Yann Martel

Beatrice & Virgil (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Henry's second novel, written, like his first, under a pen name, had done well. Yann Martel's astonishing new novel begins with a successful writer attempting to publish his latest book, made up of a novel and an essay. Henry plans for it to be a "flip book" that the reader can start at either end, reading the novel or the essay first, because both pieces are equally concerned with representations of the Holocaust. His aim is to give the most horrifying of tragedies "a new choice of stories," in order that it be remembered anew and in more than one way. But no one is sympathetic to his provocative idea. What is your book about? his editor repeatedly asks. Should it be placed in the fiction section of a bookstore or with the non-fiction books? a bookseller asks. And where will the barcode go? To them, Henry's book is an unpublishable disaster. Faced with severe and categorical rejection, Henry gives up hope. He abandons writing, moves with his wife to a foreign city, joins a community theatre, becomes a waiter in a chocolatería. But then he receives a package containing a scene from a play, photocopies from a short story by Flaubert - about a man who hunts animals down relentlessly - and a short note: "I need your help." Intrigued, Henry tracks down his correspondent, and finds himself in a strange part of the city, walking past a stuffed okapi into a taxidermist's workshop. The taxidermist - also named Henry - says he has been working on his play, A 20th-Century Shirt, for most of his life, but now he needs Henry's help to describe his characters: the play's protagonists are a stuffed donkey and a howler monkey named Beatrice and Virgil, respectively, and Henry's successful book was in part about animals. He wants help to finish his play and, we may suspect, free himself from it. And though his new acquaintance is austere, abrupt and almost unearthly, Henry the writer is drawn more and more deeply into Henry the taxidermist's uncompromising world. The same goes for the reader. The more we read of the play within the novel, the more we find out about the lives of Beatrice and Virgil - in a series of initially funny, and then increasingly harrowing dialogues - the more troubling their story becomes. As we are drawn deeper into their disturbing moral fable, the relationship between the two faltering writers named Henry becomes more and more complex until it can only be resolved in an explosive, unexpected catastrophe. Though Beatrice & Virgil is initially as wry and engaging as anything Yann Martel has written, this book gradually grows into something more, a shattering and ultimately transfixing work that asks searching questions about the nature of our understanding of history, the meaning of suffering and the value of art. Together it is a pioneeringly original and profoundly moving accomplishment, one that meets Kafka's description of what a book should be: the axe for the frozen sea within us.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Knopf Canada
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. April 2010
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780307398796
• Artikelnr.: 39204661

Autorenporträt

YANN MARTEL is the author of Life of Pi, the #1 international bestseller published in more than 50 territories that has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, won the 2002 Booker (among many other prizes), spent more than a year on Canadian and international bestseller lists, and was adapted to the screen in an Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee. He is also the award-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (which won the Journey Prize), Self, Beatrice & Virgil, and a book of recommended reading: 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. Born in Spain in 1963, he studied philosophy at Trent University, worked at odd jobs and travelled widely before turning to writing. In 2021 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada. He lives in Saskatoon with the writer Alice Kuipers and their four children.