Read Beatrice and Virgil first.
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. Oscar Wilde
I’ve never been a huge fan of super stylized novels. I wasn’t impress that noon fell in the exact center of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I never understood or agreed with the countless interpretations of Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants. The Road was nothing but style and didn’t impress me all that much.
Having said that I really loved Life of Pi-a book that filled with allusions and the possibility in the end that none of it was not at all what it appeared to be.
Beatrice and Virgil is a book best read without knowing anything about it. Just as the best parts of Life of Pi are surprises, so are the best parts of Beatrice and Virgil.
I tend to read for pleasure more than for enlightenment. I tend to like a book that means what it says, rather than one that is filed with allegory, hidden messages, and so many layers that college courses can be formed around it’s possible meaning. I do tend to like subtleties of one sort or another, I loved Shakespeare in Love for it’s many inside jokes, but I don’t usually like having to work for these fictional Easter Eggs.
I wrote a review of the movie Watchmen in which I talked about how much I hated it and what a waste of time it was. Someone left a comment that the film and it’s deeper meaning had gone over my head. Maybe so. Or maybe there just wasn’t much of a deeper meaning to be seen.
One of my favorite hobbies has always been Nitpicking Sci Fi shows of one sort or another. Most Sci Fi is based on nothing more than the Writer’s Imagination, so it’s pretty easy to look at something and say, hey, that doesn’t make any sense. For the most part I like Science Fiction, and I like making fun of most of it.
Serious Novels are another beast. While I consider myself a bit of an expert on Science Fiction and have read widely in the field, my expertise on more literary works is pretty limited. I think Moby Dick is an amazing read. I have never wadded through all of Ulysses. I have dipped a toe into Remembrance of Things Past and found it filled with the most amazing writing-but for me the author’s obsession with minutia outweighs the brilliance of his prose.
I read The Life of Pi not too long ago. An amazing and captivating book which is filled with depths I never fully plumed and meanings I have only the vaguest notions about. Was the story real? At one point near the beginning I thought that it was a real life memoir, but knew that I would have surely have heard about a boy surviving for endless days at sea. The Truth of The Life of Pi is elusive, if truth can be correctly applied to a work of fiction.
So I found Beatrice and Virgil recently-a smallish book by Yann Martel, author of The Life of Pi. On the cover we see a donkey and a monkey in an undulating plane, featureless except for long stripes and long shadows. Here is a book to rival anything by Virgina Woolf or Ernest Hemingway in it’s simplicity of language and complexity of ideas.
Beatrice and Virgil is a book, like The Life of Pi, best left a blank slate. The surprises, the subtleties, the twists and turns are wonderful. The dust jacket takes this into account and only gives a thumbnail sketch of what is to come, but even this seems a bit too much of a giveaway. I suppose there must be a few people like myself who like to walk blindly into books and then read the reviews and blog posts after they have read them.
It’s clear that Yann Martel likes to take his reader on a journey without giving them a map or a compass to help them along the way. I may have done too much in saying it reminds me of Hemingway or Woolf, though it reminds me only in a very tangent way.
But here is the bit of literature that made me think. Beatrice and Virgil is a both fun and disturbing. Self referential to the point of surrealism. The over arcing theme is one that I agree with-the mass murder of animals makes The Holocaust look like a day out at Disney. But this argue is set aside, as it is made by the villain in the piece. The mashup of novel, play, essay works for me-and I half expected there to be a few pages near the end that were printed up side down.
Part of the trouble with Beatrice and Virgil is that Yann Martel seems to think it is still 1930 or so and that he has cast himself in the part of recreating fiction as Hemingway, Woolf, Beckett, Joyce, Kafka, and Orwell did. He is a master of style and his sentences sing. This was an amazing read, but the over all result is greatly diminished by the horrid events we find at the book’s end.
There is much to think about here-about books, about history, about being human, about the reality of fiction and the fantasy of nonfiction.
