Yann Martel

Life after Pi was not always easy for Yann Martel — at least professionally speaking. It took him nine years to write the follow-up to his hugely successful novel, which in 2002 not only won the prestigious Man Booker Prize, but also became an extraordinary international bestseller, selling nearly eight million copies worldwide.

His first intended follow-up project was a “flip book” about the Holocaust, beginning as an essay from one cover and as a novel from the other. The idea was rejected by his publisher, an experience that later found its way, in lightly fictionalized form, into Martel’s eventual new novel: Beatrice and Virgil.

In the multilayered Beatrice and Virgil, we follow a “blocked” writer named Henry, who, through an intriguing letter from a fan — also named Henry — becomes involved with the latter’s play about Beatrice and Virgil. This second Henry is not only an amateur playwright, but also a taxidermist, a preserver of dead animals. Beatrice and Virgil are a stuffed donkey and monkey from his shop, both of whom met a terrible end.

Ultimately, Beatrice and Virgil is an allegorical narrative about the Holocaust. As with his abandoned flip-book project, Martel approaches the Holocaust in an unusual way: not through historical or social realism, but through metaphor. In doing so, he touches upon the taboo surrounding imaginative representations of the Holocaust. Martel confronts his readers with the cruelty of human nature, but also with the possibility of forgiveness and the liberating power of storytelling.

During BorderKitchen, Yann Martel will be interviewed by Wim Brands (VPRO).

“Martel brilliantly guides the reader from the too-sunny beginning into the terrifying darkness of the old man's shop and Europe's past. Everything comes into focus by the end, leaving the reader startled, astonished and moved.” – USA Today

“Taxidermy. Isn't that what historians do? They take the past and they try to give it life. Isn't that what writers do? Isn't that what I'm trying to do? I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.” – Yann Martel