User:SlimVirgin II/B&V

Beatrice and Virgil
Author	Yann Martel
Cover artist	CS Richardson
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf Canada
Publication date	6 April 2010
Publication place	Canada
Pages	224 (first edition, hardcover)
ISBN	0-307-39877-3
Preceded by	Life of Pi

Beatrice and Virgil, published in 2010, is a novel by Canadian writer Yann Martel.

The book tells the story of Henry L’Hôte, a novelist with one successful novel behind him, who receives a letter from a reader, also named Henry. The envelope contains a brief and unexplained request for help, accompanied by some pages from an unpublished play and a photocopy of Gustave Flaubert's "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator" (1877), a short story about the consequences of Julian the Poor's brutal slaying of animals.

Intrigued, Henry traces the letter to a local taxidermist and pays him a visit. The taxidermist introduces him to the play's protagonists, both stuffed animals. The characters – Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a red howler monkey sitting on Beatrice's back – are named after Dante's guides through the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise in his Divine Comedy (written 1308–1321). Beatrice and Virgil are living on a striped shirt – a country called the Shirt – and in conversation modelled on Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot (1953) are struggling to describe what they decide to call the Horrors.

It soon becomes clear that Henry the taxidermist needs Henry the writer to supply some of the words for the former's unfinished play, A 20th-Century Shirt, an allegorical tale about the Holocaust, about how humans treat non-humans, and the search for meaning in the relationship between art and history.

Advance

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.^[2]