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A Novel
by Pascal Mercier
A huge international best seller, this ambitious novel plumbs the depths of our hared humanity to offer up a breathtaking insight into life, love, and literature itself. A major hit in Germany that went on to become one of Europe’s biggest literary blockbusters in the last five years, Night Train to Lisbon is an astonishing novel, a compelling exploration of consciousness, the possibility of truly understanding another person, and the ability of language to define our very selves.
Raimund Gregorius is a Latin teacher at a Swiss college who one day—after a chance encounter with a mysterious Portuguese woman—abandons his old life to start a new one. He takes the night train to Lisbon and carries with him a book by Amadeu de Prado, a (fictional) Portuguese doctor and essayist whose writings explore the ideas of loneliness, mortality, death, friendship, love, and loyalty. Gregorius becomes obsessed by what he reads and restlessly struggles to comprehend the life of the author. His investigations lead him all over the city of Lisbon, as he speaks to those who were entangled in Prado’s life. Gradually, the picture of an extraordinary man emerges—a doctor and poet who rebelled against Salazar’s dictatorship.
"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." - Library Journal.
"An intriguing fiction only occasionally diluted by redundancy and by Mercier's overuse of the metaphor of a train journey." - Kirkus Reviews.
"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.
"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." - The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley.
"Reading this book, I was reminded how, years ago in an undergraduate creative-writing class, a young woman blurted out, “Yes, yes, but when do you make the writing grandiose?” “Never!” I answered, perhaps too quickly. For her question pointed to the widespread notion that literary language should be elevated above everyday discourse and elevated in a way that justifies her guileless choice of adjective. To many, if not most, readers today, grandiosity and its associated qualities – pomposity, verbosity, prolixity, pedantry and melodrama – are not off-putting but the hallmarks of great literature." - Los Angeles Times.
"Even so, this cannot explain the absence of narrative tension, or Mercier’s grandiose style (eyes shine “like black diamonds” and words are “worn grooves of babble [which] incessantly flash”). They make the novel particularly ponderous." - New Statesman.
"Having situated himself on the disputed border between fact and fiction, Pascal Mercier now takes his rightful place among our finest European novelists." - Daily Telegraph.
This information about Night Train to Lisbon was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
According to Grove Press, Night Train to Lisbon has rung up "over two million copies sold worldwide" and has been lavishly reviewed throughout Europe. Pascal Mercier is the pen name of Peter Bieri, a professor of philosophy.
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