Animal Foible
by DARA HORN
In her story "The Nurse and the Novelist," a hilarious send-up of solipsistic Holocaust fiction, Anya Ulinich describes an imaginary bestselling novel about a young man who collects his toenail clippings in a jar without understanding why. When the man's dying grandfather gives him an enigmatic gold charm, he travels to Belarus to find the old woman, a poetic crone, who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Many maudlin chapters later, "it becomes clear to him why he has been collecting nail clippings in a jar, and he is able to stop." If only.
Beatrice and Virgil, the new Holocaust-themed novel by Yann Martel—author of the mega-bestselling, Booker Prize-winning animal-fable novel Life of Pi—takes the solipsism of so much contemporary Holocaust fiction to unprecedented depths by actually being about a mega-bestselling animal-fable novelist who writes a Holocaust-themed novel. His publisher thinks it won't sell, but Henry, the writer-protagonist, "had noticed over years of reading books and watching movies how little actual fiction there was about the Holocaust," which makes one wonder if Henry has ever been inside a bookstore. Henry insists that what Holocaust literature needs is a book like his animal fable: "Art as suitcase: light, portable, essential—was such a treatment not possible, indeed, was it not necessary, with the greatest tragedy of Europe's Jews?" Lest we hope that this is some sort of joke, we quickly discover that we are holding precisely that light, portable suitcase, stuffed with the light, portable bodies of six million Jews, in our hands.
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