With Martel’s signature mixture of humor and pathos, these three stories explore the rugged terrain of grief. But they also contain the author’s reflections on the connection between storytelling and faith ... Martel’s writing has never been more charming, a rich mixture of sweetness that’s not cloying and tragedy that’s not melodramatic.
I took away indelible images from High Mountains, enchanting and disturbing at the same time ... As whimsical as Martel's magic realism can be, grief informs every step of the book's three journeys. In the course of the novel we burrow ever further into the heart of an ape, pure and threatening at once, our precursor, ourselves. You must change your life.
...although his writing hums with a vivid populism, his emotional and allegorical tale seems at times almost too safely well done to do justice to the ragged and tortured people whose tragedies it traces.
