I’m going to do this a little differently than I usually do reviews because, quite frankly, my reaction to this book was a little different than I usually experience when reading a book. Very rarely am I ambivalent about something I’ve read. Love it or hate it – or so despise it I don’t even finish – my feelings about what I read are usually crystal clear. And yet, days after finishing Beatrice and Virgil I still can’t decide: do I love it, or hate it?
Of those who actually read, I may well be one of the few humans left on the planet who has not yet read Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize winning novel Life of Pi. Everyone I know who has read it raves about it, so when I was offered the chance to read Martel’s most recent offering Beatrice and Virgil, which sounded like it had a very similar presentation stylistically, I took it.
I knew something was off when, shortly after I started reading it, my husband asked me how the book was and the first – and only – word out of my mouth was “weird.” At the time I was about 60 pages into the book and, quite honestly, very seriously thinking about giving up on it. So far all I’d learned, in painstaking detail, was that a renowned author named Henry had given up writing after a book he had been working on for 5 years was soundly rejected by his agent and publisher. Having packed up his wife and moved to a major, yet unnamed city, Henry was living a jolly old life working in a chocolatería, responding to fan mail, and acting with an amateur theater company. Um, ok.
Things start to pick up, a little, when Henry gets a letter from a local fan with a short story by Flaubert, a few pages from an uncredited play involving two characters (Beatrice & Virgil), and a cryptic request for help enclosed. His curiosity piqued, Henry writes a response and hand delivers it to the return address, which he discovers is a taxidermy shop. There he learns the shop’s proprietor is the author of the play, and that Beatrice and Virgil are two of his creations, literally. Beatrice is a donkey, Virgil a howler monkey, and both are specimens which have been fully preserved by the taxidermist. (more…)
