The high mountains of Yann Martel

Canadian author Yann Martel (1963) is coming to Brussels this week to promote his new novel. Martel is of course best known for Life of Pi, his bestselling novel that won the Man Booker Prize in 2002, and which was adapted into a film by Ang Lee in 2012. The book is about an Indian boy called Piscine Molitor Patel, Pi for short, who during his move to Canada ends up in a lifeboat that he shares with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Martel’s modern parable is a disarming but radical ode to the power of the imagination and faith, which also critiques the human urge to rationalise everything. Since the success of Life of Pi, in 2010 Martel wrote the novel Beatrice and Virgil, but his latest novel The High Mountains of Portugal has now also been translated into Dutch. In this likewise magic-realist story, the author weaves together the lives of three people – a young man, a pathologist, and an American senator – who at first sight appear to have nothing in common, but who in the space of just under a century, all turn out to have lost something in Portugal. So perhaps this is the book about Portugal that Martel wanted to write when he went to India in 1997, which after the failure of an earlier writing project gave him the material for his global bestseller. We will probably find out on Tuesday, when he will be interviewed by the reviewer Kathy Mathys, who has been following Martel’s work for some time.

YANN MARTEL
23/2, Passa Porta, www.passaporta.be