I picked up Yann Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal on a day when I found myself holding an expired map of a city I no longer lived in. I had kept that map for three years, folded wrong, torn at one corner, utterly useless. I could not throw it away. That is the kind of searching this book is about: not looking for something you can find, but holding onto the act of looking itself.
The novel has three parts, each decades apart, each protagonist a different version of the same lost man. In the first, Tomás drives across Portugal in the early 1900s, searching for a mysterious crucifix. His car has no reverse gear; he cannot go back. I thought of my own life, the way I keep moving forward even when I have no idea where I am going.That image stayed with me: a man who can only go forward, even when forward makes no sense.
The second section gives us a pathologist in the 1930s. A stranger arrives with a suitcase; inside is a dead body. The autopsy becomes a conversation, a confession, a slow unwrapping of grief. I have done my own version of that autopsy, not on a body but on old emails, rereading conversations with people who are gone from my life, cutting them open for clues I know I will not find. Martel’s pathologist finds a chimpanzee inside the dead man’s chest. I find nothing. We both keep looking.
The third section is the strangest. A Canadian politician abandons his career to live in a tiny village with a chimpanzee named Odo. He reads a book about Tomás. The layers fold into each other. Martel wrote Life of Pi, a book about survival. He wrote this one after a silence, after his own searching. He has said he wanted to answer: what do you do after you survive? Pi survived the ocean.I recognized that question. I have been living it, that strange hollow after the thing you thought would kill you did not, and now you have to keep going anyway.
The book does not give you a plot to hold; it gives you images: a man driving backward, a chimpanzee eating soup from a bowl, an autopsy where the chest opens like a book. Martel is not interested in realism; he is interested in what happens when you stop expecting the world to make sense. His characters are all grieving, but none of them know it. Tomás lost his son and his wife. The pathologist lost his wife. The politician lost his faith. They move toward Portugal’s high mountains, a place that does not exist as they imagine it, and they never arrive.Grief, Martel seems to say, is a road that does not end. You do not get there; you just keep driving.
I thought about my expired map again. I was not trying to go back to that city. I just needed it in the drawer, a small refusal to close a door. Martel’s characters cannot close doors either. Tomás drives backward across a whole country. The pathologist cuts open a dead body and finds a story. The politician sits on a hill with a chimp and says nothing.The book’s quiet revelation: you do not need to find what you are looking for. You just need to keep looking.
That sounds like a consolation, but Martel does not console. He unsettles. Odo the chimpanzee is the most human character in the book; he mourns, he loves, he sits in silence. The humans perform their grief in strange, broken ways. One of them stabs a man with a needle. Another carries a dead body in a suitcase. Another drives a car with no reverse gear into a river. They are absurd, and they are us.
I finished the book on a Sunday afternoon. I had not found what I was looking for when I started, but I had stopped needing to find it.Martel’s gift is not answers; it is permission to stay lost.
