Word: play
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...What They're Restricting in South Korea: In an attempt to crack down on video-game addiction, South Korea is setting a curfew for online play. Underage players will have to abide by an automated blackout period after midnight and become accustomed to slower connection speeds after long periods of use during earlier hours. While currently limited to a handful of games, the "slowdown" plan will eventually apply to the 19 role-playing titles that comprise 79% of the nation's online-gaming market. A recent survey of 1,500 South Korean public-school students found that 29.3% of them...
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...
...what its point is. So he bails on writing altogether. He moves to a new city, gets a dog and a cat, gets his wife pregnant and generally forgets about books entirely - until he receives a strange fan letter from an elderly, misanthropic taxidermist who's working on a play and wants Henry's help...
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...
...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 a writer must play to lose. The trick, as Beckett might have said, lies in losing in just the right...