Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Jan Martel, the author of Beatrice and Virgil.

There are two main characters in it.

Henry, the author, meets a taxidermist, also named Henry, who asked for help writing a play about a monkey and a donkey.

So once again, Martel is using animals as part of his allegory as he did in his best-selling novel, The Life of Pie.

Between these two characters, they attempt to answer the question, how do you write a novel

about the Holocaust? Not the camps, the ovens, the gas, not even about the victims. How do you

write a novel that is an allegory of the human soul facing the Holocaust? Jan Martel, tell me

the story behind the number of years it's taken to write Beatrice and Virgil.

Well, it was a torturous process, in part because the Holocaust is one of those events.

It killed people. It also kills stories. It swallows not only events but narratives about them.

So for years, I've been interested in the Holocaust.

In fact, since I was a child, I remember first being introduced to it in France.

I went to an English school there, and I remember the history teacher telling us with the Second World War,

and in parallel with the Holocaust.

And whereas war fitted rather neatly in concepts a child has of life, the Holocaust didn't.

And so it remained as an area of sort of a puzzlement in my intellectual life.

...