Life After Pi: Yann Martel is Back

• Novelist Yann Martel reads from Beatrice and Virgil tonight at the Seattle Public Central Library. 7 p.m., Microsoft Auditorium, free.

While not working on the screenplay to Life of Pi, Yann Martel has been keeping busy as a novelist. His follow-up to his 2002 Man Booker Prize winner is titled Beatrice and Virgil, and it has left New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani feeling disappointed and perverted. She’s right, the bright-eyed magical fabulism of Pi is nowhere to be found in Beatrice and Virgil, but she’s also wrong.

Beatrice and Virgil is less a book than a ticking, butcher-paper-wrapped package, whirring with gears and cogs–like an orrery of art’s relationship to unspeakable catastrophe. A slim 200-plus pages, the novel is yet a genuine attempt to move beyond the novel “format,” and there is a richness to its perversity.

The first 30 pages deal with a novelist, Henry, and his attempts to publish a book about the Holocaust that combines an essay with a fictional story. “If history doesn’t become story, it dies to everyone except the historian,” Henry argues, during a publisher’s meeting. “With the Holocaust, we have a tree with massive historical roots, and only tiny, scattered fictional fruit. But it’s the fruit that holds the seed!”

In this, he’s in opposition to the camp of Adorno, who said simply, “To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric.” In the immediate aftermath, in the mourning, who could disagree? The word Holocaust could totalize the experience, but words could not. The poetry came, in time, but six decades and counting later, every artistic “use” of the Holocaust is still scrutinized.

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Henry’s book would have been “for the needs of people today, the children of ghosts.” Martel describes him as crushed by his publisher’s rejection, indulging himself in silence, until the day that someone sends him Flaubert’s “Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator,” about a vicious young man who grows up slaughtering animals.

That “someone” turns out to be a taxidermist, who wants Henry’s help on a play he’s writing featuring a donkey named Beatrice and a howler monkey named Virgil (both after Dante’s guides in the Divine Comedy.) When we first meet them, they have a conversation that goes:

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Virgil: What I’d give for a pear.

Beatrice: A pear?

Virgil: Yes. A ripe and juicy one.

(Pause)

Beatrice: I’ve never had a pear.

Later, Martel underlines the Beckett homage so you can’t miss it. It’s notable that Henry’s role is to inject some life and vitality into the proceedings; the animals here never escape the frame of the play. Called “A 20th-Century Shirt,” although it features the donkey and monkey, it’s not for children. The shirt–on which Beatrice and Virgil live–is symbolic, it has stripes, much like a concentration camp inmate’s shirt.

I think the dizzying effect is intended. Martel is fond of a living allegory, one you can’t pin down easily. At one point, the two animals refer to mass extinction, and it’s impossible not to hear both the present’s environmental concerns and past’s gassings and executions. If you thought Martel was trying to equate the two, you could be offended on behalf of the no-longer-with-us.

But I think his interest, prefigured by Julian Hospitator, is in humanity’s sociopathic capacity for mass destruction. That is, who or what doesn’t matter to the person doing the killing. And the howl of the howler monkey may simply be the howl of extinction itself. (Since Martel paints with allusion in broad strokes and daubs, you’re not always sure about the referent: for instance, there’s someone named Theo, and a stabbing, but Theo isn’t stabbed.)

Part of the fascination with Martel’s work is in not knowing precisely where he’s going, so I’ll skip more synopsis than this. A week after reading, what I most need is for everyone else to read the book, so we can talk about it.