Word: donkey
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Martel writes with a smooth, almost stoned detachment, cool to the touch, which gives a distant, unreal feeling to a story that's already dangerously weird and abstract. The taxidermist's play turns out to be a Beckettian affair about a monkey and a donkey, Beatrice and Virgil, who live on a giant shirt (yes, a shirt). Beatrice and Virgil are lost, shell-shocked survivors of a massacre of animals by humans, an "abomination" they can refer to only as "the Horrors." Thus the Holocaust, denied entrance at the front door, sneaks in through the window...
...Life of Pi” featured a tiger, an orangutan, a hyena, and a zebra. Your upcoming book “Beatrice & Virgil” features a monkey and a donkey. Let’s get real here—do you really want to write or do you just want to open up your own menagerie...
...Beatrice and Virgil” are dead. Martel refers often to the sound of an ancient tape recording of howler monkeys in the upper reaches of the Amazon, transforming this rather odd sound into a hauntingly beautiful melody. Moreover, the two eponymous heroes of the book, are a taxidermied donkey and howler monkey, their lively dialogues pure fantasy. Martel refers repeatedly to the image of taxidermied animals standing in a bestiary-like taxidermy shop, poised as if to move. Like the tape recording of the howler monkeys, the taxidermied animals are just a chilling memory of themselves, the consummate memento...
Anyone who’s seen “The Donkey Show” will tell you: it’s bat-shit crazy. The concept sounds like something from the world’s campiest, most hallucinogen-happy comedy improv troupe: “Alright, darling, I want ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’ told in the style of ’70s disco—with roller skates, and glitter, and no pants...
This truly is madness, but might there be method in’t? That was the question I sought to answer last Saturday as I went undercover to the latest round of auditions of “The Donkey Show...