Month: December 2012

Yann Martel: Beatrice and Virgil – First thoughts

Posted on By Margot

I am really struggling with this book – normally I pick up a book and begin reading. The plot will unfold and by the third chapter I will have the map of the unknown country described by the author in my head. But here it is a different story. I was struggling so much that I have had to resort to reading reviews etc. just to be able to grasp what this book is about.

The book is an attempt to show how the holocaust can be depicted in art – or perhaps how it should be depicted in various forms of art.

Who are Beatrice and Virgil? These are the guides in Dante’s Divine Comedy. But here they are a donkey and a howler monkey, occupying the space between not alive and not dead.

The more reviews I read, the more confused I become. The main protagonist is an author called Henry who wrote an absurdly successful book and now is struggling to launch another magnum opus. And out of the blue, another Henry, this one a taxidermist, contacts Henry about a play he is trying to write. The characters are in fact stuffed animals in the taxidermist’s shop and the play is called “The 20th Century Shirt”. And the big question to be answered “How are we going to talk about what happened to us one day when it is over”? And so the allusions to the holocaust and representations in art.

This is a book that has to be read carefully and I am proceeding slowly. My problem is that this is a digital library book and expires in 3 days. Perhaps I will renew it.

Yann Martel: Beatrice and Virgil part 2

Posted on By Margot

I finished the book. It is quite short and very surreal. What is it about?

It is about Henry, an author with writer’s block who meets a taxidermist who is writing a play about two animals. The taxidermist is stuck and he approaches Henry for help. Another layer. The play is a description of the Holocaust, which is in turn an allegory for the destruction of the animal world by human beings. The holocaust as an allegory for something else?

The end of the book is disturbing and now I wish that I had just abandoned the work after I had just read 30 or 40 pages. There are some books which live with you for the rest of your life. This is one such work.

There is another twist. The story is not just about the depiction about the holocaust in art. It is also about the toxicity of human guilt. The taxidermist is a former Nazi. Was he also involved in the brutality of the holocaust? Did he also torture and brutalise? And now how does he live with himself? By using art to explain away his part in the brutality of the Nazi regime. By using art to deflect the focus, to say that the real evil that mankind has done is not the extermination of 6 million people, but rather the enslavement and destruction of the animal kingdom. The taxidermist’s conscience is assuaged. Or is it?

The Life of Pi has been made into a charming film suitable for family entertainment. This book, if it were ever to make the silver screen would be a horror movie.

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Posted on By Margot

This is the third book of the trilogy started by Shadow of the Wind by the Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I have just finished listening to it (purchased from Audible.co.uk). The Prisoner of Heaven is taken from a book by Julian Carax, the fictional author from the Shadow of the Wind. I had enjoyed the Shadow of the Wind, so much so that the Angel’s Game (book 2 of the trilogy) was something of an anticlimax. But this book brings both books together. The narrator is Daniel Sempere who is now married to Bea and has a small son. The star of the book is Fermin (Fermin Romero de Torres), an unlikely hero. Small, slight, not good looking, most definitely not a Hollywood star, on whose body is enscribed the brutality of the Franco regime and the barbarity of the Spanish Civil War. The story centres on Fermin’s time as a prisoner in the dreaded Montjuic Castle and his friendship with david Martine, the main character from the Angel’s Game. Despite the brutality of his experiences, Fermin is a man of compassion, a man of courage, the sort of man that anyone would be proud to have as a friend.

Fermin is about to be married to Bernarda, and all is not well with the groom to be. A mysterious stranger turns up in the Sempere bookshop and this stranger is the catalyst for Fermin to tell his story to Daniel. In this story Daniel finds out more about his friend and his mother as well as finding out what was troubling the groom to be.

Zafon writes a good book, the narrative is gripping, one begun it, the book has to be finished. Zafon draws us into two eras of Barcelona’s history – the Barcelona of 1960 and the post civil war Barcelona of the 1940s. How does a city recovery from a civil war, how does a city cope with a fascist dictatorship? How can the desire for revenge accommodate the desire to live a normal live?

There is a twist in the story, the world of David Martin. This is a world where the thin veil that separates the world of reality from the world of mental illness. How do we know what is real and what is fantasy? And yet here, right at the end of the book is a twist. Just when you think that there is only the real world, that the whole story can be explained, Zafon throws in the Angel from the Angel’s Game.