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Night Train to Lisbon
by Pascal Mercier
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Powells.com Staff Pick
From its first memorable passages to the complex tale that emerges, Night Train to Lisbon never relents in its existential telling of what life can be. A soulful look into the heart of what nourishes you; a compelling and beautiful book to savor.
Recommended by Danielle, Powells.com The story of a dependable, rather boring classic-languages professor at a Swiss lycée. Mundus, as he is called, seems to thrive on predictability. One rainy morning on his way to the school he encounters a woman possibly considering suicide. He intercedes, and they interact for a short while before she slips away. All he knows is that she is Portuguese and that she has written a phone number on his forehead. This tips his life so far beyond normalcy that he leaves school, takes a crash course in Portuguese, and discovers a book by a Portuguese doctor, Prado, that incites him to impulsively go to Lisbon to see if he can find the man. Far-fetched? Yes, and most of the people he meets, both along the way and in Lisbon, are so friendly and accommodating that the story can be unbelievable. But Mercier's writing and characters drew me in so much that I overlooked all the unrealities and just enjoyed the adventure that Mundus embarked on.
Prado comes up against Salazar's dictatorship and the atrocities of that time in Portuguese history, and this backdrop informs much of the action that takes place while Mundus is looking for the doctor and meeting the man's family and peers. Prado's philosophical writings are found throughout the book, as well as the memories of the tyranny of Salazar, making this a thoughtful, engaging, and often heartbreaking novel.
Recommended by Diane, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews A huge international best seller, this ambitious novel — spanning Europe and the twentieth century — plumbs the depths of our shared humanity to offer up a breathtaking insight into life, love, and literature itself.
A major hit in Germany that spent 140 weeks on the best-seller list and went on to become one of Europe's biggest literary blockbusters in the last five years, Night Train to Lisbon now introduces to the English language world the critically acclaimed Swiss author Pascal Mercier. It is an astonishing novel, a large-scale international literary feat in the vein of Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Daniel Kehlmann, and a compelling exploration of consciousness, the possibility of truly understanding another person, and the ability of language to define our very selves.
Raimund Gregorius is a Latin teacher at a Swiss college with a vast knowledge of Greek and Hebrew who one day — after a chance encounter with a mysterious Portuguese woman — abandons his old life to start a new one. He takes the night train to Lisbon and carries with him a book by Amadeu de Prado, a (fictional) Portuguese doctor and essayist whose writings explore the ideas of loneliness, mortality, death, friendship, love, and loyalty. Chafing against his solitary routine for the first time in his life, Gregorius becomes obsessed by what he reads and restlessly struggles to comprehend the life of the author. His investigations lead him all over the city of Lisbon, as he speaks to those who were entangled in Prado's life. Gradually, the picture of an extraordinary man emerges — a doctor and poet who rebelled against Salazar's dictatorship.
Recalling Bernhard Schlink and Nicole Krauss in its affirmation of the power of literature, will, and the individual, Night Train to Lisbon is a book of sensual beauty and artistic excellence, one that will be remembered for its soul and wit as well as its universality and great intellectual depth. Review: "In Swiss novelist Mercier's U.S. debut, Raimund Gregorius is a gifted but dull 57-year-old high school classical languages teacher in Switzerland. After a chance meeting with a Portuguese woman in the rain, he discovers the work of a Portuguese poet and doctor, Amadeu de Prado, persecuted under Salazar's regime. Transfixed by the work, Gregorius boards a train for Lisbon, bent on discovering Prado's fate and on uncovering more of his work. He returns to the sites of Prado's life and interviews the major players — Prado's sisters, lovers, fellow resistors and estranged best friend — and begins to lose himself. The artful unspooling of Prado's fraught life is richly detailed: full of surprises and paradoxes, it incorporates a vivid rendering of the Portuguese resistance to Salazar. The novel, Mercier's third in Europe, was a blockbuster there. Long philosophical interludes in Prado's voice may not play as well in the U.S., but the book comes through on the enigmas of trying to live and write under fascism." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "According to its American publisher, 'Night Train to Lisbon' has rung up 'over two million copies sold worldwide' and has been lavishly reviewed throughout Europe. Pascal Mercier is a professor of philosophy who writes under a pen name — his real name is Peter Bieri — and, obviously, a person of intelligence and erudition, qualities that are evident throughout this novel. But though it is being ..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) launched in this country with more energy and enthusiasm than are generally mustered for works of fiction in translation, my hunch is that this will be yet another European best-seller met with indifference on this side of the Atlantic. It's a strange book. Its protagonist, Raimund Gregorius, is 57 years old, a professor of dead languages at a secondary school — a 'gymnasium' — in Switzerland. He is set in his ways and most unlikely to change them: 'Mundus, the most reliable and predictable person in this building and probably in the whole history of the school, working here for more than thirty years, impeccable in his profession, a pillar of the institution, a little boring perhaps, but respected and even feared in the university for his astounding knowledge of ancient languages, mocked lovingly by his students who put him to the test every year by calling him in the middle of the night and asking him about the conjecture for a remote passage in an ancient text, only to get every time off the top of his head information that was both dry and exhaustive, including a critical commentary with other possible meanings, all of it presented perfectly and calmly without a soupcon of anger at the disturbance — Mundus, a man with an impossibly old-fashioned, even archaic first name you simply had to abbreviate, and couldn't abbreviate any other way, an abbreviation that revealed the character of the man as no other word could have, for what he carried around in him as a philologist was in fact no less than a whole world, or rather several whole worlds, since along with those Latin and Greek passages, his head also held the Hebrew that had amazed several Old Testament scholars.' He is comfortable with words, with texts, far less comfortable with people. His childless marriage ended several years ago. Now he lives alone in a drab apartment, talks from time to time with his friend Constantine Doxiades, wears heavy eyeglasses and assumes that the rest of his days will be spent in exactly the same way. Then, on his way to the school on a rainy morning, he is stopped in the street by a woman who writes a telephone number on his forehead with a felt-tipped pen. He is startled but recovers, and in their brief encounter before she disappears he learns that her native language is Portuguese. He feels his life changing. He goes to a Spanish bookstore, where he is drawn to a book called 'A Goldsmith of Words,' by Amadeu de Prado. The dealer, who 'found it last year in the junk box of a secondhand bookshop in Lisbon,' presents it to him as a gift. The book is in Portuguese, which he does not know, but he obtains a dictionary and laboriously sets about reading it, learning a new language in the process. As he immerses himself in the book, Gregorius recalls the words of Marcus Aurelius: 'Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but later thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of respecting and honoring thyself. For every man has but one life. But yours is nearly finished, though in it you had no regard for yourself but placed thy felicity in the souls of others. ... But those who do not observe the impulses of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.' He realizes that the chance encounter with the woman and the gift of the book are omens that cannot be ignored. He tells himself that 'I'd like to make something different out of my life,' that 'my time is running out and there may not be much more of it left.' So he quits the school, closes up his apartment, and takes a night train to Lisbon to search for Amadeu de Prado. It isn't an easy journey, since he has spasms of doubt about this 'crackpot idea' and more than once thinks to turn back, but he persists. Continuing to work his way through Prado's book, he learns that the author was a doctor, a 'poet and a language mystic who had taken up arms and fought against Salazar,' the dictator who had kept Portugal under his thumb for four decades beginning in the 1930s. He comes to realize that 'I'd like to know what it was like to be him,' or at least 'what it is like when you imagined being the other person.' He wonders: 'Was it possible that the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else? One whose life had been completely different and had had a completely different logic than your own? How did curiosity for another life go together with the awareness that your own time was running out?' Prado is dead, of an aneurysm, and so is his wife, but there are others who have survived. The first important one whom Gregorius meets is Prado's fierce sister Adriana, who, since her brother's death, 'had lived alone in this house for thirty-one years, thirty-one years alone with the memories and the emptiness left behind by the brother.' When her brother was alive, she had been 'a dragon, a dragon who protected Amadeu,' and now she is the guardian of his memory, preserving his bedroom and office exactly as they were when he occupied them. There is Joao Eca, 'a tortured victim of the Salazar regime' who knew Prado in the resistance and treasured him as 'the godless priest,' a man devoid of conventional religious belief yet who 'thought things through to the end. He always thought them through to the end, no matter how black the consequences were.' There is Maria Joao, 'the great, untouched love' of Prado's life, who is now past 80 but still possesses 'such inconspicuous and yet such perfect confidence and independence.' There is Prado's younger sister, Melodie, 'a word invented for her, for her presence was as beautiful and fleeting as a melody, everybody fell in love with her, nobody could hold on to her.' There is Estefania Espinhosa, brilliant and beautiful, who had been Prado's 'chance to finally leave the courthouse, go out to the free, hot square of life, and live for this one time completely according to his wish, to his passion, and to hell with others,' but whom Prado could not bring himself to love because she was involved, however halfheartedly, with his best friend. Et cetera. Slowly, Amadeu de Prado's portrait takes shape. As Joao Eca puts it, he was 'a walking paradox: self-confident and of fearless demeanor, but also one who constantly felt the look of others on him and suffered from it. ... Amadeu, he was the most loyal person in the universe, loyalty was his religion.' In sum, a difficult and complicated man, but an admirable one who shared Gregorius' attachment to words but was also a man of action. All of which is interesting enough, but in a rather clinical way. One problem with 'Night Train to Lisbon' is that its plot, if plot is the word for it, consists almost entirely of talk — talk, talk, talk — about people and events in the past. The effect of this endless conversation is numbing rather than stimulating. The subject of seeking a new life is rich, as innumerable American novels have made plain, but it's never really clear here whether the central story belongs to Gregorius or to Prado, and there's scarcely a hint of dramatic tension as Gregorius stumbles his way toward what he learns about Prado. Possibly, Mercier's American publisher thinks that his fiction offers the kind of intellectual puzzles and trickery that many readers love in the work of Umberto Eco, but there are no such pleasures to be found here. 'Night Train to Lisbon' never engages the reader, in particular never makes the reader care about Gregorius. It's an intelligent book, all right, but there's barely a breath of life in it. Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com." Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "For me, this beautiful book, philosophical inquiry included, lit a fuse that snaked its way into my consciousness, sending out sparklers of light that made me feel more alive, more awake, for days. I hated to see it come to an end. What more can one ask?" The Oregonian Review: "The text of Amadeu's writing is filled not with mere nuggets of wisdom but with a mother lode of insight, introspection and an honest, self-conscious person's illuminations of all the dark corners of his own soul." Seattle Times Review: "A book in which poetry and philosophy are intimately intertwined." Tages-Anzeiger (Switzerland) Review: " Night Train to Lisbon taps into some of the oldest veins of story, the primal ones of night journeys, of a distant land, of being stuck in-place, and yet adrift and confused....I'm not sure how much this book might teach any of us how to live...but it has helped remind this reader of what it is to really read." Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book CompanyReview: "One of the great European novels of the past few years." Page des libraires (France) Review: "One reads this book almost breathlessly, can hardly put it down....A handbook for the soul, intellect, and heart." Die Welt (Germany) Synopsis: A huge international best seller, this ambitious novel plumbs the depths of our shared humanity to offer up a breathtaking insight into life, love, and literature itself. A major hit in Germany that went on to become one of Europe’s biggest literary blockbusters in the last five years, Night Train to Lisbon is an astonishing novel, a compelling exploration of consciousness, the possibility of truly understanding another person, and the ability of language to define our very selves. Raimund Gregorius is a Latin teacher at a Swiss college who one day—after a chance encounter with a mysterious Portuguese woman—abandons his old life to start a new one. He takes the night train to Lisbon and carries with him a book by Amadeu de Prado, a (fictional) Portuguese doctor and essayist whose writings explore the ideas of loneliness, mortality, death, friendship, love, and loyalty. Gregorius becomes obsessed by what he reads and restlessly struggles to comprehend the life of the author. His investigations lead him all over the city of Lisbon, as he speaks to those who were entangled in Prado’s life. Gradually, the picture of an extraordinary man emerges—a doctor and poet who rebelled against Salazar’s dictatorship.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780802118585
- Author:
- Mercier, Pascal
- Publisher:
- Grove Press
- Translator:
- Harshav, Barbara
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- College teachers
- Subject:
- Self-realization
- Copyright:
- 2007
- Publication Date:
- December 21, 2007
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 438
- Dimensions:
- 9.04x6.39x1.39 in. 1.57 lbs.
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