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By Stephen Holden

• Dec. 5, 2013

Early in “Night Train to Lisbon,” Raimund Gregorius ( Jeremy Irons ), a stuffy academic, remarks that his wife left him because she found him boring. Oh how right she was!

As played by Mr. Irons, leading a prestigious cast speaking English in an indecipherable mishmash of accents, Raimund undergoes a late midlife crisis. Impulsively abandoning his comfortable post as a teacher of classical studies in Bern, Switzerland, he travels to Lisbon.

Raimund is as parched and pedantic a creature as T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, and Mr. Irons voices his thoughts in a tone of sepulchral weariness that contradicts the character’s supposed awakening. Mr. Irons’s buttoned-up performance matches a screenplay (by Greg Latter and Ulrich Herrmann) in which most of the action remains off screen.

“Night Train to Lisbon,” directed by Bille August (“Pelle the Conqueror”), was adapted from a philosophical novel by the oft-quoted Swiss author Pascal Mercier. His quotations, spoken in voice-over by Mr. Irons, are sprinkled through the movie to add a semblance of intellectual heft. But these mutterings are too disconnected and abstract to register as profound insights by a man in the process of self-discovery.

“The fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be,” goes one.

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place; we stay there, even though we go away,” goes another.

“In youth we live as if we were immortal. Knowledge of mortality capers around us like a brittle paper ribbon that barely touches our skin.”

Yada yada yada.

Raimund’s odyssey begins when, by chance, he meets a young woman who is about to leap from a bridge to her death. He brings her to one of his classes, where she accidentally leaves her coat; in a pocket is a book by the Portuguese doctor and poet Amadeu de Prado, along with a train ticket to Lisbon. Raimund’s curiosity is aroused by what he reads, and he boards the train.

Once in Portugal, he looks up the author; visits his severe sister, Adriana (Charlotte Rampling); and learns that Amadeu died in 1974 and that only 100 copies of his book were printed. The movie proceeds as a historical detective story that intersperses Raimund’s investigation with lengthy flashbacks to a past in which we meet the young Amadeu (Jack Huston), a charismatic member of the resistance to the dictatorship of António Salazar.

Although these scenes present ample opportunities for action, suspense and melodrama, the characters rarely come to life. As the movie awkwardly boomerangs between past and present, most of what we see and hear is laborious exposition. Through Adriana, Raimund meets the priest (Christopher Lee) who taught Amadeu. He tracks down Amadeu’s best friend, Jorge (Bruno Ganz) and learns of Estefania (Mélanie Laurent), a resistance fighter who was Jorge’s girlfriend until she laid eyes on Amadeu and they were instantly smitten. (August Diehl is the young Jorge.)

Through Mariana (Martina Gedeck), a friendly optician who assures Raimund that he is not boring, he meets her aged Uncle Joao (Tom Courtenay), another member of the resistance who fills in the story. (Marco D’Almeida plays the young Joao.) Late in the movie, Raimund finally meets the mature Estefania (the beautiful Lena Olin), but no revelations are forthcoming.

After barely stirring to life, “Night Train to Lisbon” mercifully expires.

“Night Train to Lisbon” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for a scene of violence and brief sexuality.

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Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier

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A- : appealing if drawn out exploration of self and others

See our review for fuller assessment.

   Review Consensus :   No consensus, very differing opinions    From the Reviews : "The novel, as mesmerizing and dreamlike as a Wong Kar-wai film, with characters as strange and alienated as any of the filmmaker�s, is in fact preoccupied with translation, with all that can be lost or gained in the process. But more than that, it is concerned with the power of language to forge and dismantle people�s experiences, desires, and identities. (�) When a character undertakes this level of soul-searching, the temptation to over philosophize can be difficult to resist, and at times, Mercier succumbs, as with his drawn-out life-as-a-long-train-ride metaphor" - Amy Rosenberg, Bookforum "Its subtlest, most appealing accomplishment may be in how other characters respond to Gregorius' precipitous swerve onto the spiritual path. (...) That said, Night Train to Lisbon is a very long, ambitious book that's feverishly overwritten. (...) Think of W.G. Sebald recast for the mass market: stripped of nuance, cooked at high temperature and pounded home, clause after clause. Some of the clumsiness derives from Barbara Harshav's inelegant translation -- we're often aware of her struggle -- but she can't be blamed for the pervasive bloat." - Michelle Huneven, The Los Angeles Times "Mercier�s novel has already sold two million copies since its publication in German four years ago, but it is hampered by an inelegant translation. Even so, this cannot explain the absence of narrative tension, or Mercier�s grandiose style (...). They make the novel particularly ponderous." - Katharine Hibbert, New Statesman "(F)antastical, long-winded and dull (.....) The book was a huge hit in Europe, where the reading public has greater patience for turgid (Mercier might prefer to call it "bombastic") introspection. (...) Mercier�s wording is so dense and overwrought, and Barbara Harshav�s translation so ham-handed, that unpacking each sentence is like decoding a cryptic crossword in hieroglyphs." - Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review " Night Train to Lisbon , which first appeared in German in 2004 and went on to sell 2 million copies throughout Europe in many different translations, is not a typical best-seller. It is a meditative novel that builds an uncanny power through a labyrinth of memories and philosophical concepts that illuminate the narrative from within, just as its protagonist will discover the shadows of his neglected soul by bringing the story of another man into the light." - Joseph Olshan, San Francisco Chronicle " Night Train to Lisbon is a novel of ideas that reads like a thriller: an unsentimental journey that seems to transcend time and space. Every character, every scene, is evoked with an incomparable economy and a tragic nobility redolent of the mysterious hero, whom we only ever encounter through the eyes of others." - Daniel Johnson, The Telegraph "(O)stentatiously a novel of ideas. (...) It might be that some of the novel's charm has been lost in Barbara Hershav's efficient translation, but the philosophy it expounds is as unoriginal as the plot." - William Brett, Times Literary Supplement "It's a strange book. (...) All of which is interesting enough, but in a rather clinical way. One problem with Night Train to Lisbon is that its plot, if plot is the word for it, consists almost entirely of talk -- talk, talk, talk -- about people and events in the past. The effect of this endless conversation is numbing rather than stimulating. (...) 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." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post "Geradezu atemlos liest man dieses Buch, kann es kaum aus der Hand legen, bevor den Protagonisten sein Weg nicht wieder dorthin gef�hrt hat, von wo aus er an einem Tag, der zunächst wie zahllose andere begonnen hatte, in ein neues Leben aufgebrochen war: nach Bern. (�) Es ist nicht nur Gregorius' abenteuerliche Rekonstruktion der äußeren Ereignisse in Prados Leben, die immer wieder eine knisternde Spannung erzeugt, sondern vor allem der gedankliche Reichtum der Aufzeichnungen des Arztes, deren abschnittsweiser Übersetzung der Leser beiwohnen kann." - Gunther Nickel, Die Welt "Pascal Mercier hat ein beeindruckendes Buch geschrieben, einen Bewusstseinskrimi mit Tiefgang und ohne Gewähr. Eine Gewähr nämlich gibt es nicht, nicht im Lotto und nicht im Leben, es sei denn, man stellt sie sich, kühnerweise, selbst aus und steht für sie ein, gegen die Anmaßungen des vorgeblich besseren Wissens. Die Philosophie, zumindest die große, nicht mit dem Tagesgeschäft des rationellen Bedenkens befasste Philosophie, hat, dank Peter Bieri, der sich seinen Mercier hält, mehr zu sagen, als sie sich zu sagen traut." - Otto A. Böhmer, Die Zeit Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

        Night Train to Lisbon centres on a high school classics teacher from Berne who has spent almost his entire life -- first as a pupil, then as a teacher -- at the same school in Berne. Raimund Gregorius is a legendary and near-infallible figure in that small world, dedicated entirely to his work, interested only in his Greek and Latin and Hebrew. He was married for a while -- to a former student -- but it's no surprise that that didn't quite work out (even as we first meet him as some passion is awakened in him). Now in his late fifties, he is very set in his ways -- until he encounters woman standing on a bridge on his way to school one morning.        The meeting changes everything, shaking his world to its very roots. Nothing much happens, and she's gone almost as quickly as she came into his life, but then Gregorius is almost entirely a mind-person and to know that she is Portuguese is enough to set a whole train of events into motion. Leaving even his books behind he heads into town after class, completely out of character. He winds up in a Spanish bookstore -- familiar because Spanish had been his former wife's field -- and stumbles across a Portuguese book there, written by an Amadeu de Prado and published in 1975, 'A Goldsmith of Words'. The bookseller reads out some of the passages and translates them for Gregorius, who then knows he has to have the book, even though he can't read Portuguese.        He is transfixed by it, and transformed. Without much thought he packs his bags and is ready to set off for Portugal. He has some doubts, but ultimately is determined, and soon enough he's in Lisbon.        Gregorius is determined to learn the story of the author and the book, as well as the language. He throws himself into the tasks with vigour, helped along by some acquaintances he makes along the way, who also hand him off to others. He's almost scared by his own initiative, repeatedly ready to turn around but then staying after all, and when he does venture back to Berne it's only briefly, as he realises he still has more to do before he's ready to face and continue with his life again.        The author of the mystery-book was a doctor; after treating one of the worst figures in the Salazar-regime he does penance by trying to help out the resistance. Gregorius meets several people close to the doctor, and between their stories and the passages from the book interspersed throughout the story, learns more about this remarkable figure.        For Gregorius it's also an opportunity to contemplate the roads he didn't choose: as a youth he was tempted by Isfahan and Persian, but decided to stick to the safer, closer classics, only now to think about those early dreams again. He looks at some of the determining moments from his youth, wondering: what if he had acted differently on occasion.         Night Train to Lisbon is a dreamy, sleepless sort of novel: Gregorius' schedule is a far cry from the clearly defined schoolday-schedule . He walks for hours, stays up late into the night -- less in insomnia (which one of the few friends he has suffers from, conveniently allowing Gregorius to reach him at any time) than in a sort of dream-state, his actions often almost sub- (or super- ?) conscious.        Mercier seems to describe almost every footstep Gregorius makes in detail, giving the book a steady rhythm. Some of what happens seems almost too simple and obvious: Gregorius needs a pair of glasses made, and when he gets his eyes checked gets a prescription with which he can suddenly see more clearly -- yet it's his one close Berne friend, the Greek eye doctor Doxiades, whom he had always trusted his vision too, and who had apparently prescribed the old, too-weak ones. Words and names play an obvious role for the philologist, but even with that and, for example, the repeated extended chess games Gregorius gets involved in the novel is anything but purely intellectual and dry: down to Gregorius' students or the woman who teaches him Portuguese, as well as those who knew Amadeu de Prado, Mercier offers rich characters and frequently inspired small details and events. The novel often reads as much as a mystery as a story of finding oneself.        It's a long trip of self-discovery -- and of trying to discover another (in this case the Portuguese doctor) -- but Mercier manages to sustain the reader's interest. Gregorius is exacting -- and it turns out the doctor was too: someone describes the way he would read, saying that after he was done with a book there wouldn't be any letters left in it, that he consumed the very print off the pages along with the meaning. Mercier seems to want to be as precise and comprehensive, and it practically works. He also offers no easy answers or certainty, the arc ultimately feeling realistic even if the premise seems at first so very unlikely.        An impressive effort, and worth the effort.

About the Author :

       Swiss author Pascal Mercier (actually: Peter Bieri) was born in 1944 and also teaches philosophy.

© 2007-2021 the complete review Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links

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Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier | Book Review

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” Mercier, P., Night Train to Lisbon, London: Atlantic Books, 2009

“In the years afterwards, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don’t want anybody to understand me completely . I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.” Mercier, P., Night Train to Lisbon, London: Atlantic Books, 2019

Magical. Profoundly moving. Overwhelmingly beautiful. Compelling exploration of consciousness and the inner life.

Night Train to Lisbon delights with the written word, very vivid descriptions of the places and characters. The author takes us on a long but a wonderful journey full of thoughts and insightful analysis on death, loneliness, courage and friendship looking at the surrounding world through the prism of many people and from a different time perspective. It is like having a long-awaited meeting with a fellow human being whom one listens with an unsurpassed curiosity and fascination.

“Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?” Mercier, P., Night Train to Lisbon, London: Atlantic Books, 2019

Pascal Mercier offers an astonishing philosophical narrative about the possibility of truly understanding another person, the ability of words to define our very selves and making a journey into the depths of our shared humanity. Night Train to Lisbon compels a reader to look inwards.

“Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language out of me so that I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the banalities of the same talk.” Mercier, P., Night Train to Lisbon, London: Atlantic Books, 2019

The protagonist, Raimund Gregorius, is a professor of classical langauges  at the college in Bern who one day abandons his old life to set out on a train journey to Lisbon. He carries with him a book written by Amadeu de Prado, a Portuguese doctor whose writings explore the ideas of loneliness, death, friendship and loyalty. These notes introduce a philosophical dimension into the narrative which echo Gregorius’s own thoughts and reflections. This book is used by him as a tool for self-discovery and journey inwards.  As he speaks to the people who knew Prado, Gregorius feels he has a lot in common internally with Prado.

One of the themes in Night Train to Lisbon is the exploration of alternate lives , than the one we have chosen, through words, conversations and the life of another man. The narrator poses a question to the reader to imagine what would happen if you questioned everything about your life and started a new existence.

Interestingly, the city of Lisbon is not only a geographical place where most of the narrative takes place, but it is also a character in the book. The occurring question throughout is about the role the place plays in our lives and its impact on who we are and what we can do in our lives.

I would recommend this book to a sensitive reader who enjoys philosophical meanderings about the meaning of life, literature, existentialism, ideas, words and identity. 

It is not an easy read, there are not many dialogues, there is no staggering action. However, if you feel that this is the time to reflect about your role in the world, you should get on the train to Lisbon with Gregorius and Prado. This journey will change your life.

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NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON

by Pascal Mercier & translated by Barbara Harshav ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2008

An intriguing fiction only occasionally diluted by redundancy and by Mercier’s overuse of the metaphor of a train journey.

An elegant meditative book teaches a painfully ironic life lesson in German-Swiss author Mercier’s searching 2004 novel, a critically acclaimed international bestseller being published in the United States for the first time.

He who learns the lesson is 50ish Raimund Gregorius, a philologist who teaches Latin, Greek and Hebrew at a Swiss high school—until an unknown woman excites the scholar’s interest in an obscure book of philosophical observations penned by an equally unknown Portuguese author. Impulsively abandoning his academic responsibilities, Gregorius acquires the rare volume, ponders its contents and travels to Lisbon to research the life of its “vanished” author. He discovers that Amadeu de Prado, a would-be priest who became a renowned physician, had led an even more complex life as a member of the resistance movement opposing Portugal’s notorious dictator Antonio Salazar. The story emerges from Gregorius’s meetings: with Prado’s aged sister Adriana, the stoical though not uncritical preserver of his memory; a contemplative priest with whom the nonbelieving doctor had often debated theology; the brilliant and beautiful colleague Estefânia, who may have been Prado’s true soul mate; and the Resistance comrade Vítor Coutinho, who discloses the “evil” act (saving the life of a vicious secret police official) that motivated Prado to forsake the life of the mind for that of a man of violent action. The nearer Gregorius comes to the truth of Prado’s passionate commitment, the more insistent becomes the question he asks himself: “Had he perhaps missed a possible life, one he could easily have lived with his abilities and knowledge?” It’s the age-old intellectual’s dilemma, considered in a compelling blend of suspenseful narrative and discursive commentary (quoted from Prado’s text).

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-8021-1858-5

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007

LITERARY FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Pascal Mercier ; translated by Shaun Whiteside

by Pascal Mercier translated by Shaun Whiteside

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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THERE THERE

by Tommy Orange ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2018

In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of...

Orange’s debut novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at Native American life in Oakland, California, through the experiences and perspectives of 12 characters.

An aspiring documentary filmmaker, a young man who has taught himself traditional dance by watching YouTube, another lost in the bulk of his enormous body—these are just a few of the point-of-view characters in this astonishingly wide-ranging book, which culminates with an event called the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange, who grew up in the East Bay and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, knows the territory, but this is no work of social anthropology; rather, it is a deep dive into the fractured diaspora of a community that remains, in many ways, invisible to many outside of it. “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together,” he writes. “Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.” The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that’s part of its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force. The stakes are high: For Jacquie Red Feather, on her way to meet her three grandsons for the first time, there is nothing as conditional as sobriety: “She was sober again,” Orange tells us, “and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.” For Daniel Gonzales, creating plastic guns on a 3-D printer, the only lifeline is his dead brother, Manny, to whom he writes at a ghostly Gmail account. In its portrayal of so-called “Urban Indians,” the novel recalls David Treuer’s The Hiawatha , but the range, the vision, is all its own. What Orange is saying is that, like all people, Native Americans don’t share a single identity; theirs is a multifaceted landscape, made more so by the sins, the weight, of history. That some of these sins belong to the characters alone should go without saying, a point Orange makes explicit in the novel’s stunning, brutal denouement. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote in a line Orange borrows as an epigraph to one of the book’s sections; this is the inescapable fate of every individual here.

Pub Date: June 5, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018

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by Tommy Orange

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Pascal Mercier’s “Night Train to Lisbon”

Lisbon Calling

We speak about the book that changed our life, the encounter that sent us down a path, the person who turned us around. It is at such moments we say we become who we are, and we can no longer, as Edgar Allan Poe's William Wilson discovers, return to the life we left.

Raimund Gregorius is a teacher of classics — he says he prefers dead languages — at a secondary school in Bern, Switzerland. One morning on the way to school in a torrential downpour he sees a woman about to jump off a bridge into a river and rushes to save her. After he stops her, she writes a phone number on his forehead with a felt pen, a number, she tells him, she cannot forget and had to write it on his forehead until she found paper. Inexplicably he takes her to school and brings her into his classroom to the students' astonishment, leaving the number on his forehead. It is not Mundo, the affectionate name they give him, who does such things. She is, she tells him, Portogese .

Phone calls need to be answered Avital Ronell writes, and Gregorius has no choice but to answer this call. He goes to a bookstore in search of something Portuguese. (“There were the people who read and there were the others,” Gregorius feels and whenever he needs to address a problem he seeks out a book.) He discovers a privately-printed book, meditations on life in the vein of Montaigne, by Amadeu de Prado, a Lisbon physician. The book sends him to Lisbon to find out more about this man whose words seems to speak to him. Gregorius seeks out those who knew Prado, one person inevitably leading to another, often someone he does not know anything about, and in the process discovers the unwritten history of Portuguese resistance to Salazar. “How could it have happened,” Gregorius asks himself, “that a single Portuguese word and a phone number on his forehead…involved him…in the life of Portuguese people who were no longer alive?”

In the parallel universe of Amadeu de Prado, Gregorius realizes he had put his own life on hold. He follows the logic of interruption to flesh out the traces of Prado, but everyone who knew Prado knew a different Prado. We are various, Gregorius realizes, and many. He is no longer the Mundo the school knows. “Mundo needed walls,” he thinks, “Now he didn't need walls.” He searches his own selves, starting with memory (another call to be answered) and remembers things about himself he had forgotten or did not know. He returns to a Bern that is not the city he left nor the man he left there.

At one point in Lisbon, Gregorius puts the books he has with him on a bookshelf where he is rooming. They are, he thinks, “ Books for the next stretch of the way .” Gregorius is drawn to discover who Prado is because Prado, like Gregorius, “consisted so much of language.” Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese writer, is on the shelf. If Amadeu de Prado is the guiding presence who puts Gregorius on the night train to Lisbon, Pessoa is the writer who takes Pascal Mercier to this book.

Robert Buckeye has had two works of fiction published, Pressure Drop and The Munch Case and has written on film and art as well as literature.

Robert Buckeye

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Review: Old-Fashioned, Deeply Unadventurous ‘Night Train To Lisbon’ Starring Jeremy Irons, Melanie Laurent & More

Jessica kiang.

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In the very finest tradition of Euro-pudding, director Bille August ‘s “ Night Train To Lisbon ” adapts an international bestselling book, takes place against the picturesque backdrop of a European capital, is half-told in flashback through a turbulent and dramatic period of history, and stacks the cast with notable European thesps. These include: Jeremy Irons , Jack Huston , Charlotte Rampling , Christopher Lee, Tom Courtenay representing the U.K.; from Germany, Martina Gedeck and August Diehl ; Bruno Ganz of Switzerland; Lena Olin of Sweden; and Mélanie Laurent from France. However, bar Irons, this Babel tower of actors all play Portuguese nationals, and so while the films is told through English, they all speak with Portuguese accents. Irons, however, plays Swiss, which obviously means he employs his usual mellifluous British tones. A little silly though all this is, it’s not actually particularly injurious to our understanding of the story, but it does give you an idea of the messiness and, well, inefficiency of the approach.

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Raimund Gregorius (Irons) is a stuffy Swiss schoolteacher (whose loneliness and intellectualism are leadenly established by an early scene of him playing chess against himself) who prevents a narratively unnecessary young woman from committing suicide on his way to work one day. She flees, but in the pocket of the coat she leaves, Gregorius finds a book written by Amadeu de Prado, a Portuguese doctor during the era of Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship. He is entranced by the philosophy of de Prado’s writings, and when a ticket for the titular night train falls from the book’s pages, Gregorius finds himself doing the first spontaneous thing he’s done in a very long time, and climbing aboard. Once in Lisbon, he tracks down the de Prado home, meets de Prado’s sister (Rampling) only later to discover that Amadeu is dead, though his sister refers to him as if alive.

Through a string of unconvincing contrivances involving the local optician he visits (Martina Gedeck), who just so happens to have an uncle who was central to the story he’s so interested in, Gregorius begins to piece together Amadeu’s tale—one that we see unfold progressively in flashback. That story of love, betrayal and revolutionary politics is actually much more interesting than the modern-day component, and so the players there—Huston as Amadeu, Laurent as the revolutionary Estefania whose photographic memory makes her a valuable asset to the cause, August Diehl as the friend and third point in the love triangle—all fare a little better than their older counterparts.

The main issue with the contemporary story is how ploddingly told it is. Gregorius seems forever pinging back and forth between places he’s already been to talk to people he’s already met, to get one tiny further scrap of the historical story. Perhaps this is a faithful reflection of how things occur in the novel, but really, transposed to film it’s just a lot of Jeremy Irons standing on doorsteps and walking down hallways, to ask something he easily could have asked the last time he was here. And seeing as all he’s really doing is talking to people and occasionally quoting from the book he has found so inspiring, these sections can feel unnecessarily verbose, with, on occasion, one actor speaking his lines almost before the other has finished, as though they know they’ve got a lot to get through. Couple this with the clashing accents, sometimes from people playing the same character at different times in their lives (Lena Olin is the older Mélanie Laurent; Bruno Ganz is the older August Diehl, etc.), and the overtly philosophical or political nature of what they are saying, and the dialogue can feel very stilted indeed.

But there are pleasures and small surprises. Huston, a favorite of ours for his brilliant turn as Richard Harrow in “ Boardwalk Empire ,” impresses here even with two eyes: his Amadeu is an appropriately romantic hero, just the right balance of tortured idealist, deep thinker, revolutionary, and fool in love. Laurent is given less to do, but makes the most of her truncated screen time, while cameos from the likes of Bruno Ganz and Christopher Lee do perk things up if only because we’re just so genuinely fond of other performances these men have given.

Mostly though, it’s a shame the lion’s share of the screen time (or what certainly feels like it) is given to Gregorius’ modern-day story. Irons is a watchable actor but here his character has an arc of such minute change (from repressed guy in ugly glasses to ever so slightly less repressed guy in cooler glasses), that it’s hard to avoid a massive “oh who cares” during the painfully predictable final scene. And these problems are compounded by the fact that the book Gregorius finds so life-changing is, judging from the excerpts we’re given, full of aphorisms that are maybe about the level of a “ Little Book of Philosophical Doodads ” that we might leave in the bathroom. Perhaps the writings themselves should have been left a mystery to the audience. Perhaps the Gregorius storyline could have been left out altogether, or simply used to bookend. Perhaps Irons could have been given a sassy robot sidekick. Who knows how many ways there could have been to make this film a little more colorful, a little more lively and surprising.

As it is, when at one point Gregorius states that he thinks his wife left him because she found him “boring,” we have to agree with her, despite the fact we’re presumably supposed to see his dullness as evidence of deep sensitivity or fine intellectualism or something. No, Gregorius’ tamped-down, buttoned-up professor is so dry that the decision to return to him time and time again just when things are hotting up in the historical story seems an almost perversely deliberate choice by August to turn us away from anything that might in the slightest raise the pulse. What we’re left with is bloodless, far too genteel, and perfectly content to continually tell where a little show ing would be nice; “Night Train to Lisbon” ends up a deeply unadventurous adventure story. [C]

This is a reprint of our review from the 2013 Berlin Film Festival.

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Night Train to Lisbon : Book summary and reviews of Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier

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Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

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Published Dec 2007 496 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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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.

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"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.

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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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Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon

This is an interesting and intriguing book, and quite unusual. It's a fairly slowly revealing book, but it keeps up your interest. One of main themes is a love of books and the influence books can have on lives, and I loved that the main character had been so inspired by a book that he changed his life because of it. The love and value and power of literature really shines through in this book, and is perfectly summed up by the quote, ‘There were the people who read and there were the others. Whether you were a reader or a non-reader - it was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people’.

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Home » Book Reviews » Pascal Mercier » Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier

This is an interesting and intriguing book, and quite unusual. It’s a fairly slowly revealing book, but it keeps up your interest. One of main themes is a love of books and the influence books can have on lives, and I loved that the main character had been so inspired by a book that he changed his life because of it. The love and value and power of literature really shines through in this book, and is perfectly summed up by the quote, ‘There were the people who read and there were the others. Whether you were a reader or a non-reader – it was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people’. 

Gregorious, who is a dedicated, mild-mannered, lonely and very private teacher in Switzerland, sees a woman about to jump off a bridge, and this makes him question the ordinary routine of his life and to wish for a dramatic change. He goes to a Portuguese bookshop to find a textbook to learn Portuguese, and also finds there an old book of thoughts and life lessons written by a Portuguese man called Amadeu de Prado in 1975. He then abandons his class and career and takes the night train to Lisbon in Portugal to find out more about this author. He speaks to strangers there and makes friends and follows a laborious trail towards Prado, learning he was a doctor of extreme intelligence with a crippled father and an obsessive sister, and that he saved the life of one of Salazar’s (the Portuguese dictator) henchman and was then ostracised by the community for this act, so then secretly joined the Resistance. 

The book is a mix of the two characters, Gregorious and Prado, and we gradually learn more about both of them, and their characters are slowly revealed. Prado seems a complex person, highly intelligent and advanced but also prone to low mood, extremely focused and determined and single-minded and driven but often alone, with a father that committed suicide and a sister that seems now to be dangerously obsessed with him. 

The trail Gregorious goes on and the clues he learns and the people he meets are all very interesting. The dictatorship in Portugal is also fascinating, though disturbing and difficult to read at times. I didn’t know much at all about Salazar, who sounds very similar to Spain’s dictator, Franco. Prado’s life lessons and philosophical thoughts in his book are often quoted, and I was fully prepared to be inspired by them and to aim to remember them, but (maybe it was me) they didn’t really grab me or resonate with me or fill me with wonder.

The story ended a bit oddly and frustratingly, I felt, with Gregorious’ health failing and him returning to Switzerland to be admitted into hospital, after he has been accepted by all the people in Lisbon that he sought out for info and them caring for him and depending on him and wanting him to stay, and him having a positive influence on their lives. It almost seems like he is suffering from a similar brain tumour to Prado, and I was left wondering if he survives or not.

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It’s fitting that Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon , which first appeared in German in 2004, has been translated into fifteen languages. The novel, as mesmerizing and dreamlike as a Wong Kar-wai film, with characters as strange and alienated as any of the filmmaker’s, is in fact preoccupied with translation, with all that can be lost or gained in the process. But more than that, it is concerned with the power of language to forge and dismantle people’s experiences, desires, and identities.

Raimund Gregorius, a fifty-seven-year-old Swiss philologist, dwells on questions of language as he embarks on a quest to understand the life of a Portuguese doctor—a potentially dull premise, but Mercier (who teaches philosophy in Berlin under his real name, Peter Bieri) is a master at mixing ideas and plot. The story’s suspense arises in the opening scene, when Gregorius, treading a well-worn path to the high school where he teaches Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, is stopped by a mysterious woman who speaks one word of Portuguese to him—in fact, the word Português . Later that day, Gregorius, described as “the most reliable and predictable person in [the] building and probably in the whole history of the school,” walks out of his classroom in the middle of a lesson, obtains a book by the doctor who will become his infatuation, and boards a train to Lisbon. In short, because of a single word, he vacates his staid existence and enters the unknown.

The book that compels him to do so is Dr. Amadeu de Prado’s ruminative autobiography, a volume reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet . Gregorius slowly translates the text into German and tracks down the people it describes, piecing together Prado’s story: his aristocratic but unhappy childhood, his intensity and discipline as a young scholar, his rigid moral code, and his participation in the resistance movement against Portugal’s right-wing dictator, Salazar. The more facts he uncovers about Prado, the more he hopes to achieve an intimate understanding of what it was like to be Prado. Yet his actual discoveries are the insignificance of the facts of his own life and a greater awareness of what it is like to be himself.

When a character undertakes this level of soul-searching, the temptation to over‑ philosophize can be difficult to resist, and at times, Mercier succumbs, as with his drawn-out life-as-a-long-train-ride metaphor (think “Allegory of the Cave” transferred to a moving locomotive). But there are enough unforgettable moments of crystalline, even poetic, insight—like the recap of the seventeen-year-old Prado’s stunning graduation speech, in which he declares, “I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty”—that the novel ultimately draws its strength from its philosophical musings.

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Night Train to Lisbon review – Jeremy Irons revives his penchant for dramas

T he rich latte of Jeremy Irons’s speaking voice lends flavour to this telenovela-like Euro-pudding directed with slow-moving solemnity by Bille August. Irons plays Raimundo, a bespectacled teacher in Bern, who saves a young woman from taking her own life: she runs away, leaving behind her coat, in which there is a fascinating book by a Portuguese doctor and a rail ticket to Lisbon. Raimundo is entranced by the mystery, jumps aboard the train and with implausible speed – the story appears to predate the web – tracks down the author’s surviving relatives and associates: a stately range of performances from Charlotte Rampling, Bruno Ganz and Christopher Lee. He finds himself swept into a romantic flashback maelstrom: the story of how they all were caught up in the fascist oppression in the 70s. Irons’s impulsive rail journey is a weird (if sexless) version of his performance in Louis Malle’s Damage or indeed his similarly preposterous globetrotting in Claude Lelouch’s cult clunker And Now … Ladies and Gentlemen. Irons has a soft spot for these hokey dramas, and I admit I have a soft spot for his appearances in them. On TV, this might while away a rainy Sunday afternoon.

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Night Train to Lisbon (Mercier)

Night Train to Lisbon Pascal Mercier, 2004 (Trans., 2008) Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 438 pp. ISBN-13: 9780802143976 Summary Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss lycée, and lives a life governed by routine. One day, a chance encounter with an enigmatic Portuguese woman inspires him to question his life—and leads him to an extraordinary book that will open the possibility of changing his existence. He takes the train to Lisbon that same night, and with him the words of Amadeu de Prado, a doctor whose practice and principles led him into confrontation with Salazar’s dictatorship, and a man whose intelligence and magnetism left a mark on everyone who met him. As Gregorius becomes fascinated with unlocking the mystery of who Prado was—meeting, among others, Prado’s eighty-year-old sister, who keeps the man’s house like a musem, an elderly torture survivor now confined to a nursing home, and Prado’s childhood friend and eventual partner in the resistance movement—an extraordinary tale takes shape, centered on a group of people working in utmost secrecy to fight dictatorship, and the betrayals that threaten to expose them.

A haunting tale of repression, resistance, and the universal human struggle to connect, Night Train to Lisbon is richly layered, wonderfully told, and inexorably propelled by the mystery at its heart.

Recalling Bernhard Schlink and Nicole Krauss in its affirmation of the power of literature, will, and the individual, Night Train to Lisbon is a book of sensual beauty and artistic excellence, one that will be remembered for its soul and wit as well as its universality and great intellectual depth.

A huge international best seller, Night Train to Lisbon was published in hardcover in January with a modest first printing.  It has been hailed by booksellers and critics, and embraced by readers.  As this catalog goes to press, the hardcover has gone into its fourth printing, and appeared on best-seller lists across the country. ( From the publisher .)

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Night Train to Lisbon

2013, Mystery & thriller/Romance, 1h 51m

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Night train to lisbon   photos.

Swiss professor Raimund Gregorius abandons his life to embark on a thrilling adventure.

Rating: R (Brief Sexuality|A Scene of Violence)

Genre: Mystery & thriller, Romance

Original Language: English

Director: Bille August

Producer: Ana Costa , Kerstin Ramcke , Peter Reichenbach , Benjamin Seikel , Günther Russ , Paulo Trancoso

Writer: Greg Latter , Ulrich Herrmann

Release Date (Streaming): Dec 17, 2013

Runtime: 1h 51m

Production Co: C-Films, Studio Hamburg Filmproduktion

Cast & Crew

Jeremy Irons

Raimund Gregorius

Mélanie Laurent

Young Estefânia

Jack Huston

Martina Gedeck

Tom Courtenay

August Diehl

Young Jorge O'Kelly

Jorge O'Kelly

Marco D'Almeida

Beatriz Batarda

Young Adriana

Christopher Lee

Father Bartolomeu

Charlotte Rampling

Adriana de Prado

Nicolau Breyner

Jane Thorne

Bille August

Greg Latter

Screenwriter

Ulrich Herrmann

Oliver Simon

Executive Producer

Daniel Baur

Eric Fischer

Kevin Scott Frakes

Kerstin Ramcke

Peter Reichenbach

Benjamin Seikel

Günther Russ

Paulo Trancoso

Annette Focks

Original Music

Filip Zumbrunn

Cinematographer

Hansjörg Weißbrich

Film Editing

Patrícia Vasconcelos

Jeremy Zimmermann

Augusto Mayer

Production Design

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Night Train To Lisbon, film review: Beautifully shot and packed with big-name cameos

(12a) bille august, 110 mins starring: jeremy irons, mélanie laurent, jack huston, article bookmarked.

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Bille August's drama is set in a Europe where everyone, whether they're Swiss, Portuguese or Spanish, speaks in the same slightly stilted English.

Jeremy Irons plays Raimund Gregorius, a repressed academic in Bern who saves a young woman from jumping off a bridge. He discovers in her possessions a poetic memoir by a little-known Portuguese writer called Amadeu do Prado, and becomes obsessed by Amadeu (played by Jack Huston) and his relationship to the woman.

In flashback, as Gregorius traipses round Lisbon meeting Amadeu's friends and associates, we see snapshots of the author's life as a poet, philosopher, doctor, lover and revolutionary.

Gregorius realises how petty his own life is by comparison with Amadeu's. In its lesser moments, the film feels like a European art-house adaptation of a Mills and Boon novel or a Saga holiday commercial, but it is beautifully shot and packed with cameos from big-name actors.

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