Click here to Download Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book by Yann Martel Language English having PDF Size 1 MB and No of Pages 149.
As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority.
Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book by Yann Martel
| Name of Book | Beatrice and Virgil |
| PDF Size | 1 MB |
| No of Pages | 149 |
| Language | English |
| Buy Book From Amazon | |
About Book – Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book
You are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have. Henry was essentially unchanged by the success of his novel. He was the same person he had been before, with the same strengths and the same weaknesses. On the rare occasions when he was approached by a reader in a disagreeable way.
He had the last weapon of the writer working under a pseudonym: no, he wasn’t XXX, he was just a guy named Henry. Eventually the business of personally promoting his novel died down, and Henry returned to an existence where he could sit quietly in a room for weeks and months on end. He wrote another book. It involved five years of thinking, researching, writing, and rewriting.
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The fate of that book is not immaterial to what happened next to Henry, so it bears being described. The book Henry wrote was in two parts, and he intended them to be published in what the publishing trade calls a flip book: that is, a book with two sets of distinct pages that are attached to a common spine upside down and back-to-back to each other.
If you flick your thumb through a flip book, the pages, halfway along, will appear upside down. A head-to-tails flip of the conjoined book will bring you to its fraternal twin. So the name flip book. Henry chose this unusual format because he was concerned with how best to present two literary wares that shared the same title, the same theme, the same concern, but not the same method.
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He’d in fact written two books: one was a novel, while the other was a piece of nonfiction, an essay. He had taken this double approach because he felt he needed every means at his disposal to tackle his chosen subject. But fiction and nonfiction are very rarely published in the same book. That was the hitch. Tradition holds that the two must be kept apart.
That is how our knowledge and impressions of life are sorted in bookstores and libraries— separate aisles, separate floors —and that is how publishers prepare their books, imagination in one package, reason in another. It’s not how writers write. A novel is not an entirely unreasonable creation, nor is an essay devoid of imagination.
Nor is it how people live. People don’t so rigorously separate the imaginative from the rational in their thinking and in their actions. There are truths and there are lies— these are the transcendent categories, in books as in life. The useful division is between the fiction and nonfiction that speaks the truth and the fiction and nonfiction that utters lies. Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book
That Henry had chosen to write in English raised a number of eyebrows in his native land. It was, he explained, un hasard. If you go to school in English and in German, you learn to think in English and in German, and then you naturally start to write in English and in German. His first creative scribblings—highly personal efforts never meant to see the light of publication—had been in German.
He told bemused journalists. Its crunchy pronunciation, clear phonetic spelling, secret-code grammar and architectural syntax endlessly pleased him. But as he grew more ambitious, he explained, it became patently absurd for a Canadian writer to be writing in German. Das ist doch verrückt! He switched to English.
Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English’s drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size over-abundance of vocabulary, its shoulder-shrug approach to spelling. Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book
Its don’t-worry-be-happy concern for grammar— the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved. In his entirely personal experience of them, English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.
Which is to say, stab his heart and it would bleed French, slice his brain open and its convolutions would be lined with English and German, and touch his hands and they would feel Spanish. But all this, as an aside. Henry also joined a respected amateur theatre group. Under an inspired director, the group took its endeavours very seriously.
Those were some of Henry’s fondest memories of the city, those weeknight rehearsals in which he and his fellow amateur actors slowly brought Pinter and Ibsen and Pirandello and Soyinka to life, leaving their lives at the door and becoming, as best they could, someone else on stage. Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book
The fraternity among these dedicated thespians was priceless, and the reaching for emotional heights and depths, for experiences that were vicarious but powerful, was highly instructive in the way great art can be. With each play Henry felt he had lived an extra life, with its attendant portion of wisdom and folly.
Sarah yawned and shook her head. By then she was healthily, but also sleepily pregnant. Henry put on his coat and set off with Erasmus. The day was brilliantly sunny but cold, hovering only a few degrees above the freezing point. The walk proved to be longer than Henry had anticipated. He had not properly translated what his eyes saw on the map to the distance their feet would be travelling on the streets.
They entered a neighbourhood he didn’t know. He looked at the buildings, residential and commercial, noting their changing character, the history of the city and its inhabitants expressing itself architecturally. His lungs breathed in the cool air. His destination led him to the bum end of an upscale commercial street that featured, among other smart businesses. Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book
A grand bridal store, a jeweller, a fancy restaurant and, at the end, on the right side, an attractive café with a large terrace. The terrace was bare of chairs and tables because of the weather, but looming over it on a brick wall, visible from the entrance of the street and promising warmth, was a mural of a cup of coffee with a steaming curl of fragrance wafting from it.
At the level of the café, the street turned to the left and then, quickly, to the right. Past this second turn, there was another stretch of businesses on the left side of the street, and, on the right side, the high, windowless brick wall of a large building. A little farther along, the street turned again, to the right this time.
The crooked geometry of the street clearly owed to the large building whose rear abutted on it; its imposing size forced the street to make a jog around it. Henry followed along with Erasmus. Henry returned to see the taxidermist within a few days. He was nervous about holding on to his obsolete cassette player and the precious tape, but he was also eager to share with him what he had written. Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book
Henry brought Erasmus again, but this time he tied him outside. The taxidermist seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see him. Henry was confused. He had phoned the taxidermist to tell him he would be coming. They had agreed on a time. Henry wondered if he had made a mistake and if he was late or early. But it just seemed to be the taxidermist’s manner, the way he was.
He was wearing an apron and was moving a wild boar into the workshop when Henry entered the store. “Need help?” Henry asked. The taxidermist shook his head without saying a word. Henry stood and waited, marvelling at the animals. He was happy to be back. This was a room full of adjectives, like a Victorian novel. “Come in,” said the taxidermist from the back room.
Henry turned in to it. The taxidermist was already sitting at his desk. Henry sat on the stool again, like an obedient junior clerk. He handed the taxidermist the part he had written for Beatrice. While the other man read, which he did slowly, Henry looked around. The taxidermist had finished the deer he was working on when Henry had first visited. But the other mannequin, the round one, was no further advanced. Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book Download
As for Virgil and Beatrice, they were still in conversation. “I don’t like the jet engine,” the taxidermist started, without any preliminaries. “And I’m not sure about the hog farm. But I like the idea of a whole herd of animals. And the dry axle, very good. I can see it. Who’s Apuleius? I’ve never heard of him.” Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?
“As I say in the text, he’s a writer,” replied Henry. “His most famous book is The Golden Ass, which is why I thought I’d make him Beatrice’s favourite classical writer.” He nodded. Henry wasn’t sure whether he was assenting to what he, Henry, had just said, or was agreeing with his own private thoughts. “And you, what do you have? Did you manage to write something on taxidermy?”
“Zoos are bastard patches of wilderness,” the taxidermist cut in as he put on his coat. “The animals there are degenerate. They shame me.” Henry was taken aback. “Well, zoos are a compromise, that’s for certain, but so is nature. And if it weren’t for zoos, most people would never see real—” “I go only when I have to, for work, to see a live specimen.” Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book Download
Henry could hear in the taxidermist’s voice the judge’s gavel coming down again. The taxidermist was directing him out of the workshop with broad, imperative gestures. I will get him to bend, thought Henry. “I see zoos as embassies from the wild, each animal representing its species. In any case, let’s meet at the café up the street. The weather is so nice now.
How about this coming Sunday at two o’clock? That’s what I have time for.” Henry put a firm edge to his last words. “All right. Sunday at two at the café,” the taxidermist agreed tonelessly. Henry was relieved. “I have a question,” he followed up smoothly as they passed through the showroom. “It’s been on my mind since I read the opening scene from your play: why this minute description of a common fruit?
It seems an odd start.” “How did you put it?” replied the taxidermist. “‘Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand spirits dancing in a field’?” “Yes. I said ‘sprites’.” “‘But they’re all we have.’” “‘But they’re all we have,’” Henry repeated. “Please,” the taxidermist said, opening the front door of the store and ushering Henry out. Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book Free
“Reality escapes us. It’s beyond description, even a simple pear. Time eats everything.” And with that, leaving Henry with the image of Time eating a pear into oblivion, the taxidermist practically slammed the door in Henry’s face. He locked it, turned the cardboard sign hanging from its frame from open to closed, and disappeared back into his workshop.
Henry took no offence at the lack of ceremony bordering on rudeness. He must behave like this with everyone, he guessed. It was nothing personal. At least Erasmus was glad to see him. The dog was jumping up and down, yelping with joy. They weren’t very far from the taxidermist’s store. On an impulse Henry suggested that they drop by. Sarah agreed. It was a mistake.
The visit went badly. Standing outside the store, Sarah granted that the okapi looked attractive. But as soon as they entered, Henry could tell Sarah didn’t like the place. When the taxidermist emerged from his lair, she seemed to cower. Henry showed her around, pointing out details, trying to elicit an enthusiastic response. Beatrice and Virgil PDF Book Free
Sarah’s remarks were short and she mechanically nodded her head in agreement to whatever Henry said. She looked tense. The taxidermist, for his part, glowered. Henry did all the talking.