Word: taxidermist
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...seems a little fuzzy about 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...