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3.35 AVERAGE
3.35 AVERAGE
It is up to faith to answer the question: are we fallen angels or risen apes?
Thomas in the first story, is driven to despair by the death of his love and child: „He weeps like a child, catching his breath and hiccuping, his face drenched with tears. We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more - there is no greater relationship. Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa and hit upon a great truth: We are rizen apes, not fallen angels.“
In the second story, Maria talks about the essential role stories play as a link between faith and reason: „That's the great, enduring challenge of our modern times, is it not, to marry faith and reason? So hard - so unreasonable - to root our lives upon a distant wisp of holiness. Faith is grand but impractical: How does one live ab eternal idea in a daily way? It's so much easier to be reasonable. Reason is practical, its rewards are immediate, its workings are clear. But alas, reason is blind. Reason, on its own, leads us nowhere, especially in the face of adversity. How do we balance the two, how do we live with both faith and reason?“
In the third story, Peter, after his wifes death, discovers the peace and joy of living in a perpetual present, with his pet ape, Odo: „Odo's motions are fluid and precise, of an amplitude and force exactly suited to his intentions. And these motions are done entirely unselfconsciously. Odo doesn't appear to think when he's doing, only to do, purely. How does that make sense? Why should thinking - that human hallmark - make us clumsy? [...] Time passes, like clound in the sky. Weeks and months go by as if they were a single day. Summer fades to fall, winter yield to spring, different minutes of the same hour. [...] While Odo has mastered the simple human trick of making porridge, Peter has learned the difficult animal skill of doing nothing. He's learned to unshackle himself from the race of time and contemplate time itself. As far as he can tell, that's what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by a river, watching the water go by. It's a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be.“
One step at a time he makes his way to Lapa, his stride free and easy, each foot lifted high, then dropped with aplomb. It is a graceful gait.
Part quest, part ghost story and part contemporary fable, three stories taking place over a century are told in this quick little read, connecting a small village in the mountains of Portugal, a curiously made crucifix, and a chimpanzee. Tomás travels in search of a mysterious treasure mentioned in an old Priest's diary. Decades later, a pathologist performs a bizarre autopsy. Finally, a Canadian senator adopts a chimpanzee and sets off on a journey that brings the three stories to a moving a conclusion.
Oh, the alpine summits of Lapa! The automobile - coughing, sputtering, rattling, clattering, jouncing, bouncing, chuffing, puffing, whining, roaring - dashes down to the end of Rua do Pau de Bandeira, the cobblestones underfoot making their presence known with a ceaseless, explosive rat-a-tat, then violently lurches leftwards and falls of the street as if from a cliff, such is the steepness of Rua do Prior.
Yann Martel has a way of spinning words and building a story that is quite engrossing. Simply describing Tomás' walk at the beginning, the most ordinary thing in the world, suddenly becomes extraordinary when, after several pages (and just enough of a back story to make you intensely care for him) it is revealed that he is, in fact, walking backwards. This slow development of a story in which not much really happens, but what does is extraordinary, characterises this clever little book. It's more of a spiritual allegory, with touches of magical realism and folklore than his previous books, which will appeal to fans of Salman Rushdie who want a short, quick fix - this novel is much shorter than Rushdie's epics - and I read it from cover to cover in a single day. I could not put it down.
Every dead body is a book with a story to tell, each organ a chapter, the chapters united by a common narrative. It is Eusebio's professional duty to read these stories, turning every page with a scalpel, and at the end of each to write a book report. What he writes in a report must reflect exactly what he has read in the body. It makes for a hard-headed kind of poetry.
The sections of the novel are divided into three parts: Homeless, Homeward, and Home. Tomás leaves home on his quest for truth, Eusebio helps a widow gain closure, and Peter finds a new home in his ancestral hometown in Portugal. It's a cleverly constructed book rich in symbolism and raising some interesting issues about identity, immigration, the effect a place can have on the psyche and what "home" really means. It's about acceptance of the things we have done, the things we do and the things we desire. As an allegory it is powerful. As a novel, purely from a plot perspective, it may be a little strange - this is not a book to be taken literally, but one which benefits marinading and being toyed with for weeks afterwards.
How curious, though: Death often comes disguised as life, a mass of exuberant, anomalous cells - or, like a murderer, it leaves a clue, a smoking gun, the sclerotic caking of an artery, before fleeing the scene. Always he comes upon death's handiwork just as death itself has turned the corner, its hem disappearing with a quiet swish.
I really loved Tomás, Eusebio, Peter and Odo - they are so different but each of them broke my heart, creating a place for themselves inside it. The "high mountains" may not be very high or very mountainous but the highs and lows of this book had me laughing on one page and crying on the next, as Tomás drives a car for the first time, Eusebio hides from the truth of his life, and Peter gets used to his new chimpanzee roommate. Not once was I bored; this book is full of little surprises. Furthermore, Martel's love of language is evident in the way that he plays with the sounds and rhythms of words within a sentence, building a symphony of vocabulary that sometimes devolves into a chaotically brilliant cacophony.
Grooming confounds Peter because of Odo's embodied form. The ape is so proximately alien: in his image - but not. There's also the living heat of him, felt so close up, the beating of the ape's heart coming through to his fingertips. Peter is spellbound.
I don't think The High Mountains of Portugal will appeal to everyone, and I don't think it will reach the same levels of success as Life of Pi did. It's not as mind-blowing or impressive; it is a quiet, quick little book. But I do think that if you give it a chance, and let the words soak into you, it will reward you.
Sure, there's other stuff going on and some of it I even liked but are we really not yet past the "kill the woman for the man-pain" trope? -.-
Absolutley not my book! The writing style was interesting and Special at first but pissed me off after a while cause it was too much, too forced. I did not like it very much.
And the Story itself wasn't much better. The first part was mainly about the car which was sort of boring after a while as well as the main character who I didn't really understand.
But the biggest Problem was with Jesus: Most of the book was about God and a search for a magnifican crucifix. And far to much talk about the miracles of Jesus and the Creation of God and how to follow him and the belives of a priest in the 17th. century.
Seriously, this was far to much God-talk for me. Don't missunderstand me, I'm a tolerant Person and it can be interesting to read something about religions or a religious main charactere who has troubes with his god, but this was just too much for me. I could't stand it and was quite bored most of the time.
