The High Mountains of Portugal

Product Information

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. 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

List of mountains in Portugal - Wikipedia List of mountains in Portugal - Wikipedia

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. Broida, Mike (12 February 2016). " 'The High Mountains of Portugal,' by Yann Martel". The New York Times . Retrieved 16 July 2016. I hope you are aware that what you have before your eyes is a highly trained orchestra, and it plays the most lovely symphony. The pitch of the piece is pleasingly variable, the timbre dark but brilliant, the melody simple yet soaring, and the tempo lies between vivace and presto, although it does a fine adagio. When I am the conductor of this orchestra, what I hear is a glorious music." Maria Lozora, commenting on Jesus’ use of parable, a literary device, asks “Why would Truth use the tools of fiction?” Why indeed?Written with nuanced beauty; not for nothing has Martel established himself as our premier writer of animal-based fiction. "Toronto Star" The third part of the narrative is called “Home.” This section begins in Canada in 1981. Peter, a politician, is grieving the death of his recently deceased wife. To his surprise, he discovers that he has made a strange connection with a chimpanzee at a research facility. He finds their interactions oddly comforting. And so the explanation for why Agatha Christie is the most popular author in the history of the world. Her appeal is as wide and her dissemination as great as the Bible's, because she is a modern apostle, a female one--about time, after two thousand years of men blathering on. And this new apostle answers the same questions Jesus answered: What are we to do with death? Because murder mysteries are always resolved in the end, the mystery neatly dispelled. We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context however hard that might be.”

The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel | Goodreads

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.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.

High Mountains of Portugal (Martel) - LitLovers High Mountains of Portugal (Martel) - LitLovers

Eusebio Lozora knows that “every dead body is a book with a story to tell,” making for “a hard-headed kind of poetry.” Though he is capable of analyzing causes of death, he knows nothing of pain. “He can find out what pushed them over [death’s threshold] but never how it felt.” He learns a crucial lesson when a peasant woman appears at his office demanding that he conduct an autopsy on her beloved husband – in her presence. (She carries her husband’s corpse inside a large, beat-up suitcase.) When Dr. Lozora opens up the man’s body, he finds an assortment of treasures and creatures; the man’s carcass illuminates the way he had lived. In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomas discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that if he can find it would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe s earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure. 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 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 Refreshing, surprising and filled with sparkling moments of humor and insight. The Dallas Morning News

Highest Mountains In Portugal Many of Portugal's mountains can be found on the archipelago of Madeira.

The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel | Waterstones

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). Ageing is not easy, Sennhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. It starts well. It's a most desirable disease. One wouldn't want to do without it. It's like yeast that corrupts the juice of grapes. One loves, one loves, one persists in loving-the incubation period can be very long- and then, with death, comes the heart break. Love must always meet its unwanted 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.”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 Pico de Cedro, the third highest mountain in Madiera region and the fifth highest in Portugal, is located near Curral das Freiras in Madiera, Portugal. It has an elevation of 4,687 feet above sea level and is located near Pico Ruivo de Santana and Pico do Arieiro. Significance of these Mountains