The High Mountains of Portugal

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In the course of one week – Gaspar died on Monday, Dora on Thursday, his father on Sunday – his heart became undone like a bursting cocoon. Emerging from it came no butterfly but a grey moth that settled on the wall of his soul and stirred no farther” 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. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian The chimpanzee is named Odo, and Peter can’t get it out of his mind. He decides to rescue Odo, leaving his old life behind to move to the small mountain town of Tuizelo, where Peter is originally from. Goodreads: Are the High Mountains of Portugal your ideal setting because they are, by name, an exaggeration? “An act of national vanity”? The setting in your novel echoes some of the ideas about truth, storytelling, and expectation. Can you talk about the importance of names as they relate to our interpretation? How did you think about the names in the story as you were writing?

The High Mountains of Portugal’ is his best Yann Martel’s ‘The High Mountains of Portugal’ is his best

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. The Telegraph (four stars) 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. Martel touches on slavery, on religion, faith and saints, the ethics of primate research, how people cope with loss, the origins of man and on learning how to be in the moment, to live in the present. There are many words of wisdom and perceptive observations. He wraps it all up in brilliant prose and presents it within a wonderfully evocative cover (designed by Simone Andjelkovic). An utterly enchanting read. Asymptote: Did you have to make any compromises? How many drafts did the novel go through? How long did it take to write? I imagine you also took a trip to the High Mountains yourself as research for the novel. Could you tell us more about that? Loneliness comes up to him like a sniffing dog. It circles him insistently. He waves it away, but it refuses to leave”As he opens up Rafael’s body, he immediately notices some very strange things, particularly a miniature chimpanzee that is occupying Rafael’s abdominal cavity. After he performs the autopsy, Eusebio watches as Maria climbs into her husband’s skin; he proceeds to sew her into his dead body. The 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?

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

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”

Goodreads: How did the idea for The High Mountains of Portugal come to you? One of the things I love about it is how it makes many of the same points over generations, but in very different scenarios. Was the novel initially conceived as these three very different parts, or did it evolve into that? Can you talk about what ideas excited you as you became immersed in this work? 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. This tiny habitation on wheels, with bit parts of the living room, the washroom, and the fireplace, is a pathetic admission that human life is no more than this: an attempt to feel at home while racing towards oblivion. He” 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.

The High Mountains of Portugal is Review: Yann Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal is

There s no denying the simple pleasures to be had in The High Mountains of Portugal. Chicago Tribune Mount Torre (Estrela Range) is the tallest mountain in mainland Portugal and the second highest in the whole republic with an elevation of 6,539 feet above sea level. It is found in Seia, Guarda District, Portugal. A unique feature of the peak is that it is accessible by paved roads. Ruivo de Santana

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. Mount Piquinho, also known as Mount Pico, is the tallest mountain in Portugal with an elevation of 7,713 feet above sea level. It is found in the mid-Atlantic archipelago of Azores on Pico Island. It is a stratovolcano made up of several layers of hardened lava, pumice, volcanic ash, and tephra. Historical records show that the mountain has a history of violent eruptions. In 1562, an eruption produced lava that reached the sea in while in 1718, an eruption produced enough lava to reach the coast. The region around the mountain is considered seismically active and is monitored by the seismic and volcanic monitoring centers. Torre (Estrela Range) Mountain That’s just what I’ve always wanted,” cries Maria. “Please sew me into my husband’s body with them.” It is a tight fit but Eusebio just about manages it.

The High Mountains of Portugal - Quill and Quire The High Mountains of Portugal - Quill and Quire

At the 2016 Governor General's Awards, Christophe Bernard was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English to French translation for the novel's French translation, Les hautes montagnes du Portugal. Interview questions attributed to Goodreads are from an interview between Heather Scott Partington and Yann Martel that appeared on Goodreads in February 2016 (goodreads.com/interviews/show/1100.Yann_Martel) and are reprinted here by permission of Goodreads. IntroductionIt 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. 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. The second section of the book takes place in Lisbon 30 years later, in 1938 (the novel abandoned for the sake of Pi was to be about Lisbon in 1939). The tale meanders via disquisitions on religion to an autopsy, described in nauseating detail, at the end of which surrealism prevails entirely and a living woman is sewn inside the dead man’s body along with an ape and a bear cub. The themes of religion, of grief and of animals connect the story to those that precede and follow it. The High Mountains of Portugal, as we come to learn, do not contain high mountains. Why do you think Martel chose The High Mountains of Portugal as the title for his novel? In a novel that uses allegory, is there an allegorical meaning to the High Mountains? You might also discuss the way the setting works within each of the three parts of the novel. Here are three seemingly unrelated stories which inevitably intersect: three male narrators, each mourning their awful loss. But their grief does not overwhelm their stories. Martel fills his novel with unusual, different, interesting, and often amusing, elements: a brand new 4 cylinder Renault in the hands of a novice; a welcome ghost; a diary written by a missionary to slaves; the fabled Iberian rhinoceros; a very different take on the novels of Agatha Christie; a car journey across a country with a wilful chimpanzee; and a very unusual autopsy.