Saskatoon author Yann Martel takes us on a sublime literary journey that is at once deeply sorrowful, yet highly amusing—a feat only a writer of Martel’s abilities could pull off.
The author of international best-selling novel, Life of Pi, follows up the smash hit with a bigger swing at literary complexity in his latest release, The High Mountains of Portugal.
In the intricate novel, Martel weaves three tales of grieving characters together. Like Life of Pi, the loss and grief are described so fleetingly that the reader is left primarily with the journey of recovery that follows. And that recovery for all three men comes with a great deal of entertainment value.
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The first quirky character, a young Portuguese museum curator named Tomás, deals with the loss of his family by walking backward throughout the first section of the book.
“…his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting.”
Headed across Portugal to the high mountain, which fittingly turns out to be grassy hills, Tomás’s peculiar quest to track down a rare sculpture that “would do nothing less than turn Christianity upside down” is wildly amusing.
In the next section of the book, a Portuguese pathologist obsessed with Agatha Christie murder mysteries appears. Set 30 years after Tomás’s wild ride through Portugal, Eusebios has his own enlightening encounter with death and grief when a peasant woman convinces him to perform an autopsy on her beloved husband while she watches.
Disturbing in its result, but somehow entertaining in its telling, the autopsy reveals a living woman inside the dead man’s body, along with a bear cub and an ape.
The themes of death’s impact and the living’s subsequent purpose are sewn within the fabric of this strange tale, but it takes a great deal of energy for the reader to bring those to the fore.
The third part of this ominously odd novel is dedicated to Peter, a Canadian senator who takes refuge in his ancestral Portugal after losing his wife. Again, Martel adds a peculiar twist, a pet chimpanzee, to set the reader on their heels, and to keep them on their literary toes.
With a plot that essentially consists of a bizarre and brazen set of unbelievable circumstances, Martel manages to provide the reader with a consistent question—how do you deal with the burden of death?
The answers are buried deep in the dialogue and hidden in Martel’s leading descriptions, challenging the reader to unearth them.
And while one can never really be sure if they have discovered the author’s intended purpose, or crucifix sculpture, as is the central metaphor in The High Mountains of Portugal, the novel is entertaining enough to force one to read on.
