Monday, August 19, 2013

September 2013 Book: Beatrice & Virgil

For September 2013, Cass has picked "Beatrice and Virgil" for our reading pleasure.


ABOUT THE BOOK
Beatrice and Virgil is Canadian writer Yann Martel's third novel. First published in April 2010, it contains an allegorical tale about representations of the Holocaust. It tells the story of Henry, a novelist, who receives the manuscript of a play in a letter from a reader. Intrigued, Henry traces the letter to a taxidermist, who introduces him to the play's protagonists, two taxidermy animals—Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a monkey.


The Globe and Mail reported that Martel received a $2 million advance from Random House for U.S. rights alone, and that the total advance for worldwide rights was around $3 million, probably the highest ever advance for a single Canadian novel.[1] Martel's earlier novel, Life of Pi, won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and sold seven million copies worldwide.

The title is an allusion to two of the main characters in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_and_Virgil

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