Night Train to Lisbon [ペーパーバック]

I'll admit that the book might not sound that interesting. A schoolteacher having a sort of midlife crisis picks up a book of philosophical essays that somehow speak to him that were written by a Portuguese doctor who died 30 years ago, drops everything in his life, starts to learn Portuguese and translate the book, and travels to Lisbon to interview people who knew the writer. The writer was an intense personality who made a deep impression on the people around him, who are more than happy to talk about him, if only to bring him back to life a little through their reminiscences. As the book progresses, layers are pulled back and the protagonist penetrates deeper into the life and thoughts of the writer, eventually coming to understand his tragic end.

As dull as the book may sound, I couldn't put it down. I found it to be a thought-provoking meditation on life, arranged in such a way that one was eager to see what would happen next. At the same time I can understand why there were a number of negative reviews here. This book has a kind of European sensibility to it that might not appeal to the typical American audience. But if you are looking for something a bit different, I recommend giving it a try.

Note: I read the original, not the translation. The language of the original seemed to me to be kind of fancy and a bit overblown, and thus perhaps hard to translate without losing some of its elegance. But I glanced at the translation and it at least seemed pretty readable.

I'm a bit surprised by some of the negative reviews this book is getting. What a wonderful novel, thought provoking and beautiful, about the power of language and it's ability to draw out the mysterious depths of a human life. Mercier has created such a haunting character in Mundus, his anxieties about the future and the past are heartbreaking and all too familiar. I found it to be thouroughly engrossing, one of the best written novels i've read in quite some time; emotional, romantic, evocative, and- unlike some novels of its kind- not preachy, but searching, earnest. It possesses such a sadness and such a hope... in a world where entertainment ((even the novel nowadays, what a shame)) is so deeply mired in 'what happens next', Night Train to Lisbon's unapologetic introspection is a welcome change of pace.

Published in German in 2004, Pascal Mercier's NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON only just reached our shores in an English translation this year. Hailed as an international literary sensation (over two million copies sold worldwide) and blurbed nearly into the Western literary canon on its dust jacket, this book will almost certainly garner a collective yawn from those Americans who open its covers. Most, I suspect, will likely never finish. They will instead discover that what looks to be a mysterious story of spies and resistance to ruthless dictatorship is something far less and so slow to develop they may want to sue the reviewer from Germany's Die Welt who blurbed, "One reads this book almost breathlessly, and can hardly put it down..." One can only imagine this line being recited by Mike Myers in an old SNL Sprockets skit.

Not to say that NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON is without its merits. However, one needs to approach this book with a certain tolerance and patience as well as a literary frame of mind, comparable perhaps to tackling something by Stendahl or Henry James or Edith Wharton. The story line is of itself simple enough, if rather improbable. Raimund Gregorius is a lifelong instructor of ancient languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew) at the same Swiss lycee in Bern where he himself had been a student. Nicknamed satirically as Mundus by his students and derisively as "the Papyrus" by his Gymnasium colleagues, Gregorius is Mr. Chips writ large: divorced, dryly unemotional, sheltered, over-intellectualized - more a walking dictionary than a human being, and reaching his life's end.

Crossing a bridge on his way to the lycee on morning, he approaches a mysterious young woman who appears to be contemplating suicide. She steps back, only to write a phone number on the teacher's forehead. She soon disappears, but not before Gregorius learns she is Portuguese, and that fact leads him the same day to a Spanish bookstore where he encounters a book in Portuguese entitled A Goldsmith of Words by Amadeu Prado. After laboring to translate and read excerpts of Prado's book, Gregorius decides one afternoon to leave his school, his students, and his city for Lisbon where he hopes to perhaps find the mysterious woman on the bridge and the story of Prado's life.

This setup takes perhaps thirty pages. The rest concerns Gregorius's slow self-realizations about his own life as he gradually pieces together the triumphs, tragedies, and lost loves of the tortured soul who wrote the rambling essays in A Goldsmith of Words. As he proceeds to uncover Prado's story, he research calls forth memories from among those who knew him and he inadvertently restores the broken web that connected many of them. Prado's story alternates occasionally with the backdrop of Gregorius's, and the whole is frequently interspersed with what are supposed to be excerpts from Prado's book and letters to his sister, father, and lost loves. These last range from boring to insufferably self-possessed, filled with homiletic screechings and weary aphorisms that interrupt the book's story line and flow. "We humans: what do we know of one another?" Or "The world as a stage, waiting for us to produce the important and sad, funny and meaningless drama of our imaginations."Or "Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living." Or my favorite: "Human beings can't bear silence; it would mean that they would bear themselves." Hard to bear, indeed.

Not surprisingly given the book's title, trains and train rides loom large in the story. They variously serve to represent flights to freedom or away from one's old life as well as periods of introspection or contemplation of significant life decisions. At one point, the entirety of a human life becomes encapsulated in Prado's use of a train trip metaphor with an unseen but presumably divine conductor. At another stage, a train trip has unmistakably Freudian overtones that lead to tragic consequences.

In the end, NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON is a story about relationships - families, friends, parents, children, siblings, lovers - and regrets. It is also a story about the influence of random, uncontrollable events and how people's choices in responding to those events affect their lives. Despite its pseudo-philosophical meanderings, Mercier's book is a modestly intriguing exploration of two over-intellectualized souls searching for their path through life and ultimately realizing what they've missed by living almost exclusively in a world of words and thoughts. The "goldsmith of words" dies in the gilded cage of his own construction.