2011.05.14 — Beatrice & Virgil Finished 2011.05.05

☆☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.
Finished 2011.05.05. Begun 2011.05.01.

Yann Martel.
Beatrice & Virgil.
Toronto: Random House, 2010.
ISBN 9780307398772.

I was originally tempted to give this four ☆s because the ending just didn't ring true to the story told. (I'm not sure how the ending could be improved, however.) But the book has gripped my intestines and rattled my imagination so much so that since finishing it nine days ago, I'm still struggling to put into words the complexity and beauty and shear power of this story. (I will blog that extended reaction soon — I hope.)

There are passages in the book with prose as beautiful as anything I've ever read. For example:

BEATRICE: As for the other quality that gives Virgil his name, how to put into words something so astounding to the ears? Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field—but they're all we have. I will try.

A howl, a roar, a howling roar, a deafening roar— these barely hint at the reality. To compare it to other animals' cries becomes a kind of zoological one-upmanship that addresses only the aspect of volume. A howler monkey's roar exceeds in volume the cry of a peafowl, of a jaguar, of a lion, of a gorilla, of an elephant—at which point the inflating of hulk stops, at least on land. In the ocean, the blue whale, which can weigh well over one hundred and fifty tons, the largest animal ever to grace this planet, can put out a cry at a volume of one hundred and eighty decibels, which is louder than a jet engine, but this cry is at a very low frequency, hardly audible to a donkey, which is probably why we call the whale's cry a song. But we must, in all fairness, grant the blue whale top spot. So there, if they were lined up side by side, between the massive bull elephant and the colossal blue whale, involving a serious dropping of the eyes, stands Virgil and his kind, without a doubt the most noise per kilo of any life-form on earth (88-9).

Scene from LoP

At my prompt my friend RT — a huge fan of Life of Pi — read the book, albeit with some hesitation because I'd warned her that there are some brutal bits. When she finished it she thanked me and said that it has become her number one favourite book. She told me she was going out the next day to buy her own copy so as to read it again. My other friend, TR — a voracious reader — also read it at my prompting, and thought it great too. And I just finished talking with AG, the friend who prompted me to read it, and she too found it impressive and complex and challenging, and tough.

Since I loved Life of Pi I was skeptical that Martel could surpass it. I would have been overjoyed if he could even have matched it. But to my shock, Beatrice and Virgil is a better book than LoP for many reasons: B&V was a far tougher story to tell, and it was told very well; it followed a brilliant book; Martel used animals again, but kept it new and fresh; he successfully explored the limits of text to express emotion in a multilayered, contra textual way about an emotionally, psychologically and historically sensitive subject.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.