High Mountains of Portugal (Martel) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Pack your bags: Fifteen years after The Life of Pi, Yann Martel is taking us on another long journey. Fans of his Man Booker Prize–winning novel will recognize familiar themes from that seafaring phenomenon, but the itinerary in this imaginative new book is entirely fresh. . . . Martel’s writing has never been more charming, a rich mixture of sweetness that’s not cloying and tragedy that’s not melodramatic. . . . The High Mountains of Portugal attains an altitude from which we can see something quietly miraculous.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Martel continues his quirky romance with ideas, using three interlocking novellas to chew over religious revelation, human mortality, and interspecies communication, among other notions.... [He] maintains his fascination with the porous borders between homo sapiens and other species.... [Martel packs] his inventive novel with beguiling ideas. What connects an inept curator to a haunted pathologist to a smitten politician across more than seventy-five years is the author’s ability to conjure up something uncanny at the end.
Boston Globe
 

In his whimsy-streaked, sometimes inscrutable novels, what the eye sees and what the soul experiences can be two completely different things.... Martel's blend of fable, magic realism, road comedy and religious philosophy never coheres. But there's no denying the simple pleasures to be had in The High Mountains of Portugal.
Chicago Tribune


Just as ambitious, just as clever, just as existential and spiritual [as Life of Pi] . . . a book that rewards your attention...an excellent book club choice.
San Francisco Chronicle


I took away indelible images from High Mountains, enchanting and disturbing at the same time: the motorcar hitting obstacle after obstacle as it gradually, comically falls to pieces (as does its driver), or the ape as he swings his way across the rooftops of a Portuguese village. As whimsical as Martel’s magic realism can be, grief informs every step of the book’s three journeys. In the course of the novel we burrow ever further into the heart of an ape, pure and threatening at once, our precursor, ourselves. You must change your life.
NPR
 

We’re fortunate to have brilliant writers using their fiction to meditate on a paradox we need urgently to consider—the unbridgeable gap and the unbreakable bond between human and animal, our impossible self-alienation from our world.... [Martel’s] semi-surreal, semi-absurdist mode is well suited to exploring the paradox. The moral and spiritual implications of his tale have, in the end, a quality of haunting tenderness.
Ursula K. Le Guin - Guardian (UK)
 
 
Written with nuanced beauty; not for nothing has Martel established himself as our premier writer of animal-based fiction.
Toronto Star
 

Gleefully bizarre, genuinely thrilling and entirely heartbreaking.... While The High Mountains of Portugal is an exuberantly narrative novel, it is even more so a contemplative, philosophical one.... The book’s prose [reminds] us of how subtle and elegant a craftsman Martel is.... High Mountains resists the reader at every turn in the most pleasing way possible: it does not seek to offer you absolute truth, though it contains much wisdom; instead, it seeks to evade you, and in doing so deepens your sense of its mysteries, and the mysteries of the world we share with it.
Toronto Globe and Mail


His depiction of loss is raw and deeply affecting—but it’s the way in which he contextualises it within formal religion that gives this book an extra dimension. Martel’s writing is enriched and amplified by the abundance and intricacy of his symbology (touching on Job, St. Peter, Doubting Thomas and the parables of Jesus) and his probing of religion’s consolations. Martel is not in the business of providing us with answers, but through its odd, fabulous, deliberately oblique stories, his new novel does ask some big questions (four stars).
Telegraph (UK)
 

[An] extravagant smorgasbord of a novel.... 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.... At every turn Martel’s deft observations and quiet compassion for human suffering shine through.
Saturday Paper (Australia)


(Starred review.) Highly imaginative.... Martel’s narrative wizardry connects three novellas set seven decades apart in the eponymous region of Portugal.... Martel is in a class by himself in acknowledging the tragic vicissitudes of life while celebrating wildly ridiculous contretemps that bring levity to the mystery of existence.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) In three distinct yet connected parts, each centered on the high plains in northern Portugal, the narrative describes an innovative arc of endings and beginnings.... An enjoyable journey that brings meaning and discovery. —Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Library Journal


[A] by-the-numbers connections of incidents and family relations that obscure Martel's much more interesting musings on how we deal with tragedy and find our true home. Provocative ideas straitjacketed in an overdetermined plot.
Kirkus Reviews