‘Isso é minha casa’: At Home with Grief
Yann Martel, The High Mountains of Portugal
Canongate, 352pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781782114697
reviewed by Katie Da Cunha Lewin
The thread that runs through Yann Martel’s new novel is surprising and enigmatic: the Iberian rhinoceros. The rhinoceros, or the concept of a real-life rhinoceros living in Portugal, appears throughout the novel’s three parts. It is linked with mystery, religion and that most Portuguese of words, saudade. Martel’s first of three sad and widowed men, Tomás, first notes of the sad disappearance of the rhinoceros:
Saudade, a famously untranslatable Portuguese and Galician term, has come to be seen as representative of the Portuguese soul. Frequently referenced in Fado, that most melancholy of Portuguese folk music, saudade is a feeling that the Portuguese experience, one of loss, sadness and yearning for something that may or may not have existed. In its archaic form, soidade, we can understand its contemporary usage: first found in cantigas d’amigo in the thirteenth century, the word was used by those lamenting the distance between themselves and their loved ones due to lengthy voyages of discovery around the world. As Brazilian poet Fernando Santoro explains in Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon:
This word, then, has various levels to its meaning in that it stems not only from a sweet sense of absence, and of a longing for a return, but also is used in collective mourning, as a way of unifying people together in their emotion of loss. Moreover, the term is constitutive of the historical Portuguese character (whatever that may mean in reality) in such a way as to suggest its prolonging: to be Portuguese is to form yourself around this notion of saudade. Saudade is something that needs your attention, both emotional and intellectual in order to remain within you; it is a feeling that is cultivated. Keats famously described this paradox in ‘Ode to Melancholy’:
The Portuguese ‘glut [their] sorrow’ continually, using the feeling of saudade as a way to sustain this national characteristic. In Martel’s invented Portuguese saying about the rhinoceros (though the Portuguese have many unusual sayings, this does not appear to be one of them), the rhinoceros is emblematic of the double longing for absence and presence, of a thing that may never have existed. In this way, Martel has created a central thread of longing for mystery and meaning much like the one he became famous for in his award-winning Life of Pi in 2001. And like in that novel, he again is using animals as a way to untangle human existence. In a 2002 interview with the Guardian, Martel stated that ‘Animals, all of them, fill me with a sense of wonder. To me, they are walking and breathing mystery.’ It is in this mystery that animals become a way of giving life to human unknowns: what appears to be unlivable can live in the body of an animal.
Rather than notions of violence and storytelling, explored so famously in Life of Pi, this novel takes on another difficult and unclear topic: grief. The novel, which comprises three stories, focuses on three men who have experienced deep loss, of either a wife or a child, and each are trying to deal with their grief in some way. Tomás, in the first story, set in Lisbon in 1904, becomes obsessed by a cross carved by a priest living in Saõ Tomé and decides to travel to the so-called ‘high mountains of Portugal’ to seek it out. In the second story, a pathologist called Eusebio converses with his dead wife and is visited by an elderly lady with the body of her recently deceased husband. The final story tells of a member of the Canadian senate, a recent widower, who decides to leave his life to move to a small village in Portugal with a newly acquired chimpanzee.
The three distinct parts, ‘Homeless,’ ‘Homeward’ and ‘Home,’ suggest a movement of return and conclusion while also moving the narrative somewhat circularly from 1904 Lisbon to Yann Martel’s real life home, Canada, and back again to a small village in Portugal. This direction ‘homeward’ suggests a move towards being at home with grief, as accepting grief as part of the landscape of a life. This trajectory is also established in the first part of the novel, in the refrain found in diaries of Father Ulises: ‘isso é minha casa’ or ‘this is home.’ This phrase not only refers to the literal searching and travelling that two of three characters undertake but also suggests the journey undertaken by an individual in their grief. Each of these bereft men, whose loved ones still feel so present to them, need to navigate their way through grief as a way to somehow be at home within it. Travelling ‘homeward’ towards a place where grief can live, the novel crosses the Portuguese landscape, until in the final story the rhinoceros emerges, fully real, large and living over the land.
If the rhinoceros is a cipher for saudade, then the chimpanzee comes to represent, for the living, breathing grief itself, an inexact replica of the human. This personification of grief is by no means a new idea, and other writers have attempted to use animals as a proxy for the pain of loss through the inclusion of an ‘unknowable’ animal. One can think, for example, of the 2015 novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, in which a man’s deceased wife reappears in the form of a crow. Martel himself is clearly no stranger to using animals in allegory, as in the famous Life of Pi. The chimpanzee first appears as the face of the carved cross that propels Tomás to journey across Portugal, until finally emerging as a fully fleshed out real life chimp in the last story ‘Home.’
It is here that Martel makes the most interesting use of this exploration with animals, though perhaps with a touch too much sentimentality. This chimp, named Obo, takes an instant liking to the Canadian-Portuguese MP Peter, who visits the research facility he resides in – so much so, in fact, that the recently widowed Peter decides to buy this chimp with a half-formed plan of returning to his roots in Portugal, the very same town in which the other men have found themselves. Obo’s ability to be in the present moment is therapeutic for the bereft Peter: ‘Does it bother him that the ape is essentially unknowable? No, it doesn’t. There’s reward in the mystery, and enduring amazement. Whether that’s the ape’s intent, that he be amazed, he doesn’t know – can’t know – but a reward is a reward. He accepts it with gratitude.’ The chimp does what Peter cannot do: live in the moment.
In spending time with the chimp, grooming, going for walks, sitting quietly, Peter’s return ‘home’ to where he was born becomes a return to life, a way to live with his grief. He can finally say ‘isso é minha casa.’ However, though not particularly sensitive to animals and animal rights, I did wonder as the novel went on about the ease of this pairing of animals with mystery. Can and should we continue to make animals a blank space on which to write our human emotions? Gilles Deleuze would counter that by making them ‘stand for’ human concepts, we are yet again domesticising wild animals who have meanings on their own terms that we should not ignore. In this novel, I’m not sure that these metaphors bear the weight that Martel wants them to – in fact, the more Martel insists on this central metaphor, the less convincing it becomes for the reader. JM Coetzee, another writer particularly interested in animals, would not use them to represent or externalise human emotion, and I think would be highly critical of this enterprise. In Coetzee’s writing, the lives of animals (and of course I nod here to his novella The Lives of Animals) are taken as exactly that – beings who experience joy and who have meaning on their own terms, and not hermetic mysteries that can never be known.
As a result of this central flaw the novel, for all of its interesting moments, does not quite convince. The metaphors of the text feel too close to the surface, too controlled by the author; it is as if Martel doesn’t quite trust his reader to respond thoughtfully to the central premise and so clearly lays out his ideas to ensure a fitting response. The business of fiction writing, in order to be affective, seems to need an element of self-awareness, one that interrogates its own production, the stability of its location or indeed the ethics of its metaphors. This work seems to prize sentiment over any such introspection, and is weaker for it.
Despite its ungraceful appearance, he has always lamented the fate of the animal that once roamed the rural corners of his country. Was the Iberian rhinoceros’s last bastion not, in fact, the High Mountains of Portugal? [...] It was, in a sense, run over by modernity. It was hunted and hounded to extinction and vanished, as ridiculous as an old idea – only to be mourned and missed the moment it was gone. Now it is fodder for fado, a stock character in that peculiar form of Portuguese melancholy, saudade. Indeed, thinking of the long-gone creature, Tomás is overcome with saudade. He is, as the expression goes, tão docemente triste quanto um rinoceronte, as sweetly sad as a rhinoceros.
Saudade, a famously untranslatable Portuguese and Galician term, has come to be seen as representative of the Portuguese soul. Frequently referenced in Fado, that most melancholy of Portuguese folk music, saudade is a feeling that the Portuguese experience, one of loss, sadness and yearning for something that may or may not have existed. In its archaic form, soidade, we can understand its contemporary usage: first found in cantigas d’amigo in the thirteenth century, the word was used by those lamenting the distance between themselves and their loved ones due to lengthy voyages of discovery around the world. As Brazilian poet Fernando Santoro explains in Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon:
The form saudade is found once in a fourteenth-century codex, but it began to spread, according to Carolina de Vasconcelos, only in the sixteenth century, in the years following the legendary Portuguese defeat at the battle of Alcácer Quibir. It was there that the Portuguese lost their king, Sebastian, who disappeared in the fighting, and since a successor could not be found, they subjected themselves to the Spanish crown. This battle produced a collective feeling of mourning and hope that has characterized the Portuguese soul ever since.
This word, then, has various levels to its meaning in that it stems not only from a sweet sense of absence, and of a longing for a return, but also is used in collective mourning, as a way of unifying people together in their emotion of loss. Moreover, the term is constitutive of the historical Portuguese character (whatever that may mean in reality) in such a way as to suggest its prolonging: to be Portuguese is to form yourself around this notion of saudade. Saudade is something that needs your attention, both emotional and intellectual in order to remain within you; it is a feeling that is cultivated. Keats famously described this paradox in ‘Ode to Melancholy’:
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
The Portuguese ‘glut [their] sorrow’ continually, using the feeling of saudade as a way to sustain this national characteristic. In Martel’s invented Portuguese saying about the rhinoceros (though the Portuguese have many unusual sayings, this does not appear to be one of them), the rhinoceros is emblematic of the double longing for absence and presence, of a thing that may never have existed. In this way, Martel has created a central thread of longing for mystery and meaning much like the one he became famous for in his award-winning Life of Pi in 2001. And like in that novel, he again is using animals as a way to untangle human existence. In a 2002 interview with the Guardian, Martel stated that ‘Animals, all of them, fill me with a sense of wonder. To me, they are walking and breathing mystery.’ It is in this mystery that animals become a way of giving life to human unknowns: what appears to be unlivable can live in the body of an animal.
Rather than notions of violence and storytelling, explored so famously in Life of Pi, this novel takes on another difficult and unclear topic: grief. The novel, which comprises three stories, focuses on three men who have experienced deep loss, of either a wife or a child, and each are trying to deal with their grief in some way. Tomás, in the first story, set in Lisbon in 1904, becomes obsessed by a cross carved by a priest living in Saõ Tomé and decides to travel to the so-called ‘high mountains of Portugal’ to seek it out. In the second story, a pathologist called Eusebio converses with his dead wife and is visited by an elderly lady with the body of her recently deceased husband. The final story tells of a member of the Canadian senate, a recent widower, who decides to leave his life to move to a small village in Portugal with a newly acquired chimpanzee.
The three distinct parts, ‘Homeless,’ ‘Homeward’ and ‘Home,’ suggest a movement of return and conclusion while also moving the narrative somewhat circularly from 1904 Lisbon to Yann Martel’s real life home, Canada, and back again to a small village in Portugal. This direction ‘homeward’ suggests a move towards being at home with grief, as accepting grief as part of the landscape of a life. This trajectory is also established in the first part of the novel, in the refrain found in diaries of Father Ulises: ‘isso é minha casa’ or ‘this is home.’ This phrase not only refers to the literal searching and travelling that two of three characters undertake but also suggests the journey undertaken by an individual in their grief. Each of these bereft men, whose loved ones still feel so present to them, need to navigate their way through grief as a way to somehow be at home within it. Travelling ‘homeward’ towards a place where grief can live, the novel crosses the Portuguese landscape, until in the final story the rhinoceros emerges, fully real, large and living over the land.
If the rhinoceros is a cipher for saudade, then the chimpanzee comes to represent, for the living, breathing grief itself, an inexact replica of the human. This personification of grief is by no means a new idea, and other writers have attempted to use animals as a proxy for the pain of loss through the inclusion of an ‘unknowable’ animal. One can think, for example, of the 2015 novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, in which a man’s deceased wife reappears in the form of a crow. Martel himself is clearly no stranger to using animals in allegory, as in the famous Life of Pi. The chimpanzee first appears as the face of the carved cross that propels Tomás to journey across Portugal, until finally emerging as a fully fleshed out real life chimp in the last story ‘Home.’
It is here that Martel makes the most interesting use of this exploration with animals, though perhaps with a touch too much sentimentality. This chimp, named Obo, takes an instant liking to the Canadian-Portuguese MP Peter, who visits the research facility he resides in – so much so, in fact, that the recently widowed Peter decides to buy this chimp with a half-formed plan of returning to his roots in Portugal, the very same town in which the other men have found themselves. Obo’s ability to be in the present moment is therapeutic for the bereft Peter: ‘Does it bother him that the ape is essentially unknowable? No, it doesn’t. There’s reward in the mystery, and enduring amazement. Whether that’s the ape’s intent, that he be amazed, he doesn’t know – can’t know – but a reward is a reward. He accepts it with gratitude.’ The chimp does what Peter cannot do: live in the moment.
In spending time with the chimp, grooming, going for walks, sitting quietly, Peter’s return ‘home’ to where he was born becomes a return to life, a way to live with his grief. He can finally say ‘isso é minha casa.’ However, though not particularly sensitive to animals and animal rights, I did wonder as the novel went on about the ease of this pairing of animals with mystery. Can and should we continue to make animals a blank space on which to write our human emotions? Gilles Deleuze would counter that by making them ‘stand for’ human concepts, we are yet again domesticising wild animals who have meanings on their own terms that we should not ignore. In this novel, I’m not sure that these metaphors bear the weight that Martel wants them to – in fact, the more Martel insists on this central metaphor, the less convincing it becomes for the reader. JM Coetzee, another writer particularly interested in animals, would not use them to represent or externalise human emotion, and I think would be highly critical of this enterprise. In Coetzee’s writing, the lives of animals (and of course I nod here to his novella The Lives of Animals) are taken as exactly that – beings who experience joy and who have meaning on their own terms, and not hermetic mysteries that can never be known.
As a result of this central flaw the novel, for all of its interesting moments, does not quite convince. The metaphors of the text feel too close to the surface, too controlled by the author; it is as if Martel doesn’t quite trust his reader to respond thoughtfully to the central premise and so clearly lays out his ideas to ensure a fitting response. The business of fiction writing, in order to be affective, seems to need an element of self-awareness, one that interrogates its own production, the stability of its location or indeed the ethics of its metaphors. This work seems to prize sentiment over any such introspection, and is weaker for it.