Night Train to Lisbon (Mercier)

Night Train to Lisbon
Pascal Mercier, 2004 (Trans., 2008)
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
438 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802143976


Summary
Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss lycée, and lives a life governed by routine. One day, a chance encounter with an enigmatic Portuguese woman inspires him to question his life—and leads him to an extraordinary book that will open the possibility of changing his existence.

He takes the train to Lisbon that same night, and with him the words of Amadeu de Prado, a doctor whose practice and principles led him into confrontation with Salazar’s dictatorship, and a man whose intelligence and magnetism left a mark on everyone who met him.

As Gregorius becomes fascinated with unlocking the mystery of who Prado was—meeting, among others, Prado’s eighty-year-old sister, who keeps the man’s house like a musem, an elderly torture survivor now confined to a nursing home, and Prado’s childhood friend and eventual partner in the resistance movement—an extraordinary tale takes shape, centered on a group of people working in utmost secrecy to fight dictatorship, and the betrayals that threaten to expose them.

A haunting tale of repression, resistance, and the universal human struggle to connect, Night Train to Lisbon is richly layered, wonderfully told, and inexorably propelled by the mystery at its heart.

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.

A huge international best seller, Night Train to Lisbon was published in hardcover in January with a modest first printing.  It has been hailed by booksellers and critics, and embraced by readers.  As this catalog goes to press, the hardcover has gone into its fourth printing, and appeared on best-seller lists across the country. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Aka—Peter Bieri
• Birth—June 23, 1944
• Where—Bern, Switzerland
• Education—Ph. D., University of Heidelberg
• Currently—N/A

Peter Bieri, is a Swiss writer and professor of philosophy, who writes under the pseudonym Pascal Mercier. Night Train to Lisbon is his third novel.

Bieri studied philosophy, English studies and Indian studies in both London and Heidelberg. From there he was awarded a doctoral degree for his work on the philosophy of time. After the conferral of his doctorate, Bieri worked as a scientific assistant at the Philosophical Seminar at University of Heidelberg.

Bieri co-founded the research unit "Cognition and Brain" at the German Research Foundation. The focuses of his research were the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. From 1990 through 1993, he was a professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Marburg; from 1993 he taught philosophy at the Free University of Berlin while holding the chair of philology, succeeding his mentor, Ernst Tugendhat. (From Barnes & Noble and Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews 
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.
Washington Post

Celebrates the beauty and allure of language.... Adroitly addresses concepts of sacrifice, secrets, memory, loneliness, infatuation, tyranny, and translation. It highlights how little we know about others.
Tony Miksanek - Chicago Sun-Times

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.... Mercier has captured a time in history—one of time times—when men must take a stand.
Valerie Ryan - Seattle Times

Dreamlike.... A meditative, deliberate exploration of loneliness, language and the human condition.... The reader is transported and, like Gregorius, better for having taken the journey.
Debra Ginsberg - San Diego Union-Tribune

Might call to mind the magical realism of Jorge Amado or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.... Allusive and thought-provoking, intellectually curious and yet heartbreakingly jaded.... Its lyricism and aura of the mysterious only enhance the tale’s clear-sighted confrontation with the enduring questions.
Tony Lewis - Providence Journal

Rich, dense, star-spangled.... The novels of Robert Stone come to mind, and Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe, and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map, not to mention Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein.... [But] what Night Train to Lisbon really suggests is Roads to Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre’s breathless trilogy about identity-making.
John Leonard - Harpers

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

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 - Library Journal

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, considered in 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.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1.  In the first chapter we meet Raimund Gregorius, aka Mundus, aka Papyrus and learn about his essential habits.  Now that you have finished the book, as the story progressed, and in light of what you learned about him, throughout, how are his nicknames appropriate? “That was the moment that decided everything,” (p. 5).  What do you think was decided? 

2.  After he leaves his classroom what makes Mundus head for the bookstore?  Why does he have such an instinctive reaction to the book Um Ourives das Palavras by Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado?  Cite some passages from A Goldsmith of Words to support your view.

3. Why did the woman on the bridge, strange as their interaction was, have such a lasting effect on Gregorius?  What incident in Gregorius’s past makes the consequences less surprising?

4. “That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him.” (p. 42). Why is this small piece essential to our understanding of the puzzle that is Gregorius?  How is his métier, teaching ancient languages, involved with everything he thinks? What is the importance of books in the life of Gregorius and Prado?  How do books connect the two?

5. In Lisbon Mundus has an accidental collision with a rollerblader.  Are there other fortuitous “collisions”?  Because his glasses were broken by the rollerblader, he gets new lenses prescribed by Mariana Eça. “With the new glasses the world was bigger and for the first time, space really had three dimensions where things could extend unhindered.” (p. 88). Discuss Gregorius and his eyesight.  Concern with his vision has led him to some very important links.  Connect some of these links to make a chain encircling Amadeu Prado. What other physical changes besides new glasses does Gregorius make?   Discuss chance vs. choice.

6.  Mundus interacts with three different physicians, Doxiades, his Greek doctor and friend in Bern, Eça, his Portuguese ophthalmologist, and of course, Amadeu Prado the man he encounters only through his writing.  Why is a man of the mind drawn to medical practitioners concerned with the body?

7. Only six days pass between the moment that Gregorius leaves his old life in Bern to the moment when he first encounters Prado’s sister, Adriana, at the casa azul, “As if my whole future were behind this door,” (p. 97). In this short time he has become immersed in another man’s life, a life that was ended by an aneurysm thirty-one years before.  How does time and memory have an effect on what he learns inside the house?

8. What is the nature of Adriana’s relationship with her brother, before and after his death? What are the important events that formed their bond?  Why does she always wear the black ribbon around her neck?  Is she a reliable source?

9. Mundus wishes to meet Mariana’s uncle João Eça because he knows that he had been in the resistance movement as had Prado. Mariana sets him up with an errand to deliver a recording of Schubert’s sonatas. Prado and Eça had first met on a train during Amadeu and Fatima’s honeymoon in England. Senhor Eça, as well as train journeys, in addition to the sonatas all take their place in the unraveling of some of the mysteries of Prado’s life. Is it all serendipity or is something else at work here? “Was he still Mundus, the myopic bookworm, who had gotten scared only because a few snowflakes had fallen in Bern?” (p.114). Was he?

10.  Once trust is established between João Eça and Gregorius he learns a great deal from the older man. What part does the game of chess play in their relationship?  In what other personal associations does chess figure?

11. Prado appears to have had a very different relationship with his sister Rita/Melodie than with his sister Adriana. After his wife, Fatima’s death, he writes a long letter to Melodie from Oxford in which he speaks of an Irishman with a red soccer ball. “No meeting of minds?” I asked. “What?” he shouted and howled with laughter. “What?” And then he shot the soccer ball he had been carrying the whole time onto the sidewalk.  I would like to have been the Irishman, an Irishman, who dared to appear in All Souls College for the evening lecture with a bright red soccer ball.” (p. 137). What is Amadeu trying to communicate to his sister?  Why does he want to be like the Irishman?  How would his life have been different if he had been?

12. In order to find out more about Prado’s early days, Gregorius visits Father Bartolomeu, now in his nineties, who had been a teacher at the Liceu. Father Bartolomeu speaks of Prado’s funeral.  “Two people, a man and a young woman, of restrained beauty came toward each other from each end of the path to the grave.  Each had to cover an equally long way to the grave and they seemed to adapt the speed of their steps precisely to one another, so they arrived at the same time.  Their eyes did not meet one single time on the way but were aimed toward the ground. To this day, I don’t know what kind of secret bound the two people or what it had to do with Amadeu” (p. 160). Who were these people and what was their secret, and what did it have to do with Prado?

13. Father Bartolomeu gives Gregorius an envelope containing Amadeu Prado’s “blasphemous” graduation speech. “I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals.  I need the luster of their windows, their cool stillness, their imperious silence.  I need the deluge of the organ and the sacred devotion of praying people” (p. 171). What does the speech reveal about Prado?  Why was he sometimes called the “priest of truth”?

14. What does the note written by Prado about saving Mendes, “the doctor of death,” reveal?  “Here what experience always kept teaching me is confirmed, quite against the original temperament of my thought: that the body is less corrupt than the mind” (p. 193).  Does Prado think of himself primarily as a doctor?  The question of sacrificing one life for many arises once again in the case of Estafânia Espinhosa.  Do you think that there is a consistency between the two instances?  What is ironic about Estâfania? Did you find  Prado’s behavior inevitable?

15. Prado’s close friendship with Jorge O’Kelly, would be pianist, Lisbon pharmacist, former resistance fighter, and accomplished chess player, began when they were boys and flourished even though they differed in significant ways. In order to understand Prado, Gregorius must understand O’Kelly.  In what ways were they different?  What drew them to each other?   “All the blood had drained out of his face.  In this one single second, I realized that the most horrible thing had happened: our lifelong affection had turned into hate.  That was the moment, the dreadful moment, when we lost each other” (p. 335). What split them apart?

16. Gregorius tracks down another close friend of Prado’s from his school days, Maria João Ávila. “If there was anybody who knew all his secrets, it was Maria Joao.  In a certain sense, she, only she, knew who he was.” (p. 337). What does Gregorius perceive about her?  How did this relationship develop?  Was there any similarity to Prado’s other liaisons with women?

17. Gregorius eventually leaves his hotel in Lisbon to live in the apartment of a man, Senhor Da Silveira, whom he had met and befriended on the night train.  What are the parallels in the friendship between these two and Prado/O’Kelly?  What else has changed about Gregorius besides his address? What are the parallels between Raimundo Gregorius and Amadeu Prado? Cite some specific events in the narrative to sustain your views.

18. Many letters are quoted in this book.  Gregorius reads one of these from the father, Judge Prado, to his son Amadeu and from the son, Doctor Prado to his father. “It was crazy, thought Gregorius: both men, father and son, had lived on opposite hills of the city like opposing actors in an ancient drama, linked in an archaic fear of each other and in an affection they didn’t find the words for, and had written letters to each other that they didn’t trust themselves to send.  Clasped in muteness neither understood, and blind to the fact that one muteness produced the other.” (p. 291). What do the letters contain, and what is learned from them? What is the nature of the father-son relationship?

19.  “And there’s something else about the intricate way you created me according to your will-like a wanton sculptress of an alien soul: the names you gave me Amadeu Inacio.  Most people don’t think anything of it, now and then somebody says something about the melody.  But I know better, for I have the sound of your voice in my ear, a sound full of conceited devotion.  I was to be a genius.  I was to possess godlike grace.  And at the same time-the same time!-I was to embody the murderous rigidity of the holy Ignacio and his abilities to perform as a priestly general” (p. 312). What kind of a woman was Senhora Prado?   What was the nature of the mother-son relationship?

20. “He had disappointed all expectations and broken all taboos, and that was his bliss.  In the end, he was at peace with the bent judging father, the soft dictatorship of the ambitious mother, and the lifelong stifling gratitude of the sister.” (p. 379).  Gregorius sees this image of Prado late in the story when he himself may be facing death. When the bookseller from the Spanish bookstore asks him if the book kept its promise, Gregorius says that it did, absolutely. How have the memories of the doctor/poet’s life helped him to bring together his own life and to find his own peace?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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