Maybe my critical side is coming out these days and with the Author way off in Canada somewhere, and used to critiques of his writing, or just mostly immune to them, it'll be alright for me to have my say. I was told of this book recently and by this time had quite forgotten the life of Pi, which was quite good mostly but interrupted by exceedingly dull bits that were hard to get through. I like books where the descriptiveness is alive and interesting, or possibly arresting, that swings through words using oddities or absurdities that make extra sense because of their inclusion. Yann can be very good at this, the spellbinding effect, but in Beatrice and Virgil this effect doesn't go anywhere; it's merely cleverness in seclusion. This way with words is a useful tool to lift the reader to a place where the vantage of what is to come can be swept into with whatever descriptiveness the Author has used; a slide into a playground hopefully unlike any other but in the instance of Beatrice and Virgil the particular sandpit we always go back to play in is a dull and overly serious crutch of many a modern writer.
Mr Martel has fallen prey to that supposed sign of seriously deep writing ability; being seriously deep, and choosing playing with the ability to be disturbing and ending up just being morbid. He trucks out that great monolithic inspiration to being able to confront the depths of human culpability and disaster of store bought remorse... the holocaust. Oh the people that fall when confronting this huge barrage ballon of insipid political correctness.
This is not to say that the holocaust isn't a reality that's needs occasional address but such loaded guns should only be addressed by those great enough to do them the justice the topic deserves. And I say topic because, like any historical event fading into it's vortex of relevance, the realities can only now be second, third and fourth hand so the subtext of realism is a matter that needs careful and inspired writing to meet us in a way that leaves us with a reminder that matters. Yann is unable to do this in Beatrice and Virgil and the book comes across then as an uninspired exercise unworthy of the abilities he has shown in the past. But maybe I just don't get it?
Maybe I'm just not clever enough, or have at my disposal enough of the historical metaphors that deep people seem to collect like gas station free gifts after the buying of significant amounts of the gas of seriousness, to get his well chosen opposite of in jokes and I'm unable to swim in his chlorinated swimming pool of literary loftiness. The uneducated like myself are relegated to the paddling pool of story telling because the man is unable to get a good story together and has to fall back on the tools of every uninspired artist trying to let us know how clever they are... off the top shelf technique.
I'm sorry but this book suffers from second album syndrome; and badly. After The life of pi it's a fall from grace by someone frightened by their strengths and working through their weaknesses in public. At least Britney Spears does it with trailer park honesty. The same couldn't be said of Yann who seems to think he can grab the toolbox of the holocaust and with a few references to Dante and some slightly bizarre metaphors, a donkey and a howler monkey, tell us something we don't know in a way we haven't heard but the man fails badly and to me he,s obviously drowning in his own pool of consequence... because hes unwilling to take chances and let the story go somewhere it needs to go and, rather, relies on intellectual cliches to cover his inability to transcend his own past glories.
Oh well, one hopes the other reviews are bad, and this man decides to stop living off the proceeds of previous writers circuit bombast and take a high dive back into the waters of significance - from a place high enough to be both slightly frightening and invigorating so that he suspends his sense of his own belief and follows the hairy monster of inspiration to a place we'll all willingly follow.
So I don't mind if this really is a good book, lauded by the good and the wise, 'cause I'd rather stay stupid than fall prey to the modern disease of intellectual deceit by using the tools of massive obstruction... technique.
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