NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON by Pascal Mercier
The most thoughtful and entertaining novel to come out of Europe in a decade is Night Train to Lisbon, written by Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri under the pseudonym of Pascal Mercier. It’s a smart, heartfelt, thoroughly enjoyable novel written for thinking adults, and the most recent incarnation, from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf right down to Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, of that potent, ever-popular myth, the book that changes your life.
That’s exactly what 57-year-old Raimund Gregorius finds in a secondhand bookshop. That little book, along with a young Portuguese woman about to jump off a bridge, cause this set-in-his-ways professor of dead languages to walk out of the school where he has taught for thirty years, out of his rigid life of habits in Bern, and get on a train to Lisbon to find out everything he can about the little book’s Portuguese author, Amadeu de Prado.
The novel expertly tells two stories at the same time with two very different, very endearing heroes. One is Gregorius, the old academic suffering from dizzy spells, who boldly decides to live the part of his life he’s never dared. From being a stuffy old stickler the faculty call Papyrus, he is slowly humanized and changed in Lisbon by piecing together the troubled saga of the little book’s author.
That's Amadeu de Prado, the other hero, a brilliant bad boy whose fiery graduation address scandalizes the Church, an honest young man who falls in love with the woman adored by his best friend. Amadeu is an obedient son who takes up medicine to please his pain-ridden, hunchbacked father. He becomes a saintly doctor who saves the life of the dictator’s cruelest henchman and becomes hated by the Resistance fighters he loves. Both tales are studded with dozens of great scenes and emotional payoffs.
It’s a story about putting together the pieces of a story. The characters are learned about in their tragic, romantic youth as legendary figures, then actually encountered as old people, when the drama is long over. The present-day action of the novel is built upon geriatric interviews with the survivors. You’ve never read a novel with this many eighty-year-old characters!
To top it off, hefty servings of Amadeu’s translated writings pepper the tale in meaty philosophical chunks. Go ahead and buy this one – believe me, you’ll want to read it more than once.
(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)
Nick DiMartino
2 Comments
Reader Comments (2)
It was reviews like this one that (wrongly, as it turned out) persuaded my London-based book club to choose this book.
Basically, it is a huge disappointment, its ideas worn-out, its style clunky (which may be the fault of the translation, of course), and its message uninteresting. I attempted to care about the main character and his obsession with Prado--but both in vain.
Then I thought, if I can spare any other reader the same level of disappointment, then I should attempt to do so. I have read philosophy (Sartre, Aristotle) and psychology (Freud,Jung, Klein) so perhaps I have read TOO much, but the thinking here is frankly so sophomoric as to make it painful to read.
(I hope that others may find this useful.)
All the best,
AM
I have found this review thouroughly interesting and corresponding to my own impression of the novel. I really enjoyed reading "Night Train to Lisbon" (in French), both because I liked the story and its characters and because I do love Lisbon and its people, that you can recognize in the characters of the book. Maybe it's not deep philosophy, which is not what I was looking for, anyway, but it certainly appeals to book-lovers and brings about food for thought.