Who would have thought two stuffed animals and a taxidermy shop could have such deep-seated meaning?
Yann Martel’s latest book Beatrice and Virgil uses childlike toys to tell a compelling, suited-for-adults allegory about the Holocaust. The award-winning Life of Pi author will stop in Albuquerque on Thursday to promote his newest novel.
Martel said he chose to make the main characters stuffed animals because he had no concrete connection to the Holocaust.
“I have no family thread to follow up to the event to bear witness when there are people who have bore witness very, very well,” he said in a phone interview with the Daily Lobo. “Why would I even try to imitate that? So I wanted to represent it differently, and the animal allegory just came quite naturally after having written Life of Pi.”
Martel said something about the Holocaust mystified him ever since he learned about it in elementary school in France.
“With lessons of history, a child will absorb them or forget them,” he said. “The Holocaust stood apart. It was just very different, this massacre of civilians.”
He said most of the literature about the Holocaust is nonfiction, or in some extreme cases thinly veiled nonfiction, masquerading as fiction. Since he’s a writer, he said he was curious about what he could do with it from a fictional standpoint.
“You can easily transform war into a metaphor,” he said. “I wanted to somehow tell the truth differently, but I couldn’t figure out how to do so. It was only after writing the Life of Pi, I thought ‘What if I use animals again?’ That artistic challenge of trying to bear witness in a different way was the way I wanted to do it.”
The Holocaust, Martel said, is still relevant, and he believes that writing about it through a fictional lens can renew its importance in modern society.
“It is viewed too strongly as a purely historic event — something that happened in black and white 60, 70 years ago in Central and Eastern Europe,” he said. “I think it’s more contemporary than that, and that’s where art can come into play. A novel sort of lives forever, in a sense.”
And with it living forever, he said, people can see how it still matters even though it was long ago.
“It’s a human tragedy: The Jews are human beings, and they were victimized by other human beings,” he said. “It’s kind of a victimization that could happen anywhere. It’s like the plague. It still exists today. It’s on rats in the USA, but it doesn’t jump onto human beings because of hygiene and other factors. And the same is true for genocidal instincts.”
Martel said he doesn’t plan read from his book during the event, but he is willing to answer questions the audience has. He said he may focus more on Life of Pi, since most readers may be more familiar with that novel.
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That book, as some readers know, focuses on a young boy trapped on a boat with a tiger. Martel said the idea came from an obscure book review about a Brazilian novel with a character stuck in a lifeboat with a wild animal.
He eventually forgot about it and moved on, but his interest was renewed in the image when he started to study and think about religion, a key element in the book. He focuses particularly on the leap in logic that religion requires.
“What it does mean to have faith?” he said. “It’s so non-reasonable to have faith in anything. Faith in politics, in loving someone. When you have a faith, it’s not something you worked out logically. It’s something you’re attracted to for reasons you can’t understand. The most non-reasonable faith is religion faith, which tells everything makes sense.”
Martel said he thought about boiling reality down to two dual spectrums: The religion and the faith it requires is represented by a religious child, and an animal embodies the wildness of nature.
“It goes way beyond logic,” he said. “Those two polar opposites in a confined space, it just made my mind click, and then the whole thing came very easily to me. I was telling two stories based on the same fact.”
