The High Mountains of Portugal

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When Peter Tovy’s son, Ben, sees the crucifix, he says, “This is crazy. What’s with all the apes?” What is with all the apes? Martel studiously avoids giving any offence here, by making sure that every one of his ideas is hedged and muddled. The central motif running through the novel’s three sections is a chimpanzee, and each story touches on the Darwinian notion that “we are risen apes, not fallen angels”. The High Mountains of Portugal, in Yann Martel’s novel of that name, turn out to be grassy uplands rather than high mountains; and the book turns out to be three stories rather than a novel. The stories, connected ingeniously, vary greatly in tone and quality. The first two display so little of the author’s narrative skill that they may offer more temptation to stop reading than to go on. Liking the last part of the book much better, I could wish that it stood alone.

The High Mountains of Portugal Summary and Reviews - BookBrowse The High Mountains of Portugal Summary and Reviews - BookBrowse

During a visit from his son, Peter comes to understand that his grandfather Rafael and his grandmother Maria emigrated from Tuizelo many years ago, and that the house that he and Odo occupy actually once belonged to his grandparents. Rafael and Maria’s son, who passed away under very mysterious circumstances, has come to be revered in the small town. That's the great, enduring challenge of our modern times, is it not, to marry faith and reason? So hard--so unreasonable--to root our lives upon a distant wisp of holiness. Faith is grand but impractical: How does one live an eternal idea in a daily way? It's so much easier to be reasonable. Reason is practical, its rewards are immediate, its workings are clear. But alas, reason is blind. Reason, on its own, leads us nowhere, especially in the face of adversity. How do we balance the two, how do we live with both faith and reason?” 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, "The Guardian" As for research, yes, I went to Lisbon and northern Portugal a few times, to soak in the atmosphere. But the rural Portugal I evoke is largely mythologized, so my research trips were starting points, not end points. And I did other research, as I always do. My perspective as a writer is of looking out. The inward, psychological novel bores me. The world is fascinating, the inner ego fleeting and dull. 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. So I do research. It’s an integral part of my writing process. His heart is expended that way, of loving the single, particular individual. He loved Clara with every fibre of his being, but now he has nothing left. Or rather, he has learned to live with her absence, and he has no wish to fill that absence; that would be like losing her a second time. Instead he would prefer to be kind to everyone, a less personal but broader love.”Mountains and hills occupy most of the territory of Portugal. The highest Portuguese mountain is Mount Pico in the Azores islands, with 2,351 metres (7,713ft). The highest peak in Mainland Portugal is Torre in the Serra da Estrela range, with 1,993 metres (6,539ft). 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. 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. Interview questions attributed to Asymptote are from an exclusive interview between Lee Yew Leong and Yann Martel from the January 2016 issue of Asymptote (asymptotejournal.com) and are reprinted here by permission of the interviewer and Asymptote. Questions and Topics for Discussion

Highest Mountains In Portugal - WorldAtlas Highest Mountains In Portugal - WorldAtlas

There s no denying the simple pleasures to be had in The High Mountains of Portugal. Chicago TribuneThe High Mountains of Portugal is a novel about loss, among other themes. Tomas has lost his young lover and their son; Maria Castro has lost her husband and son; Senator Peter Tovy has lost his wife. Discuss each char-acter’s response to loss. In presenting the three different -stories, what might Martel be trying to tell us about how to live with the loss of a loved one? 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 Tomas undertakes this personal pilgrimage to recover his father’s artifact, wanting to retain something of meaning from his father. One of Tomas’s relatives gives him an old car to help him along his journey. At first, very emotional and overwhelmed by what he is about to do, Tomas is concerned about his driving skills and ability to maintain the vehicle.

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So, the bare bones of this gleefully bizarre, genuinely thrilling and entirely heartbreaking novel: in its first section, set in 1904, a grieving young man named Tomas takes an epic road trip in search of a religious relic; in the second, set 35 years later, an older man, a pathologist named Eusebio, has a long conversation with his wife about the relationship between the gospels and Agatha Christie novels, and then performs a profound yet surreal autopsy at the request of a stranger; in the third, set 50 years after that, an old man, this time a Canadian senator named Peter, retires to Portugal in the company of a chimpanzee acquaintance. Maria Castro has traveled all the way from the mountain town of Tuizelo to visit Eusebio. The purpose of her trip is to get him to perform an autopsy on her husband, Rafael, while she is present. Eusebio feels very unsure about it, but Maria opens up about the hardships her family has gone through, including the death of their very young son. After hearing about the woman’s loss, Eusebio, moved, agrees to perform the autopsy on Rafael.A magical, or perhaps symbolic, chimp features in the second section, set in the office of a pathologist on New Year’s Eve 1938. What it is supposed to symbolise remains entirely unclear, as do the underdeveloped characters of the pathologist and his wife, who appears, helpfully, to deliver a long, static disquisition on Christianity in the works of Agatha Christie (Christie – Christ – geddit?). Martel clearly knows that he writes well about animals, as he includes at least one in every book While reading, I thought often of those startling works of architecture that seem to destroy physics, the buildings that make complete sense when you look at them despite the fact that you could never explain how they're able to stand up. The ones that defy logic and seem to float on faith. YM: Compromises? Hundreds. Drafts? Dozens. I suppose there are some modern–day Jane Austens who write finished polished prose in which only a word or two is changed here and there. I ain’t one of those writers. I’m a messy, untutored blunderer. I might have been left to my ways if it hadn’t been forthe bizarre success of Life of Pi, which—-among many otherconsequences—-brought me to the attention of many fine,sharp–minded editors. One of my editors, for example, is J.M.-Coetzee’s editor. Another regularly works with Rushdie. Well, these kinds of readers call your every bluff, follow your every line of argument, weigh every word you write. So these are not craven compromises. They’re escapes from indulgences, narrow misses with non sequiturs, rescues from repetition, and so on. Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomás's quest.

The High Mountains of Portugal: A Novel - AbeBooks The High Mountains of Portugal: A Novel - AbeBooks

Maria also says, “The heart has two choices: to shut down or to open up.” Discuss this statement in terms of how each of the characters in the other parts chooses to live. Written with nuanced beauty; not for nothing has Martel established himself as our premier writer of animal-based fiction. Toronto Star Under the pathologist's microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist's job is to find the bull among the matador cells” A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction--besides unexpected interludes--has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end.”Love is a house with many rooms, this room to feed the love, this one to entertain it, this one to clean it, this one to dress it, this one to allow it to rest, and each of these rooms can also just as well be the room for laughing or the room for listening or the room for telling one’s secrets or the room for sulking or the room for apologizing or the room for intimate togetherness, and, of course, there are the rooms for the new members of the household. Love is a house in which plumbing brings bubbly new emotions every morning, and sewers flush out disputes, and bright windows open up to admit the fresh air of renewed goodwill. Love is a house with an unshakable foundation and an indestructible roof. He had a house like that once, until it was demolished.” What other themes do you find in the novel—-for example, how important is faith and how important is love in each of the three parts? And which themes resonate for you personally most deeply? Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists, poets, playwrights, and other crafters of inventions” New Year's Eve, 1938. Eusebio Lozora is a medical examiner in Bragança. He has a conversation with his deceased wife Maria. She compares the novels of Agatha Christie to the New Testament. Then he receives a visit from Maria Castro. She has the corpse of her husband Rafael with her. He was the father of the blond child that was killed in Part 1. During an autopsy Eusebio finds a chimpanzee and a bear cub inside of the corpse.