The High Mountains of Portugal

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BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Feeling a kinship with the animal, he finds their connection brings him a sense of peace and happiness that he has not experienced in a long time.

The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel, book review The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel, book review

While The High Mountains of Portugal is an exuberantly narrative novel, it is even more so a contemplative, philosophical one. Don’t get me wrong: there is a story and it is fun to read, but it’s also a parable about parables and it's challenging and heady as hell.

The importance of plausibility to realistic fiction is obvious, but it may be even more important to fantasy, where its failure dumps the reader out of the book on to the cold hill’s side where no birds sing. A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. The landscape is vividly evoked: “In Portugal the sunshine is often pearly, lambent, tickling, neighbourly. It is a testament to the book's ambition, and Martel's novelistic abilities, that this evolution seeks to better the reader while also denying him or her any comprehensive sense of resolution – it refuses to conflate maturity with certitude, and in a sense insists on ambiguity. If you can surrender completely, and let go of reality with its safe boundaries, then you will be touched and expand.

The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel – digested read The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel – digested read

After the loss of his family, Tomás decides to walk backward, an artificial eccentricity: “his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. So if I’m going to look out, I also need to know, because you can’t understand what is out there if you don’t study it. If fans of [ Life of Pi] have been feeling deprived, they will be happy to know [that The High Mountains of Portugal] deals in many of the same fundamental questions of life, love, family and faith. This slapstick comedy, which, frankly, runs on too long, is punctuated by the grim nature of Tomás's quest.Asymptote: Other than the obvious Christian allusion, was there anything that drew you to its triptych structure? So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. In Part Two, Maria Lozora encourages her husband to read the novels of Agatha Christie to bring him closer to the Gospels.