The High Mountains of Portugal

Narrator Mark Bramhall delivers a confident performance of Yann Martel's exploration of faith and personal tragedy. The lives of three men are mysteriously connected through loss and grief. In 1904, after the death of his entire family, Tom‡s, furious with God, sets out to find a "special kind of crucifix," located in the high mountains of Portugal. Bramhall is achingly convincing as the grief-stricken Tom‡s. In 1938, a pathologist finds a link to the crucifix inside a dead man who came from the same region, and in 1981, a Canadian widower makes a touching interspecies connection, changes his life, and moves to the high mountains of Portugal. Bramhall keeps the sometimes confusing tale just grounded enough to allow the spiritual elements to coalesce. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 14, 2015
An Iberian rhinoceros, two chimpanzees, three dead wives, and two dead toddlers all figure in this highly imaginative novel. Martel’s narrative wizardry connects three novellas set seven decades apart in the eponymous region of Portugal. In the first section, titled “Homeless” and set in 1904, Tomás Lobo, a young resident of Lisbon whose wife and son have died, begins to walk backward “to face the uncertainty of the future,” since everything he cherished in life has been taken away. Though he has lost his religious faith, he vows to find a “strange and marvelous” crucifix that resembles a chimpanzee in a church in the tiny village of Tuizelo. His quest goes awry in highly comic ways: an episode that finds him naked in a meadow rubbing lice powder over his body rivals the hilarious meerkat scene in Martel’s Life of Pi. Characters from Tuizelo figure in the second section, “Homeward,” set in 1938. A pathologist receives a visit from his dead wife and later discovers a dead chimpanzee curled in the body of a man on whom he does an autopsy. Martel handles this improbable scene with convincing magical realism. “Home,” the third section, is set in 1981 Canada, where a politician mourning his dead wife impulsively buys a chimpanzee called Odo and travels to Tuizelo, where he was born. His grief is assuaged and his faith is restored by the ancient crucifix and the simple pleasures of country life. 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.

April 1, 2016

Divided into three sections--Homeless, Homeward, and Home--that converge in the titular mountains, three men epitomize the concepts after which the sections are named. Part 1's Tomas, grieving the loss of his lover and son, takes his uncle's automobile--one of 1904's first--in search of a religious artifact mentioned in an ancient diary of one Father Ulisses, setting in motion an epic odyssey. In Part 2, set in 1938-39, Eusebio, a pathologist, discusses the many parallels between Agatha Christie's murder mysteries and the mystical life of Jesus Christ and is then confronted with an autopsy whose results he cannot explain. Part 3 jumps to 1981 when Peter, a Canadian senator, reacts to his wife's death by acquiring a chimpanzee and abandoning everything familiar to return to a birthplace he doesn't remember. Mark Bramhall's versatile narration flows easily from a twentysomething character's desperation to a sixtysomething's acceptance, with even stronger cross-gender characterizations as he reads such characters as a playfully intelligent wife, a long-suffering widow, and a concerned sister thousands of miles away. VERDICT Recommended for fans of the author and interconnected narratives. ["An engrossing reading experience, with disparate elements combined into a coherent whole": LJ 2/1/16 starred review of the Spiegal & Grau hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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