"We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones." 
 "Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness." 
 This book was not at all what I imagined it would be about. Because Life of Pi had been such a fantastic book we picked this out for our book club. I can't tell you now what I imagined it was about, but its actually an allegorical tale of the Holocaust. The book reads like one giant writing experiment on Yann Martel's behalf. 
 The lead of the story is a writer named Henry who was flummoxed because he wanted to write an allegorical story of the Holocaust in a way that was more playful than had ever been written. He escapes to a new city to try and find the inspiration to write the right kind of story and gets a letter from a fan. The fan turns out to be a strange taxidermist, who is also called Henry, who has an obsession and a story to tell about a stuffed donkey, Beatrice and a stuffed monkey, Virgil. The taxidermist is trying to complete a play about them and has a hard time finding their voice. Henry decides to help him, but the man is not pleasant, nor is his story right, but Henry is intrigued nonetheless. 
 The story explores the horrible things that occurred to people via the animals and I think that might have been Martel's intent. As Henry begins to realize just what the play the taxidermist wrote is about, two other characters make a brief and I believe more poignant appearance. Henry has a dog named Erasmus and cat named Mendelssohn. 
 At some point Erasmus gets rabies and it goes unnoticed until he violently kills Mendelssohn. The fact that a dog that was perceived as docile and kind was capable of such a violent act was to me an indicator of what the author was trying to say with this story. The play of Beatrice and Virgil to Henry sounded nonsensical. The animals were stuck in a field with no idea of where to go or what to do. They just waited. They were hungry and fearful, but they did nothing, and then they are attacked and they die violently at the hands of children. 
 While I got the books resounding message, I found its construction problematic. And perhaps Martel made his point by making me care more about Virgil, Beatrice, Erasmus, and Mendelssohn's demise than about the violence that is eventually enacted on Henry.