It is not the first book -as most of you well guess- that I’ve read from the writer. I bought it almost 6 months after I finished “Life of Pi” when in Paris where I bought also the second copy of Life of Pi as a present to someone who thinks read write is only an eye action – which is another sad story to tell and I prefer to leave it for another blog.
I’ll start with the moment that I finished the book and turned the last page: the first thing I felt was a huge void. Yes, a huge void. If I’m attached to a book or better to say if a books wins my heart alright, I usually feel that all the characters in the book, who’ve been living with me until that very moment, who walked besides me wherever I go, who sat and waited while I was sleeping, leave me as soon as I finish the book. They kiss me good bye and leave the room one by one waving their hands.
Might be sounding a bit sloppy, but hell yeah, this is usually how I feel.
Getting back to dear Beatrice and Virgil, what hits me after having finished it was that said void: sort of emptiness slapped me in the face; there was something missing in the book. Then having thought over it a little bit more I found out what was bothering me exactly there: the book was pretty dramatic and gloomy, even heart breaking, but since the writer didn’t focus on the story of Beatrice and Virgil well enough, distracting the attention from them -instead attracted it to the narrator and his own story of which the animals are both a part and at the same time not- one cannot keep going on feeling what he just starts to feel.
Yan Martel gives you something, put it just before your eyes. When you lean forward to have a closer look he takes it back so fast that you even don’t understand what you just felt a second ago.
I wish we could read more about their journey and their conversation in its all sadness.
I wish Mr. Martel gave us some more moments to sing our requiems and to mourn after all what happened…
