Arts- Author Yann Martel on “The High Mountains of Portugal”

There are three separate but interlocking stories in Yann Martel’s latest book.

In it, a man who has lost, and is someway lost, and is seeking something, a connection, a reason, a faith. The second part is a man is was not lost but perhaps is losing faith. And in the third part, a man who has found something.

It starts at the beginning of the last century in Portugal with a museum worker, then switches to the middle of the century, and a pathologist also in Portugal, and finally to a Canadian senator who returns to his ancestors roots in Portugal.

Three completely different lives, all three men having lost their wives, grieving, and each searching for something, and all connected somehow to the high mountains of Portugal.

Meticulously researched, it is an allegorical biblical story, and Martel weaves in some fascinating and thought provoking connections to Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries as they relate to the gospels.

There is also throughout the Portuguese sense of “saudade”, a sadness and  longing as the characters who each on their own fashion have a journey to make.