Word: virgil
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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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...
...Divine Comedy,” they are the ones who guide Dante through the whole journey. In other words, through Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradiso. In this novel, Beatrice and Virgil are the reader’s guides through hell. When dealing with things as momentous as the Holocaust, or any other historical event, you need a guide...
There is indeed no exit from “Beatrice and Virgil,” not even when the book culminates in its final moment of overwhelming crescendo, as Martel’s characters find themselves trapped in an eruption of hell-like flames. Like the echoing themes of a fugue, all the components of the Martel’s novel fit tightly together, leading up to one ultimate moment of terror...