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BEATRICE AND VIRGIL

Name: BEATRICE AND VIRGIL
Author: Yann Martel
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6926-2

by Yann Martel ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2010

As Henry asks Henry, “Symbolic of what?”

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Whimsy takes a deadly serious turn in a novel that will enchant some readers and exasperate others.

The Canadian author’s previous novel (Life of Pi, 2001) won the Man Booker Prize, became a critically lauded bestseller and made legions of fans eager for a follow-up. Here it is, a meta-fictional shell game about a novelist who has experienced the same sort of success as Martel by writing a similar sort of animal-filled book, who attempts a follow-up (about the Holocaust) that mixes fact and fiction in a manner that advance readers find unsatisfying and who thus stops writing. His story reads something like a fable, since for the longest time the protagonist has only one name, Henry, and he and his wife move to a city that remains unidentified, though the narrative suggests it could be one of many. Instead of writing, Henry becomes involved with a chocolate shop and a theater troupe, and then he receives a package from a reader. The most accommodating bestselling author ever, Henry answers all his mail and goes to great lengths to track down the sender of this package, which contains a short story by Flaubert, a play with two characters—the title characters of this novel—and a plea for help. Henry’s quest leads him to a mysterious taxidermist, also named Henry, whose shop seems to contain “all of creation stuffed into one large room,” and who plies his trade in homage to Flaubert—“to bear witness.” Uh-oh, allegory alert! Like a Russian doll, the novel contains parables within parables, as the play’s Beatrice and Virgil (from Dante, of course) turn out to be a donkey and a monkey, and their dialogue sounds like Aesop filtered through Samuel Beckett (“This road must lead somewhere”/ “Is it somewhere we want to be?”). Henry agrees to help with the play that has been the taxidermist’s life’s work, thus breaking the novelist’s writer’s block, though at a great price.

As Henry asks Henry, “Symbolic of what?”

Pub Date: April 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4000-6926-2

Page Count: 210

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SON OF NOBODY
by Yann Martel

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HIGH MOUNTAINS OF PORTUGAL
by Yann Martel

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FACTS BEHIND THE HELSINKI ROCCAMATIOS
by Yann Martel

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EAST OF EDEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 1952

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

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Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.

Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952

ISBN: 0142004235

Page Count: 616

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK IN VIETNAM
by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICA AND AMERICANS
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson

- BOOK TO SCREEN
‘East of Eden’ Series in the Works at Netflix

- BOOK TO SCREEN
4 New Adaptations To Watch in October

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.