Word: martell
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...Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil begins with a dreary little piece of self-referential play. Henry, the hero, is a novelist trying to write a follow-up to his prize winning first book. Similarly, Martel's Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize in 2002, and now he's produced a follow-up in the form of Beatrice and Virgil. This kind of metafictional loop has become a convention as well-worn as those it was meant to explode. Somebody needs to come up with a fifth wall to break. (See the all TIME 100 novels...
...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...
Beatrice and Virgil is a true oddity. Its subject is violence and the impossibility of describing it: violence is an atrocity that immolates language itself, turns us into dumb animals and brute flesh. But Martel's story is so arbitrary and oblique that its savage truth almost misses making itself felt. There may be no way to approach the unspeakable other than sneaking up on it with a winding story like Henry's and toylike nonsense characters like Beatrice and Virgil. But Beatrice and Virgil falls victim to its own paradox: speaking of the unspeakable is a dangerous game that...
...shipwreck, a tiger, and God connected? All play a major part in Yann Martel’s Booker Prize winning novel, “Life of Pi.” Nearly nine years after the publication of his runaway success, Martel sits down with FM on a sunny afternoon at the First Unitarian Church in Harvard Square to discuss his new book, his résumé, President Obama, and religion...
...Yann Martel: I toured for “Life of Pi” for two years, so I did end up talking a lot about animals and shipwrecks and religion and multiple faiths. After two years I had enough, but it was still interesting talking to readers...