The High Mountains of Portugal ★★★★☆

My second Yann Martel book after the seminal Life of Pi, which I adored. It's about loss and grief, and how people across time, tied by a common thread, deal with them in their lifetimes. As is with Martel, the high mountains, which in fact are not even mountains, are an allegory to that thread that binds their grief. Chapters 2 and 3 spoke more to me, and I'm glad I persisted after the relatively lackluster Chapter 1.

Edition Read

• Author: Yann Martel, Mark Bramhall
• Date Published: 2016-01-01

Description

With this highly anticipated new novel, the author of the bestselling Life of Pi returns to the storytelling power and luminous wisdom of his master novel. The High Mountains of Portugal is a suspenseful, mesmerising story of a great quest for meaning, told in three intersecting narratives that touch the lives of three different people and their families, and taking us on an extraordinary journey through the last century. We begin in the early 1900s, when Tomás discovers an ancient journal and sets out from Lisbon in one of the very first motor cars in Portugal in search of the strange treasure the journal describes. Thirty-five years later, a pathologist devoted to the novels of Agatha Christie, whose wife has possibly been murdered, finds himself drawn into Tomás’s quest. Fifty years later, Senator Peter Tovy of Ottawa, grieving the death of his own beloved wife, rescues a chimpanzee from an Oklahoma research facility and takes it to live with him in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, where the strands of all three stories miraculously mesh together. Beautiful, witty and engaging, Yann Martel’s new novel offers us the same tender exploration of the impact and significance of great love and great loss, belief and unbelief, that has marked all his brilliant, unexpected novels.

Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, the international bestseller published in more than 50 territories that has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, won the 2002 Man Booker (among many other prizes), spent more than a year on Canadian and international bestseller lists, and was adapted to the screen in an Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee. Martel is also the award-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (which won the Journey Prize), Self, Beatrice and Virgil, and a book of recommended reading: 101 Letters to a Prime Minister.

Source: Hardcover

Notable Highlights

Hipólito is surprised, stunned, aghast, and delighted at the throbbing, clanging invention Tomás has brought to his shop. “So this is it? What a big, noisy thing! Quite ugly in a beautiful sort of way, I’d say. Reminds me of my wife,” yells Hipólito. [loc. 1120]

Maria ardently believes in the spoken word. To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken. And so she talks. [loc. 1720]

“We loved our son like the sea loves an island, always surrounding him with our arms, always touching him and crashing upon his shore with our care and concern. [loc. 2492]