March 28, 2024

24 of 52 in my 2011 book blogging challenge.

Beatrice and Virgil was not at all what I expected. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is one of my favorite books ever. People told me this book was nothing like his last. That’s why I waited so long to read it. I was afraid I’d be disappointed. Still, I was kind of hoping for another Life of Pi.

Beatrice and Virgil is not Life of Pi. It’s nothing like Life of Pi. I won’t be going around for years to come telling people it is my favorite book ever. Neither will I say I’m disappointed.

This book is different. That’s all. It’s very different. I’m not sure it’s even a novel. It’s part novella and part play, part metafiction and part theater of the absurd. It’s part fable and possibly part autobiography. It is its own book. It is not like any other.

Beatrice is a donkey and Virgil is a monkey. The two form an unlikely friendship as they go through something that resembles the Holocaust. They are the main characters of the play within the novella.

Meanwhile we have Henry, a guy who has written a book that was wildly successful, loved by millions and already studied by school children the world over. He is struggling to figure out what to do with his life next. He is struggling to write his next book. He wants it to be different. When he can’t seem to agree with his publisher on what’s acceptably different, he moves to a new city and engages in a series of creative endeavors. He takes music lessons. He joins a theater group. He befriends a weird old man working on a very a strange little play. He does everything except write a book the way his publisher wants.

It’s not hard to imagine Yann Martel as Henry. Martel even gives Henry’s son the same name as Martel’s own real-life son. He invites us to imagine that he is Henry, at least in spirit. He invites us to imagine the level of pressure we have burdened him with by loving Life of Pi so much.

I understand, but I can’t say I feel sorry for him. This is a man who doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do. It doesn’t matter if he ever writes another book or has another job. His kid will still go to a good school because we’re still buying copies of Life of Pi.

But he did write another book. He gave us Beatrice and Virgil, which is an act of experimental writing aware of being an act of experimental writing. I didn’t want to like it. Several times I started to put it aside without finishing it, but something stubborn in my made me keep going. It annoyed me because I found it difficult to latch onto a plot, and when one finally did pull me in, it would be immediately disrupted by a switch to not just a new storyline but a new genre as well.

I believed I would read the last page, toss the book aside and say, “Thank God that’s over.” Instead, I reached the last page, held the book in my hands for a while and said, “My God, that was brilliant.”

It is brilliant. It will make you reflect in many ways on many subjects, not the least of which are atrocity and art. Henry keeps searching for a new way to tell a story we’ve heard before. Yann Martel has done that.

But where reading Life of Pi is an act of spiritual meditation, reading Beatrice and Virgil is an act of philosophic contemplation. Life and Pi is still my favorite, but Beatrice and Virgil has certainly won my admiration. And somewhere in the world, I can only hope Yann Martel is working on another book that will surprise me just as much.

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