Interview with Yann Martel

In 2001, Canadian novelist Yann Martel's fanciful tale of a boy stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker captivated thousands and won the Man Booker Prize. Nine years later, Martel moves on from Life of Pi. In his newest book, Beatrice and Virgil, Martel once again features animals, but this time he tells an allegorical story referencing the Holocaust: Henry, a successful writer, helps a brusque taxidermist overcome writer's block, producing a play about a donkey named Beatrice and a howler monkey named Virgil. Martel shared with Goodreads his perspective on how metaphor can give meaning to one of history's greatest tragedies.

Goodreads: Early in Beatrice and Virgil, the novelist Henry is stumped when asked, "What's your book about?" No doubt, you encounter this question all the time. Unlike Henry, do you have an answer ready?

Yann Martel: On one level my book is about a writer who meets a surly taxidermist who's been working on a play for years. On another level Beatrice and Virgil is about the trauma of the Holocaust and what to do with it.

GR: Henry observes that writers most often depict the Holocaust in a realistic manner, rarely taking any artistic license with history. What first inspired you to take on such a challenging and controversial project?

YM: Precisely because it hasn't been addressed much in a nonliteral way. I see that as a problem. It is the nature and strength of art to transform experience, including historical experience, into representations that bring out the essence of that experience. War, for example, is constantly being treated by artists, oftentimes with scant regard for the reality of war. Why is this not only permissible but good? Because in doing so we come to a full understanding of what war means to us. I believe the same must apply to the Holocaust: In approaching it nonliterally, allowing ourselves to use the tools of metaphor and irony, we will come to a greater understanding of what that tragedy means to us.

GR: George Orwell's famous allegory, Animal Farm, is often referenced in relation to your new book. However, Beatrice and Virgil is more complex structurally—the play-within-the-novel is a conversation between Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a howler monkey. This allegory is framed by Henry's larger narrative and interaction with the playwright, a taxidermist. How did this hybrid structure evolve?

YM: The heart of the novel is the interaction between Beatrice and Virgil. I wrote that out in its entirety, a stand-alone play. Then I cut it up and embedded the fragments into the narrative of Henry and the taxidermist. The fragmentary elements we get of Beatrice and Virgil are to me like the fragments we get of the lives of Europe's doomed Jews.

GR: Why did you choose to make the taxidermist's artistic attempt a drama as opposed to a novel?

YM: I like the idea of the Holocaust portion of the novel being a play because to me that is the ultimate relic of the Holocaust, its most powerful memento: the words spoken by the victims. They are terrifying in their emotional weight, even when banal.

GR: Your protagonist Henry sounds suspiciously autobiographical. What are the advantages and dangers of writing a fictional version of yourself as a character?

YM: The advantage, I hope, is that it pulls the reader in. We tend to give great weight to factual truth. So if a narrative features a story that sounds like the factual story of its author, the symbolic or emotional truth that goes with it will, hopefully, be accepted more easily by the reader. I should also add that I made Henry a writer who plays music and acts in plays and speaks several languages because I wanted him to symbolize Europe's Jews, who were—and still are—very involved in the arts and were often multilingual. And the way he spends time with the taxidermist, never seeing what's coming, always making excuses for the taxidermist's rudeness, is symbolic of the Jews' uncomprehending slide to their demise.

GR: Like Life of Pi, Beatrice and Virgil incorporates wild animals. Why do you find animal characters so compelling? How is Beatrice and Virgil different from Life of Pi in its use of animals?

YM: I find it compelling because it works, at least for me, and because I feel I'm alone in using animals in adult fiction. Animals in literature are mostly found in children's books. Which puzzles me. What exactly is childish about a wild animal?

As for the difference between B & V and Life of Pi, the main one is that the animals in the first are entirely anthropomorphized, while in the second they are realistically portrayed. Their symbolic significance is also quite different. In B & V it is quite specific—Beatrice and Virgil are stand-ins for Europe's Jews—while in Life of Pi the meaning of the animals is far more ambiguous.

GR: Goodreads member E. Haggett says, "I've just finished reading Self (I read Life of Pi a few years ago and loved it). I'd like to know how you think your writing has evolved through the course of your career. Are there certain things that you've noticed have really changed between the three novels?"

YM: That demands a degree of self-awareness that I'm not capable of, or want. I hope I've become a better writer over time. I also hope that my novels continue to stand up intellectually and emotionally. Otherwise, each is to me an attempt to understand an issue in my life: in Self, the meaning and content of gender identity; in Life of Pi, the meaning of faith and its relationship to reality; in Beatrice and Virgil, the ways of representing the Holocaust.

GR: What authors, books, or ideas have influenced you?

YM: The usual suspects from 19th century England and 20th century America. I've also been marked by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun and the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima.

GR: Describe a typical day spent writing. Do you have any unusual writing habits?

YM: I write at any time of day in any place, so long as it's quiet and I can set up my computer. I'm a slow writer, given to playing Spider Solitaire when stuck. Otherwise, my writing habits are blindingly boring. I just sit down at the computer and write.

GR: What are you reading now? Do you have any favorite books or authors?

YM: The single greatest book ever written, in my opinion, is Dante's Divine Comedy. It's not at all a stuffy or boring old classic. It's a thrilling and phantasmagorical story. As for my favorite living writer, it's J.M. Coetzee. In a spare style he invokes the most subtle and complex realities. I've just started reading a novel by the Israeli writer David Grossman, To the End of the Land. It's coming out in September 2010. I'm reading a bound galley.

GR: What's next?

YM: Taking care of my 8-month-old son, Theo, and watching him grow. A little later this year I'll start doing research for my next novel, which will feature three chimpanzees and be set in Portugal.