Review: Night Train to Lisabon (Satis Shroff)

Review: Pascal Mercier’s Nachtzug nach Lissabon (Satis Shroff)

Author: Pascal Mercier, Title: Night Train to Lisabon, btb Verlag, Random House, Munich 2006, 495 pages, price 9.50 euros ISBN-10: 3-422 73436 and ISBN-13: 978-3-442-73436-8

Pascal Mercier was born in 1944 in Bern (Switzerland) and is Professor for Philosophy at the Freie University Berlin. He was awarded the marie Luise Kashnitz-Prize in 2006. Other novels by the author are: Perlmanns Schweigen and Der Klavierstimmer.

The genre is a meditative memoir in which he cleverly mixes the ideas and the plot. The theme is the power of language, the original is in German, published in 2004 and dwells on people’s experiences, wants and who they really are.

The book is divided into four parts: Der Aufbruch (Begin of a journey), the Meeting, the Experiment and finally the Return. The book begins with ‘The day, after which nothing should be the same in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like numerous other days. He came at 7:45 am from the Bundesstrasse and crossed the Kircfeld bridge, which connects the city center to the Gymnasium, as schools are called in Germany and Switzerland (where you can do your ‘A’ levels).

This quest-story is told as a narrative in the past tense, but when the protagonist thinks, the author Pascal Mercier uses the stream-of-consciousness device in italics. The pace of the story is fast in this 496-page book. In a poignant letter to the school rector and Herr Kagi the protagonist Gregorius writes, ‘I’m undertaking a long journey and it’s open when I’ll return and how. I don’t expect you to keep my job for me.’ Further in the letter he writes, ‘You and I, we’re both admirers of Marc Auriel, and you’ll know in these words of his on self-observation: ‘Harm yourself, do harm to yourself and be brutal to yourself, my soul, for you will have no time later to consider and respect yourself. For we all have only a single life, but have done so as though your happiness depended on the other souls..those who are not aware of the earthquakes of your soul are as a consequence unhappy.’

The protagonist of this novel is a Swiss Latin-teacher named Raimund Georgius, 57, and he’s a language genius who teaches in a Gymnasium. About his school charges he thinks: they have so much to live; how open is their future; so many things can happen to them; they can experience so many things.

He gets up from his chair in the middle of his lesson and leaves his class. He’s shocked by the sudden feeling and leaves his carefully constructed Swiss life behind.

It’s raining heavily in Bern and a gust of strong wind turns his umbrella upside down. At this moment he sees a woman in the middle of the bridge who’s reading what looks like a letter. As he approaches her, she crumbles the letter to a ball and throws it. She’s going to jump into the cold, glacial-green waters of the river Aare, he thinks. He drops his teachie-satchel and the exercise books of his school-kids flow out, get wet. She sees him, fetches a pen from her coat and writes a number on his forehead and says in a foreign tongue in French, ‘Excuse me, but I’m obliged not to forget this telephone number and don’t have paper to write it on.’ Both are wet and he says he’s a teacher and takes her to school.

Shortly thereafter, the woman disappears and what remains are her jacket with a book about the charismatic and highly intelligent, politically engaged Portugese physician and resistance-fighter Amadeu de Prado. Gregorius finds a ticked in the book for a night train to Lisabon. He becomes obsessed with the translation of the book. Gregorius is fascinated by the story, especially the views and thoughts of the author.

He translates a passage from the Portugese book into German: ‘If it is so, then we can only live a part of our lives which is within us, what happens to the rest?’

The physician’s book is about the life, love, loneliness and death and all these themes become a passion, as Gregorius, the Swiss teacher begins his search in the inner and the outer world. He wants to know more about this mysterious, fascinating medical doctor. Gregorius seems to realise slowly who the author of this novel really was. But what are the consequences for his own life? Is it possible for a person to leave everything that one is used to behind? Bruce Chatwin did it in his ‘Patagonia’ travelogue and Siddharta Gautama Buddha did it when he left his palace, wife and child, to search for truth.

The ‘Night train to Lisabon’ is not only an epic novel with a lot of voices about a trip across Europe but also about own thoughts and feelings. A book I’d put at the same level as Peter Mathiessen’s ‘The Snow Leopard’ about a journey to Western Nepal on the trail of the elusive snow leopard, a denizen of Dolpo, as well as a journey in the inner world of the author’s friend George Schaller, a Zen-Buddhist.

Raimund Gregorius boards the night train to Lisabon spontaneously and leaves behind his teachie-life into the unknown. Jeremy Irons does justice to the role of Raimund Gregorius, and the viewer-cum-reader can put the puzzle together piece for piece, and experience the moving, revolutionary life of Dr. Amadeu de Prado, which is stuffed with political and emotional intrigues at the time of the Portugese Revolution in the 1970s.

Gregorius himself discovers love in Lisbon and his journey becomes a search for the reason of his own existence. In the film version of this literature, Jeremy Irons is supported by high-class international stars such as Charlotte Rampling, Bruno Ganz, Christopher Lee, Melanie Laurent and Martina Gedeck. The film takes the essential time for its protagonists and their complex stories. The well-photographed film develops into a philosophical thriller with a poignant critic on the deadly monotony and schedule of everyday life. The book and the film are excellent works of art, and at the same time literary works dripping with tension.

The purpose of the book? This quest book about the protagonist’s fascination for Prado’s story and its poetic insight in 17 year old Prado’s graduation speech, ‘I revere the word God because I love its poetic force’ is remarkable. It reminds me of Arjuna’s rhetoric question to the God Krishna in the ancient Vedic book ‘Bhagavad Gita’ in the battlefield of Kurushetra. Savvy philosophical musings? You’re on the right track. The authors takes you on a journey through memories and philosophical concepts and throws light into his own soul, as well as that of the Portugese physician Prado, who dies in 1973 at the age of 53. Prado is the man Gregorius wishes he could have been. Amadeu de Prado regards life as a deceptive world and the world within ourselves is a delusion, which makes us doubly strangers. These words have a great impact on Gregorius and they make him scan his life, his terrible marriage, his social contacts, and the fact that he has a nickname ‘Papyrus’ for his friends think he lives more in old texts than in the real world. The same argument could be transferred while referring to Facebook or cyber-game addicts,eh?

This philosophical work is topical because it has dialogues, pace and in Prado’s speech he is repelled by the violent subjugation in the name of a complacent God. The death and agony of wars, conflicts in recent times and the vetoes of the powerful nations in escalating such conflicts is one such example.