Stuff and nonsense

Yann Martel’s second novel, The Life of Pi, a fable with animals, won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and was translated into 38 languages.

Yann Martel’s second novel, The Life of Pi, a fable with animals, won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and was translated into 38 languages. The narrator of Beatrice and Virgil, who lives, like Martel, in Canada, hit the literary jackpot with his second novel, a fable with animals. A self-referential layer can be assumed.

Since his success, the narrator, Henry, has tried to write a ‘flip book’ about the Holocaust: two back-to-back books in one volume, which can be read either from the front or the back, part fiction and part an historical essay. He has the strange delusion that there is ‘little fiction’ about the Holocaust. This might, I suppose, be regarded as a character trait; Henry throughout the book shows a peculiar lack of awareness of others, remarkable in a novelist.

His ‘flip-book’ is rejected by his publishers; and Henry’s reaction is singularly off-key:

His flip-book was about having his soul ripped out — with it, attached, his tongue. Wasn’t that what every Holocaust was about, aphasia? . . . For his part, Henry now joined those who had been shut up by the Holocaust.

So, having a book rejected is comparable to suffering trauma or death in a concentration camp? That is not just pretentious; it is morally tone-deaf.

Henry retreats from failure to a pretentiously unnamed city,

one of those great cities of the world that is a world unto itself. Perhaps it was New York. Perhaps it was Paris. Perhaps it was Berlin.

The point of this modish post-modern uncertainty is unclear. It certainly does not give Henry’s life there any universality: privileged by wealth, he has no need to earn a living, and fills his time with rarefied hobbies.