Stephanie Jane recenzis The High Mountains of Portugal de Yann Martel
So many ideas!
3 steloj
I didn't realise when I started reading The High Mountains Of Portugal that the book isn't a novel. Instead it is three cleverly linked longish short stories that take place at different times over a period of about eighty years. To be honest, I wasn't at all enamoured of the first story! I struggled to get into the bizarre tale and I had limited sympathy for its beleaguered protagonist. Supposedly griefstruck by the deaths of his serving maid lover and their child, I irritatedly thought that perhaps he should have made the effort for them all to be a family while he had the chance rather than clinging to his family's privilege while he could and then making futile gestures too late to matter. Harsh?
The book and I clicked towards the very end of the first story and I thoroughly enjoyed Martel's wild imaginings and the totally unexpected directions …
I didn't realise when I started reading The High Mountains Of Portugal that the book isn't a novel. Instead it is three cleverly linked longish short stories that take place at different times over a period of about eighty years. To be honest, I wasn't at all enamoured of the first story! I struggled to get into the bizarre tale and I had limited sympathy for its beleaguered protagonist. Supposedly griefstruck by the deaths of his serving maid lover and their child, I irritatedly thought that perhaps he should have made the effort for them all to be a family while he had the chance rather than clinging to his family's privilege while he could and then making futile gestures too late to matter. Harsh?
The book and I clicked towards the very end of the first story and I thoroughly enjoyed Martel's wild imaginings and the totally unexpected directions his further two narratives take. This would be a good book for fans of oddness and magical realism. I am sure I didn't identify or correctly interpret half the symbolism, but I understood enough to appreciate the layering of these stories. At one level they could be simply mad fairytales. Step back and glance from a different angle though and Martel's ideas are practically leaping over each other in their rush for attention. At times it's almost overwhelming!