Night Train to Lisbon

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More About This Book

Overview

A huge international bestseller, 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.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Raimund Gregorius, a Swiss professor of classical languages, is crossing a rainy bridge in Bern when a mysterious woman writes a phone number on his forehead and utters a single word in Portuguese. Later that day, he wanders into a bookstore and finds himself drawn to a Portuguese book titled A Goldsmith of Words, self-published in Lisbon 30 years earlier. These unexplained and seemingly unrelated events conspire to tear myopic bookworm Gregorius out of his solitary and unvarying existence and send him to Lisbon in search of both the woman and Amadeu de Prado, the book's (fictional) author. This third novel by the pseudonymous Mercier caused a sensation in Europe and spent 140 weeks on the German best-sellers lists, feats unlikely to be duplicated in the United States because of the book's slow pacing. Patient readers will be rewarded, however, by the involving, unpredictable, and well-constructed plot and Mercier's virtuosic orchestration of a large and memorable cast of characters. As the stories of Gregorius and de Prado draw together, this becomes a moving meditation on the defining moments in our lives, the "silent explosions that change everything." Recommended for all fiction collections.
—Forest Turner

Kirkus Reviews
An elegant meditative book teaches a painfully ironic life lesson in German-Swiss author Mercier's searching 2004 novel, a critically acclaimed international bestseller being published in the United States for the first time. He who learns the lesson is 50ish Raimund Gregorius, a philologist who teaches Latin, Greek and Hebrew at a Swiss high school-until an unknown woman excites the scholar's interest in an obscure book of philosophical observations penned by an equally unknown Portuguese author. Impulsively abandoning his academic responsibilities, Gregorius acquires the rare volume, ponders its contents and travels to Lisbon to research the life of its "vanished" author. He discovers that Amadeu de Prado, a would-be priest who became a renowned physician, had led an even more complex life as a member of the resistance movement opposing Portugal's notorious dictator Antonio Salazar. The story emerges from Gregorius's meetings: with Prado's aged sister Adriana, the stoical though not uncritical preserver of his memory; a contemplative priest with whom the nonbelieving doctor had often debated theology; the brilliant and beautiful colleague Estefania, who may have been Prado's true soul mate; and the Resistance comrade V'tor Coutinho, who discloses the "evil" act (saving the life of a vicious secret police official) that motivated Prado to forsake the life of the mind for that of a man of violent action. The nearer Gregorius comes to the truth of Prado's passionate commitment, the more insistent becomes the question he asks himself: "Had he perhaps missed a possible life, one he could easily have lived with his abilities and knowledge?" It's the age-old intellectual's dilemma, consideredin a compelling blend of suspenseful narrative and discursive commentary (quoted from Prado's text). An intriguing fiction only occasionally diluted by redundancy and by Mercier's overuse of the metaphor of a train journey. Agent: Friederike Barakat/Carl Hanser Verlag

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780802143976
  • Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  • Publication date: 10/15/2008
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 448
  • Sales rank: 174,801
  • Product dimensions: 5.70 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 1.50 (d)

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
( 18 )

Rating Distribution

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(7)

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Sort by: Showing all of 18 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted May 23, 2008

    Night Train To Lisbon

    The plot of Night Train To Lisbon begins with a well-worn premise: a character stuck in the routine of life suddenly receives an epiphany and goes on a horizon-expanding quest to find himself. But few novels or movies plumb the philosophical depths of this novel, the third by Swiss philosophy professor Peter Bieri, whose nom de plume is Pascal Mercier. A bestseller in Europe when it was first published in 2004, it is translated for the first time from German to English by Barbara Harshav. In this novel, the soon-to-be englightened protagonist is Raimund Gregorius, a 57-year-old divorced teacher of ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew at a secondary school in Bern, Switzerland, the same one he attended as a school boy. For years he has stuck to this uneventful life, watching his students come and go over the top of his Coke-bottle glasses and beloved textbooks of dead languages. But he is inspired to 'take his life into his own hands for the first time' after meeting a mysterious Portugese woman on the bridge he crosses every day to go to school. Thus, he abandons class, goes to a bookshop and comes across a Portugese book titled A Goldsmith Of Words by a man named Amadeu Inacio De Almeida Prado. He knows not the language, but has the bookseller translate for him. He is struck by a sentence: 'Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us - what happens with the rest?' We find out when Gregorius ups and leaves, abandoning home and school to travel to Lisbon, in search of the mysterious author of the book. He finds out that the latter, a doctor and a member of the resistance fighting against dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, died in 1973. But he is able to track down siblings and friends through some painstaking detective work. Most of them have their own samples of Amadeu's writing, and Gregorius slowly (and the plot indeed takes its time to unfurl in this 438-page tome) gains insight into a brilliant, melancholic man, a clever wordsmith who was yet frustrated by the inabaility of words to truly bridge the distance between people. The characters in the novel are rather old-fashioned in a Romantic sort of way, with soul-tortured people who haunt rooms where time has stopped, who harbour heart-rending regrets that from the central core of their lives, who swoon and bang their heads against the walls due to inner tumult. But such gothic cheesiness is compensated by the nuggets of philosophy revealed as Gregorius goes about his quest. This is a book that trustst the reader to concentrate, to plough through chunks of italicised excerpts from Amadeu's book, with musings ranging from why we fear death to how travel allows us to bridge distances externally and internally. This novel is a dense, and at times tedious, read. But the moments of exquisitely crystalised insight will have you scrambling for a pen to jot them down, and are well worth this long train ride.

    5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted February 1, 2009

    Captivating

    From the very beginning; the cover, the title, leads to a captivating plot, style, and evolving characters. A story beyond the narrative, that forces unto the reader a deeper look into the self and our existence. A bit tedious at times, with some very minor translation snaffus. A must read...

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted October 29, 2008

    more from this reviewer

    Peevish Prado

    Two hundred pages in I got the gist and wanted it to end. Prado's life is not that interesting, his questions (and speculative answers) are not profound and the people who knew him should have smacked him a few times.

    Had this book featured female characters, they would have been labeled whiners and the novel one long petulant lament.

    Very disappointing.

    2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 11, 2012

    i read mystery novels almost exclusively. i found this in a use

    i read mystery novels almost exclusively. i found this in a used book store, the cover caught my attn so i read the back. i bought it. it is a great story. a wonderful change from the predictable mystery is this predictable epiphany novel. it is not a book i read in 2 hrs. if you can purchase this title i encourage you to do so and sink into this engrossing tale.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 13, 2010

    Too many words, not enough story.

    Too many words, not enough story. The guy is a looser that rejected all responsiblity on a whim. He needed to get a real life. I struggled to get through the whole book.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted March 11, 2010

    Interesting

    This book was interesting to read because i have been in Lisbon and the author describes the city really well, even though these days it is a very diferent city, it is funny the way he feels so confused about everything in his life, there are so many people that feel the same way and just don't have what it takes to do something about it the way he did. And the fact that he encouters someone that he relates to on his journey to discover himself is also interesting, i just didn't know that alot of people in Portugal spoke french so well. The book is good, sometimes gets a little boring and confusing but overall very good, i did enjoy it. Just think about it for a second; would you be able to pack a bag and take off to rediscover yourself? How many of us don't wish we could? It is food for though.

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    Posted August 8, 2009

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    Posted November 1, 2008

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    Posted March 27, 2010

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    Posted June 10, 2011

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    Posted February 1, 2009

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    Posted February 13, 2009

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    Posted September 29, 2010

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