Word: martel
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...book,” with a novel on one side and an essay on the other. The book, therefore, would be doomed from the start. So discouraged by this, Henry goes into a period of artistic withdrawal, in which he cannot bring himself to write. It almost seems that Martel is making a private joke, as he proceeds, in the rest of “Beatrice and Virgil” to accomplish what Henry fails...
...Martel identifies Henry’s temporary loss of an authorial voice with that of the extinct animal and those of Holocaust victims. Martel also appears to take umbrage at the idea that the Holocaust must always remain a static concept. According to Henry, first-hand accounts of past suffering cannot accomplish the same emotional and intellectual challenge that a piece of fiction can. Martel’s book is therefore a revolutionary move written in protest against the reluctance to portray the Holocaust outside of non-fiction. Yet a simple look at the corpus of contemporary Western literature shows...
...both “The Life of Pi” and “Beatrice and Virgil,” it becomes evident that Martel is most comfortable with expressing himself through the voice of anthropomorphized animals. Although he insists that his animal protagonists are irrevocably non-human, in some ways his animal characters are more nuanced than the human ones. In “Beatrice and Virgil,” the animals are the hapless heroes, while the humans prove to be cold-blooded and vicious...
Eerily however, the majority of the animal figures in “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...
...title, “Beatrice and Virgil” refers to Dante’s sublime and venal guides through Paradise and Hell in the “Divine Comedy.” Martel evidently hopes to draw a parallel between Dante’s experiences in the afterlife with the sometimes-agonizing human experience of life on Earth. Beyond that obvious reference, “Beatrice and Virgil” is full of literary allusions. Martel borrows heavily from the mood of manic stasis in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot...