Beatrice and Virgil

Title: Beatrice and Virgil

Author: Yann Martel

Publisher: Text Publishing

Place: Melbourne, Victoria

Date: 2010

Henry is the author who spends five years writing a book on the holocaust. A book in which one half is fiction and another half is nonfiction, with two front covers. After the book is rejected Henry stops writing and moves with his wife from Canada to Europe. A fan’s letter lures him to the shop of a taxidermist also named Henry, who asks his help to complete a play. It’s called A 20^th Century Shirt and turns out to be about an event called “the horrors” and how it affected Beatrice a donkey and Virgil a howler monkey, both stuffed and on display in the shop.

Over time Henry concludes that the taxidermist is using the Holocaust to speak of the extermination of animal’s life. He was seeing the tragic fate of animals through the tragic fate of Jews and extermination of animals is the theme which Henry comes to suspect as a metaphor for the Holocaust.

For further information see:
http://www.un.org//holocaustremembrance/ index.shtml
http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/holocaust-fiction
http://library.jccc.edu/guides/literature/holocaust.html