Title: Beatrice and VirgilAuthor: Yann Martel
I'm not a person who enjoys philosophical or abstract conversations very much. Right now I'm taking a literary criticism class, and the professor has us reading primary sources-- works of philosophy from the people (like Plato, Aristotle and Kant) whose work has inspired entire movements of literary theory. It's interesting and challenging, but it's also all about philosophy and ideas, and very little about story. After reading Beatrice and Virgil, I realized that the books I read "for fun" while I'm enrolled in the class should be books that aren't philosophical in nature, because reading them just feels like more homework.
Beatrice and Virgil is one of those books. If you read Yann Martel's Life of Pi a few years ago, you probably remember that the deceptively simple story of a boy and a tiger who survived a shipwreck was just the first layer of meaning, and underneath that were all sorts of symbols. It was a popular book for book clubs, because invariably some of the people in the group would love it and others would hate it and people could feel smart figuring out the symbols together, over cake, before they went back to talking about their husbands and children and sex (isn't that how your book club works?). Anyway, Beatrice and Virgil is also a story about people and animals, in this case a washed-up author and a taxidermist (the people) and a donkey and a howler monkey, who are stuffed in the taxidermist's shop. The taxidermist has written a play where the donkey and the monkey talk and act sad, and even though the conversations compel the author to come back again and again to talk to the taxidermist, he doesn't understand why the play has been written. And then finally, he comes to realize what the second layer of meaning in the story is.
Maybe if I read this book with my book club, I could come as one of the people who hated it, and the other people in the group could feel smart explaining the symbols and telling me why they loved it, and I would be converted. But right now, I'm not feeling it. Beatrice and Virgil hurt my head and left me feeling kind of dumb.
4 comments:
True about Life of Pi, my book group still argues about that book to this day -- 5 years after we read it!
I'm waiting for you to read The Lonely Polygamist!
I'm halfway done with Shiver, and The Lonely Polygamist is sitting next to my bed, waiting for me. I'd start it right now if I could finish the dang laundry!
I bought it this weekend, but I'm trying to navigate thru HIIIV and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel...ugh.
that's exactly how i felt after reading this...and the ending slightly traumatizes the reader! it's wholly unexpected, but, like the rest of the book, seems to draw another parallel to the Holocaust. i enjoyed Life of Pi quite a bit more.
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