Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

Narrated by Marc Bramhall.
Audiobook published by Random House Audio, 2010.
Formats available: print, ebook, MP3 audiobook, CD audiobook.

Story:
Reading:

Like most everyone else in the world who read it, I loved Life of Pi. So I was excited when I learned that Yann Martel had written another book.

I started listening to this as an audiobook and had to abandon it after a few chapters. This is the story of Henry, a famous writer who is experiencing writer's block. He moves to a big city with his wife, which city we don't know, and takes a job at a chocolate shop. One day Henry receives an intriguing package in the mail which contains a short story by Flaubert and an excerpt from a play written by the sender. It was when we got to the play that I had to stop listening to the audiobook. Not only is it incredibly dull to listen to a narrator read a play within a work of fiction, complete with stage directions and having to identify the characters every line, but this particular section of the play that is sent to Henry contains a conversation between a donkey named Beatrice and a monkey named Virgil, chatting about a pear. It's a very long conversation about a pear. Since skimming isn't possible with audiobooks, it was unbearable. I had to stop.

(As an aside, I should make clear here that what makes the audiobook intolerable is the story and not the narrator, who did the best he had with what he was given).

Although I gave up on the audiobook, I didn't give up on Mr. Martel. I checked out the book from the library and took up where I had left off on the audio. I enjoyed reading the book more than listening to it, but only marginally. Henry, our famous-writer-turned-barrista protagonist, decides to track down the sender of the package. This leads him to a taxidermy shop. I must admit that the descriptions of the shop are fantastic. Animals of every sort, large and small, domestic and wild, are crammed in until the shop is about to burst. And they are posed in the most life-like ways that Henry is quite taken aback. So the taxidermist/playwright, also named Henry, convinces writer Henry to help him finish his play (the one with the pear scene), which he considers to be his life's work. Henry reluctantly finds himself helping Henry write the play and, as a by-product, learns more about taxidermy than anyone should probably know.

The play is an allegory, hence the donkey and monkey I suppose, and we come to figure out that it's about the Holocaust. The story devolves from bizarre to brutal. The surprise twist at the end dragged it back from the brink of utter antipathy for me, but wasn't enough to redeem the novel.