Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

“Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.”

I take no joy in saying this, but Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel’s follow-up to his international bestseller The Life of Pi, is a really bad book. It’s not bad in the way that, say, the latest ghostwritten Clancy novel is, or a cheap science fiction paperback. It’s bad in the way that Rand’s Anthem is, bad in a way that patronizes and insults the reader. It’s pretensions without being able to follow through on its pretensions. The pacing feels like an author that didn’t want to kill his beauties, and finally had the power to save them. 

But lest this sound like a stream of misplaced invective, let’s examine the book itself. It opens on what is essentially the first of two(!) framing stories, following its protagonist, Henry, as he attempts to finish a follow-up to a massively successful first novel, one that used animals to tell a story that was not about animals—sound familiar? Henry’s second novel, as it is described, sounds insufferable. It is envisioned, Henry tells us, as a flip-book, where one side is a novel about the Holocaust and the other is a non-fiction essay about the same. His editors understandably reject this conceit, and, after railing against them for several pages, Henry decides to take his wife and journey to France, where he settles. This is, notably, about the first 3^rd of an already short book, and boy, is it a ham-fisted slog. It’s entirely unnecessary, for one thing, and it serves only to emphasize how one note Martel’s themes are. Like the message about stories reflecting truth in Pi? You’ll love hearing it spelled out here (and throughout the book) over and over and over.

Well, Henry moves to France and, long-seeming story short, meets a taxidermist, also named Henry, after receiving several pages of a play he’s written. The pages concern a monkey, named Virgil, and a donkey, named Beatrice, discussing a pear. The excerpt is interesting—and the writing in the play is consistently better than the writing in the rest of the novel—but it also introduces the book’s first big snag; namely, that the taxidermist is an entirely unpleasant person who causes stress in Henry’s marriage and upsets the fine life he’s made for himself, and we, as readers, are intended to understand that Henry pursues this relationship so he can read the rest of a play that, frankly, is structured so much like Waiting for Godot that I half-expected Beatrice to enter scene eating a boot. Most people aren’t going to upset their life for second-rate Beckett. After an interminable period of Henry coaxing the play out of the taxidermist one scene at a time, we’re treated to the big reveal, which must be SPOILED BELOW so I can discuss what really bugged me about the book.

It turns out that the taxidermist was a Nazi sympathizer, and Beatrice and Virgil is his attempt at absolving himself of the guilt he feels for doing nothing to stop (or, possibly, actively aiding) the Nazis. So, surprise, Henry’s real life turns out to be the perfect story to tell the Holocaust story he wanted to tell with his crazy flip-book idea, and it turns out that’s the book you’ve been reading. Also, the taxidermist goes crazy really abruptly and stabs Henry and drama, but whatever. Putting aside the banality of the “this is the book” ending (the movie Hugo uses the exact same conceit to greater effect, and that’s for kids), the whole thing is insulting. It’s insulting to me as a reader, because the twist ending is telegraphed about once every 10 pages. It’s insulting a larger scale because this is a book about the Holocaust, as seen by a world-famous author who thinks a masturbatory talking-animal meta-textual novella that barely makes sense communicates the truth of the Holocaust in a more meaningful way than actual history, or the fictional works that attempt to share the horror in a realistic fictional framework. It’s extremely hard to read Beatrice and Virgil and not come away with the idea that Martel is using the Holocaust to add emotional weight to his story about writer’s block, and that’s just wrong. It’s also consistent with the rest of the book’s MO, which uses the pretty disturbing deaths of two animals near the midpoint to score cheap emotional points, even though those deaths don’t add anything to the story aside from that melodramatic button-pushing.

This is a bad book. There’s really nothing to redeem it, aside from a few passages that read nicely and a section involving Beatrice being tortured that, in spite of being just as manipulative as everything else, at least works. I don’t recommend reading it, and it’s probably turned me off Martel for good.

Everyone has read Life of Pi: Brent Carlton Christopher Jim

Tears of a Tiger by Sharon M. Draper

Teacher A: The first book we have to teach for the freshmen is Tears of a Tiger.
Teacher B: Okay, what do we do the second week?

--actual conversation between two teachers at my school

--Hey Rob! Live game, man. You be flyin' with the hoops, man! Swoosh! Ain't nobody better, 'cept maybe me.
--Yo, Andy, my main man! I see you been eatin' bull crap for dinner again! You only wish you was as good as me! I, Robert Orlando Washington, will be makin' billions of dollars playin' for the N.B.A.! Want me to save you a ticket to one of my games?

--actual opening lines of Tears of a Tiger


Apparently, years ago, when my school first opened, none of the English teacher positions were actually filled by English teachers and so when it came time to choose books to teach someone decided on something called Tears of a Tiger, which may actually be the worst book I have ever read all the way through.

The story is this: Andy Jackson and Rob Washington are best friends and basketball teammates at Hazelwood High. One night, after a win, they go out and celebrate a little too much and Andy, who is driving drunk, crashes into a retaining wall, killing Rob. (From the locker room to the hospital, according to the time-stamp before each chapter, is an hour-and-a-half. Beer bong, anyone?) The rest of the story details Andy's grief, the deterioration of his relationships with his family and friends, and his eventual suicide.

The entire book is written without any sort of action or description, trading off between chapters of confusing, unattributed dialogue, and some sort of epistolary sections cobbled together from letters, homework assignments, and diary entries. Which would be fine, if it made any sense and weren't completely tone-deaf as to the way young people talk, even back, I'm sure, in the mid-90's when it was published.

I also have two much larger, moral issues with the book (Oscar Wilde be damned)--first of all, as if it weren't enough to chronicle Andy's internal struggle, Draper goes to great lengths to describe the kind of social ills that young black students face, like the teacher who predicts that Andy will be fine because "black kids are tough" and the conflict that Andy has with his father about what Andy feels is his dad's toadyism with regards to his white bosses. The book boasts an ensemble cast of Andy's friends and classmates, so we frequently are privy to their racial sensitivities as well, including the character who would get rid of band-aids because they're not the color of his skin, and Andy's little brother, whom he chastises for preferring dolls with blonde hair. Thematically, it's oddly out of place and serves only to minimize Andy's grief by placing it on the same level. Furthermore, Draper's tone-deafness in the way that she airs these greivances had many of my students convinced that the book as a whole was quite racist.

Secondly, and worse, is the treatment that Andy's suicide receives. The event is clumsily foreshadowed multiple times, including an instance in which Andy runs out of the classroom when one of his classmates observed that Lady Macbeth probably deserved her death at her own hands (cue bewildered white and clueless teacher). Yet, when after the act the school counselor recommends that Andy's friends and family write letters to him, not a single one offers any pity or sympathy toward him, but all show some variation on this sort of condescension:

You know what really pisses me off? You! You're a coward and a sellout! You decided to end your life, without saying good-bye to anybody, without asking anyone for help. You deserted your friends and family--the people who love you the most. Suicide is the coward's way out. Brave men face their problems. So what does that make you?

..I hate you for leaving me here. I hate you for making me feel like this. I hate you for making me cry. And I hate you for making me face death again so soon.

Does anyone really think this kind of intimidation is effective in keeping kids from suicide? Andy maintains that no one understands his grief and his guilt, and in the end he's right; no one does. The book is, at the very least, emotionally manipulative, and ultimately comes off as an anti-suicide screed that lacks any sort of insight into what might make a young man kill himself. It is clearly also written by a person that has never considered suicide and has no sympathy for anyone who has.

Worse even still, the book is almost devoid of anything that ought to be taught in English class--there is no figurative language, no deeper meaning, and the characters are paper thin. But I taught the damn thing--where's my Teacher of the Year award, Obama?

Anthem by Ayn Rand

The following is the only part of Anthem I liked:

"This would wreck the Plans of theWorld Council," said Unanimity 2-9913," and without the Plans of the World Council the sun cannot rise. It took fifty years to secure the approval of all the Councils for the Candle, and to decide upon the number needed, and to re-fit the Plans so as to make candles instead of torches. This touched upon thousands and thousands of men working in scores of States. We cannot alter the Plans again so soon."

Think of your favorite dystopian novel (1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, We) and extract the barest bones of the plot (we now live in a Communist society; we are not allowed to love; etc). Now imagine the protagonist is a first person narrator with less personality than Ben Stein, and that the author thinks you, the reader, are a complete dolt. That's what reading Anthem feels like. The pot is this: dull protagonist finds ancient (read:modern) technology in an underground bunker, tries to show his fellow men, is punished, triumphs by giving a long speech to himself about himself, the end. Oh, also, there's a forbidden word. It isn't "I" if that's what you're thinking.

I'd never read any of Ayn Rand's books, but, what can I say, I'm behind in books and Anthem is mercifully brief. I'd heard that Rand was a poor writer and that her books were basically skeleton plots to spread her philosophy of Objectivism (i.e. selfishness), but it didn't prepare me for the utter ineptitude of this book.

Not much happens in the book to begin with, but when something does (Person 12422494934843's capture for breaking the law, his presentation of electricity to the Council of Scholars), every effort is made to eliminate any trace of tension or importance. For example, Person 12422494934843 is beaten and placed in prison for breaking some laws. To escape, he just... knocks down the door and walks out. There are no guards, no pursuit, no sense of heroics. An infant escaping from a roomful of dead paraplegics would be more dramatic. Virtually the same thing happens when he "escapes" from the Council of Scholars: he goes out a window into the forest where he lives until Person 489023984, his love, finds him.

The book has a philosophical and a material climax, both of which are boring. The material climax occurs when the recently renamed Prometheus (SWM/21) and Gaia (SWF/18) discover a house from the old times, decide to build an electric fence, and live happily ever after. The philosophical climax occurs about 15 pages from the end of the book when Rand forgets that she's writign a story and has Prometheus speechify about Objectivism, which, if I understand correctly, is this: I am the most important person in the universe, everything revolves around me, I shouldn't help anyone, etc, etc. Objectivism is strongly opposed to etcetering.

The forbidden word? EGO. Objectively, this book sucks.