(Text, $39)
You don’t need to have read the Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi to know it was an offbeat story: a shipwrecked Indian boy spends almost a year at sea on a raft with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Two million people bought and loved Life of Pi and the world has been waiting (and waiting) for Canadian-based writer Yann oartel to write a follow-up. This, I gather, has put poor Yann under quite some pressure.
The project he spent quite a few years working on was to have been two books in one: on one side, a novel called A 20th Century Shirt about a donkey and a monkey re-living the Holocaust, and on the other, a related essay.
You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that a strange concept: so did his publishers. The long-awaited book is now not the flip-book Yann originally planned, but a novel about a writer who has written a long-awaited follow-up flip-book which has been rejected by his publishers.
A little bit of art imitating life sneaking in there, I’ll be bound, but hopefully not for long because in the fictional version, the rejected writer’s world is changed forever when he hooks up with a dour taxidermist who needs his help writing a play about a donkey and a monkey. The play is called A 20th Century Shirt.
I’m possibly making it sound madder than it actually is, which I would not have thought possible, but one of my favourite bits is in the taxidermist’s play when the monkey is trying to describe a pear to the donkey. Don’t roll your eyes – you try describing a pear to someone who has never seen or tasted one!
Part mystery, part horror, part fable, part unfathomable, totally delightful. I loved this accessible, thought-provoking, quirky book from beginning to end. And quirky it is: in fact, Yann oartel was once described as the second quirkiest person on the planet next to Icelandic singer Bjork – the one who wore the swan outfit and laid an egg at the 2001 Academy Awards.
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