The high mountains of Portugal

a novel

No cover

Yann Martel: The high mountains of Portugal (2016)

332 pages

English language

Published Jan. 8, 2016

ISBN:
978-0-8129-8703-4
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
911240030

View on OpenLibrary

3 stars (2 reviews)

7 editions

So many ideas!

3 stars

I didn't realise when I started reading The High Mountains Of Portugal that the book isn't a novel. Instead it is three cleverly linked longish short stories that take place at different times over a period of about eighty years. To be honest, I wasn't at all enamoured of the first story! I struggled to get into the bizarre tale and I had limited sympathy for its beleaguered protagonist. Supposedly griefstruck by the deaths of his serving maid lover and their child, I irritatedly thought that perhaps he should have made the effort for them all to be a family while he had the chance rather than clinging to his family's privilege while he could and then making futile gestures too late to matter. Harsh?

The book and I clicked towards the very end of the first story and I thoroughly enjoyed Martel's wild imaginings and the totally unexpected directions …

Review of 'The high mountains of Portugal' on Goodreads

3 stars

In three slightly interconnected novellas set in Portugal during the 20th century, a man drives a car for the first time and also walks backwards looking for a relic (1904), a pathologist performs an unconventional autopsy on a man whose wife carried him in a suitcase to the hospital (1938), and a politician gives up his uneventful life in order to move to another country with an ape (1981).

This book is a bit difficult to talk about because of the differences in each story. While it doesn't mess with your head as well as Paul Auster's New York Trilogy does, it's still a little on the weird side. The most important thing to say about it, and probably its strongest recommendation, is Martel's wonderful narrative. He writes beautifully--and English isn't even his first language. His narrative is so engaging that it's probably worth the read for that alone.

All …