Night Train To Lisbon by Pascal Mercier (1944-2023)  is the sixth and final book from my Book Booty list, posted on January 22.

First published in 2004, it was a huge international bestseller and has since been made into a film (2013) starring Jeremy Irons. In addition to its bestselling status, Night Train To Lisbon has also received a multitude of critical accolades, such as “One of the great European novels of recent years” (Page des librairies – France) and “A sensation…The best book of the last decade…” (Bücher – Germany.)

My response is more cautious. In fact, it’s not often I have to reflect long and hard on what I really think about a book.

Firstly, I did like it and am glad I read it. I didn’t love it, though, and am not sure whether I would read it again. Before I say why, though, I’ll start with an outline of the story.

Outline

The protagonist Raimund Gregorious, nicknamed “Mundus”, teaches classical languages at a gymnasium (academic high school) in Bern, Switzerland. He is a man of deeply entrenched routine, but shaken up by a chance encounter with a young woman whom he believes is about to commit suicide. Instead she writes a telephone number on his forehead (in the absence of paper or cellphone) and communicates that she is Portugese, before vanishing from his life.

Her Portugese nationality sparks a subsequent sequence of life-changing decisions, including purchasing a secondhand book, published a quarter century before, titled Um Ouvrives Das Palavras — A Goldsmith of Words. The book’s author is Amadeu Prado, a mysterious figure who died two years before the book was published.

Gregorious finds the opening sections of A Goldsmith of Words as life-altering as the encounter with the woman on the bridge, so much so that he leaves Switzerland and his job, taking the night train to Lisbon to learn more of the book’s origins and its mysterious author.

What ensues is a series of encounters with members of Amadeu Prado’s surviving family and friends. These encounters unfold in conjunction with Gregorious’s reading of A Goldsmith of Words, and open up the interior world of Prado’s convictions, and his personal and family life. It also leads Gregorious to discover Prado’s involvement in the Portugese resistance to the Salazar dictatorship, through which he became entangled in a tragic and destructive love triangle.

At face value, then, Night Train To Lisbon is about Raimund Gregorius’s life-altering journey and rediscovery of himself, through his quest to uncover who Amadeu Prado was and the origins of A Goldsmith of Words.

The Main Protagonists

Night Train To Lisbon has two protagonists. The first is Gregorius, who embarks on an impulsive, Quixotic, and in many ways obsessive mission to reveal the life and thought of Amadeu Prado.

The second is Amadeu Prado himself, whom we only know through his writing—sections of which form part of the narrative, similar to an epistolatory novel—and what his family, friends, and community remember and reveal. That knowledge, though, is core to the narrative. As much, if not more so, than Gregorius’s quest to illuminate it.

My ‘Terribly Important Thoughts’ 😀

In terms of  what I really enjoyed about the book, the cast of characters is at the top of the list. Prado’s surviving family members, a teacher, friends from his school days and the resistance—all inform Gregorius’s quest. There are also others who intersect his path, independent of Prado: José da Silveira, a businessman met on the train, who becomes a friend; an opthamologist, Mariana Eça; and Cecília, his Portugese language teacher.

The development of and interactions between all these characters are masterful. The narrative captures the subtleties of human relationship and motivation, and reveals a profound understanding of human nature. For me, that is far and away its greatest strength. Nothing about the characters is ‘by the numbers’ — this is a cast of very real people, with all their strengths and weaknesses.

Night Train To Lisbon also has a really strong sense of place, from Gregorius’s origins in, and strong connection to Bern, his exploration of Lisbon in pursuit of Prado, and—late in the book—of Salamanca (Spain) when tracking down the latter’s resistance colleague and love, Estefânia.

The overlap between emotional and physical ‘place’ is also explored through Gregorius’s youthful interest in Isfahan, and its psychological hold on him, and Prado’s similar fascination with Finisterre, in northern Spain.

In terms of what the story is really about, beyond the synopsis above, I believe it centres on the nature of existence and what it means to be human, along with the dynamics of self and other within that context. A complementary, but equally significant theme is the importance of language to comprehending existence, and the degree to which it shapes us (rather than the other way about.)

The chief mechanism for exploring these themes is through Prado’s writings and Gregorius’s reflections upon them. In this respect, Night Train To Lisbon is a cerebral and introspective narrative—which is entirely consistent with the characters of the two protagonists. 😀 And although not “heavy”, as such, it’s definitely a book where the reader needs to be paying attention.

Not least in deciding what, if anything, should be taken at face value, starting with Prado’s writings. Or, to deploy my own tongue-in-cheek phrase for this discussion, his “terribly important thoughts” — for that is how they are presented in the book. Just as Prado is perceived by others as a prodigy and his reflections (in A Goldsmith of Words and related writings) as evidence of genius.

Or are they? Reading them along with Gregorius, I frequently thought them pretentious, and sometimes found their intensity somewhat puerile. In some cases, particularly where Gregorius is reading letters Prado has penned (but never sent) to his parents, I also considered the outpourings more than a little neurotic. He is also extremely judgmental, as is Gregorius when it comes to matters of the intellect: it is the character trait they have most in common.

The time these impressions really took hold, at around half to two-thirds through the book, was also when I decided I really needed to pay attention. Chiefly to determine whether I was meant to take Prado as the genius he was purported to be, or as a more complex human being—and perhaps less of a prodigy.

By the end of the book I was inclining toward believing this may have been the author’s intention, chiefly because of the observations of several touchstone characters such as Prado’s lifelong friend, Maria João. But I was, and am, by no means sure, especially when so many reviews praise Night Train To Lisbon’s philosophical and existential gravitas.

Hence my mixed feelings, both about Amadeu Prado and the book. And although there was (and is) a great deal about it that I liked, I felt conscious throughout of myself reading and appreciating its craft, rather than being absorbed by the story. A distance that was never fully bridged.

I read the English language translation by Barbara Harshaw, 2008, in the 2009 paperback edition, 436 pp, published by Atlantic Books. I obtained my reading copy from a library.