MERCIER, Pascal - Night Train to Lisbon - (Paperback)

Book still in a very good condition.  >>>   A teacher of dead languages (Latin, Greek) at a Swiss prep school has no real friends or even much of a life to speak of.  One day he stops a despondent young woman from jumping off a bridge.  She is Portuguese and he then begins reading a work by a Portuguese author and becomes obsessed with finding out about the author.  He quits his dull job of many years (in the same school he attended as a boy) and hops a train to Lisbon even though he doesn’t even speak Portuguese.    -   So this is novel of male midlife crisis.  (The author, who writes in German, is Swiss and has been a philosophy professor.)  The narrator goes back to retrace the life of the Portuguese author and finds he is deceased.  In the story, he intersperses many deep passages from the fictitious book.  He interviews family and friends, and former teachers, even camping out in the author’s abandoned school building.  His sister tells us “…his soul was made of words, in a way I had never experienced with anybody else.”  We begin to question the narrator’s sanity as he almost starts to become the person he is shadowing, even seeming to start having his physical ailments.    -   During the course of the story we see how the fictitious author wrestled with the Big Questions of good and evil and love.  As the narrator learns of someone else’s life, he reflects upon his own.  He gets new glasses and finds out how poor his old ones were – a metaphor for what is happening to him.  We are treated to a lot of the local color of Lisbon and we learn a bit about Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” of 1974 that overthrew the remnants of the dictatorship of Salazar.  The book is reasonably fast-paced for what seems to be heavy stuff.  I highly recommend it.    (Jim Fonseca on Goodreads)