Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier

Whenever I am about to embark on a trip, I thoroughly enjoy searching for stories set in the city of my destination. Earlier this month, my husband and I traveled to Lisbon, Portugal. In our luggage, we packed Lisbon books that we relished reading in the city’s cafés.

My favorite novel was Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon written in 2004. The book follows the midlife journey of Raimund Gregorius a 57-year-old divorced classics professor living in Bern, Switzerland. After years in the same routine, he is open to change. He knows his life is half over and feels envy toward his students, “How much life they still have before them; how open their future still is; how much can still happen to them; how much they can still experience.”

While walking to his school one morning in the pouring rain, he notices a woman leaning over the edge of a bridge reading a letter. It appears that she might jump, but doesn’t. They speak briefly and Gregorius learns one fact about her: she is Portuguese. The encounter shakes him. Rather than teach his class, he walks to a nearby hotel and has a cup of tea. He has taken the first step to change his life.

Then at his local bookstore, Gregorius coincidently discovers a book by a Portuguese man named Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado. The book is titled A Goldsmith of Words. The introduction strikes a chord with Gregorius. Prado writes of wanting to become the ‘archeologist of his soul’ to understand the choices of his life. “Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us –what happens with the rest?” These two Portuguese connected events inspire him. Within a couple of days, he makes an uncharacteristic decision and boards a train to Lisbon. He hopes to learn more about Amadeu Prado.

The novel follows Gregorius as he wanders through the streets of Lisbon learning about the complex life of Amadeus Prado and the book Prado wrote thirty years ago. When Prado and his friends were young, they had been part of the resistance against the right wing dictator António Salazar who ruled Portugal for 36 years. Like a John Le Carré or Dan Brown novel, the story follows Gregorius as he slowly pieces together what happened to Prado and his fellow fighters leading up to the Portuguese revolution of 1974. The book is not about the politics of Portugal. Rather the novel focuses on the now middle age resistance members who Gregorius meets. They each look back at the group’s complicated dynamics and the life and death choices they made during that terrifying time. Gregorius has empathy for each person’s plight and feels invigorated as he grasps each person’s perspective. The novel contains Prado’s plaintive philosophical and psychological musings about parents, love, religion and the meaning of life.

This novel was engaging, enjoyable and stimulating. Even if you are not in Lisbon, Night Train to Lisbon is a wonderful ride.