BOOK REVIEW: ‘Beatrice and Virgil’

THE BOY WITH THE CUCKOO-CLOCK HEART
By Mathias Malzieu
Translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone
Knopf, $22.95
192 pages

BEATRICE AND VIRGIL
By Yann Martel
Spiegel & Grau, $24
195 pages

We all remember “The Wizard of Oz, “either from being read the book as children, reading it to our own kids or, more likely, from the brilliant Hollywood film with Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” the magical moment when black and white becomes color, and the wonderful trio of actors playing the lion who needs courage, the brainless scarecrow and the tin man who could be happy if he “only had a heart.”

A new French novel also features a character in need of a real heart, but the drama, whimsy and genuine sentiment that made “The Wizard of Oz” so memorable are missing from it. “The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart” by Mathias Malzieu, recently released by Knopf in a translation by Sarah Ardizzone, tells the story of Jack, born in late-19th-century Edinburgh on a day so cold and in circumstances so unpromising that his heart is, literally, frozen. Dr. Madeleine, the midwife who delivers him to a young, unwed mother, saves his life by installing in his chest a cuckoo clock that does the work of a heart and must be wound up with a key each morning. A large bandage covers the clock’s dial.

Jack narrates this experience and the adventures that follow with an odd combination of omniscience and anachronism. (“I’ve had no heartbeat for a dangerously long time. My head is spinning, in an exhausting dream. … I’m not exactly battered but my skin looks old, with wrinkles like Charles Bronson.”)

Still a boy, he escapes from Dr. Madeleine, his adoptive mother, and her injunction to him never to fall in love (“if you do, the hour hand will poke through your skin, your bones will shatter, and your heart will break once more”), but not before meeting two prostitutes and a little singer, Miss Acacia, with whom he - yes - falls in love.

“Her dimples are a never-ending game, her smile is always changing, I could watch her forever.” He loses the little singer and, after many picaresque encounters, finds her again - discovering, at last, the true nature of his heart. “A big bang of sensations wreaks havoc with my emotional connections. Tears come without warning, hot and long, impossible to hold back.” Life with a human heart, it seems, is full of disappointment and pain.

Mathias Malzieu, the author of this cloying tale, is described as the lead singer in the French rock band Dionysos, and is said to have plans to co-direct an animated feature film based on it. It is possible that, liberated from the novel’s leaden style and overwrought imagery (“our kisses are an inferno as an earthquake registers across my entire body”) this story may, like the infant Jack with the newly installed clock mechanism, achieve viability. Not likely, but possible.

Yann Martel’s new book, “Beatrice and Virgil,” bears some surface similarity to “The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart.” Both are short, nonliteral novels, works that seem to be more fable than fiction in the usual sense. As the successor to his tremendously successful “Life of Pi,” Martel’s new book benefits from his serious intellect and superb writing skills. It also comes burdened with high expectations.

Those expectations are at the heart of the new book. Henry, its protagonist, bears a strong resemblance to Mr. Martel. A young Canadian writer living in the aftermath of a tremendous success, he has won prizes, gone to literary festivals all over the world and received a ton of fan mail about his book. A detail that surely comes from Mr. Martel’s own life - “he regularly saw people reading it on planes and trains.” It is being made into a Hollywood movie.

Inevitably, anxiety surrounds Henry’s next effort. He wants to do something unusual and, therefore, risky - a “flip book” that’s half-fiction, half-essay with the two halves printed in the same book “attached to a common spine upside down and back-to-back to each other. … A head to tails flip of the conjoined book will bring you to its fraternal twin.” His editors on both sides of the Atlantic are worried that this will not work. Where, they ask him, will they put the bar code?

In which section of bookstores will it be displayed? Even more troubling, Henry sees his book is an evocation of the Holocaust, yet the editors keep asking him “what is your book about?” He leaves a lunch with them so dejected that he puts aside the flip book and decides to make a complete change in his life. He and his wife move to “a storied metropolis” in Europe, where she works as a nurse and Henry pursues music lessons, acts in amateur theater, gets a job in a “chocolateria” and, on occasion, creeps to his computer in the middle of the night to call up the failed book.

Into this mix comes an unusual communication - a large envelope containing a manuscript with fragments of a play and a typed note saying, “Dear Sir, I read your book and much admired it. I need your help.” What follows is a strange story, one that does not quite make literal sense and yet is engrossing.

Henry’s encounter with the writer of the note, a taxidermist by trade, moves from odd but seemingly benign to slightly threatening and then to frightening. The story is interrupted by passages from the taxidermist’s play, a puzzling dialogue between a howler monkey named Beatrice and a donkey called Virgil (their names being among the many details and allusions drawn from history and literature). When Henry remarks that some of the play’s details remind him of the Holocaust, his wife responds, “You see the Holocaust in everything.”

“Beatrice and Virgil” is an odd book, not likely to achieve the stunning success of Mr. Martel’s previous one. Yet it is surprisingly moving and, like the flip book Henry wanted to write, is an unusual and provocative take on a profound, hauntingly enduring subject.

Stephanie Deutsch is a Washington writer and critic.