Night Train to Lisbon probably wasn’t meant to be read while lounging poolside, but somehow that’s what I did, finding myself, despite the unlikely setting, thoroughly absorbed in this philosophical novel. It concerns Raimund Gregorius, a middle-aged classical language scholar in Switzerland, who, after an unsettling encounter with a possibly suicidal Portuguese woman, abruptly upends his life, becoming obsessed with an obscure book by Amadeau de Prado, and going in search of what he could learn about the man.  

Gregorius comes to learn that Prado, now deceased, was a brilliant thinker with a charismatic personality, a physician, a member of the resistance during the Salazar Dictatorship, and a tormented soul, who struggled with moral issues, his relationships with his family and friends, and the knowledge of his mortality.

Perhaps it strains credulity that so many of the people who knew Prado best were still alive some thirty years later, and were willing to open their hearts to a stranger. It’s a fair criticism of the plot. But somehow, it works, at least it does for me, and I found Gregorius’ existential crisis and his efforts to unlock Prado’s mysteries believable in their specificity and irrationality.

Night Train to Lisbon reminds me a bit of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (another book in which a doctor’s moral choices in a repressive regime have political repercussions), but it’s wholly original in its explorations of human self-knowledge and decision making. The prose (at least in the English translation by Barbara Harshav) is beautiful and haunting. Like so many of the best books, it’s about how to live, and it offers no easy answers.  

It’s not an easy read, but Night Train to Lisbon is worth the effort. Or at least this reader thinks so. The novel received mixed reviews–some find it boring, clunky, facile. In a way, that’s one of the main themes of the book, though–the difference in perceptions between people, our miscommunications, and our failures to understand each other, or even ourselves. If you seek a thoughtful and elegant exploration of ideas and recent history, and have a high tolerance for philosophical musings, you may find that this one speaks to you.

NOVEL: Night Train to Lisbon

AUTHOR: Pascal Mercier (pseudonym of Peter Bieri) 

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2004 (English translation 2008)

LEAD-IN IMAGE

Book cover, Grove Atlantic