Faith and Loss Across the Generations

Yann Martel’s latest novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, has been about 30 years in the making. He began work on the story, a century-spanning odyssey, long before he released his divisive Beatrice and Virgil, and before his best-selling Life of Pi became a critically acclaimed movie. The long gestation has already paid off—within the first month of The High Mountains of Portugal’s release, it had made The New York Times bestseller list.

Readers might recall from Life of Pi the “author’s note” that acknowledged an abandoned novel set in Portugal in 1939. Here he has returned to that abandoned novel and to explorations of faith in trying times, and the roles played by imagination and storytelling in our reactions to losing someone we love. But, what sets this new work apart from Life of Pi, and other contemporary loss narratives such as Billie Livingston’s The Crooked Heart of Mercy, is its sheer...