Getting off at a station
Night Train to Lisbon. Pascal Mercier. Literary novel.
What triggers Raimund Gregorius, a set in his ways languages teacher at a University in Bern, to do just this is a chance encounter with a woman on a bridge and how she speaks. A few short words in her native Portuguese sets him off on a side trip to Lisbon after which his life will never be the same.
Or is it actually different? Does the journey, and the several others which he takes through both the present day and the Salazar dictatorship era Portugal, through another chance encounter, this time with a book, merely provide him with a reflection of his own life?
Gregorius is by nature a self-contained man. With few friends, he would think, though he might be surprised to realise just how fondly those who do acquaint his life consider him. The unexpected detour on his own journey has him following a man long dead, the doctor Amadeu Prado, through his writings and through those of Prado's friends who are still alive. He finds a man, indeed, very similar to himself.
His quest is not necessarily welcomed by some of the dead man's friends and acquaintances. Prado was, as most of us are, a very complex individual who created complications in the lives of those he left behind.
'Night Train to Lisbon' is not a quick read. Despite the fact that I am a quick reader, it took me several months to finish Mercier's book. Months of many pick-ups and put-downs. Months in which I probably read a dozen or more books of much less depth. It is a story of many layers, as might be expected with the author being a Professor of Philosophy. And many of those layers are deep.
If a soul can be searched, Gregorius is doing it for all of us. If, of course, there is such a thing as a soul. Perhaps life itself, in its simple and its complex, is the soul. Thus it is even more transient than people of faith would prefer to believe. And if there is a life everlasting component to our being here, perhaps it is about how what we do, or don't do, decides small but vital local constructs in the extraordinary web that is mankind's past, present and future.
You can read this one for how elegantly the words are writ, even in translation from the original German. Or you can read it to plumb its philosophical depths. Or simply to follow a man who took the time to get off the train before the last stop. To look back at where he came from. To realise that there are other places than those on the route first chosen. To spend time with fellow travellers on the network and see where their journeys have taken them.
When I think about it, that's what I was doing in how I read this book. Conciously or not, I didn't want to do the whole trip in one go.
Brian Byrne.
