gaining small insights into the taxidermist. What starts out as an innocent examination of a pear, and a strange, yet slightly whimsical story about two animals that live on a shirt, progresses to more sinister scenes and allusions to the holocaust, and we, as readers, soon start to suspect that something really horrible has happened to these two characters and that the taxidermist is hiding something important.
Beatrice and Virgil is an excellent read and very well written. It has no chapters, only small breaks occasionally, but I never felt put off by that. I wouldn't exactly call it a page turner, because the action in the story is more intellectual than anything else, but I certainly had a hard time putting it down. Although, I do feel I should warn you that by the end of the book, I had become so engrossed in the story that even when I did want to put it down, (mostly because I was disturbed or mildly horrified by what I was reading — thank you Boy in the Striped Pajamas) I couldn't because I had to see it through. And, like Life of Pi, which I absolutely loved, it starts a little slow, but it gets interesting much faster.
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