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.