Night Train To Lisbon

Product Information

Despite all of this, I found the story compelling. Gregorius’ investigation reveals lives lived in fear under the dictatorship of Salazar, leader of the Estrada Novo, the authoritarian government that ruled Portugal with an iron fist until 1974. I knew nothing about this terrible period in Portuguese history. Magical. Profoundly moving. Overwhelmingly beautiful. Compelling exploration of consciousness and the inner life.

Night Train To Lisbon - Pascal Mercier - Google Books

Danish film director Bille August's film adaptation of the same name, with Jeremy Irons as Raimund Gregorius, was released in 2013.

A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.” Bicycle: The traffic, the slopes, the tram or the cobblestones can make the bicycle a challenge. However, the city has some stretches of bike lanes that make pedalling a good way to visit certain areas, among which the Ribera del Tajo area, where you can find several bike rental companies. 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. Vanity's] an unrecognized form of stupidity... you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that’s a glaring form of stupidity.”

Night Train to Lisbon - Wikipedia

So of course I loved this exploration of how a character can walk away from his life, how he can explore, through words and conversations, another life (not just the present). Phillips, Anne (9 August 2009). "Works mix, ponder illusions and reality". The News-Gazette. Champaign-Urbana, IL. (Accessed in NewsBank database (Requires subscription)) He looks at some of the determining moments from his youth, wondering: what if he had acted differently on occasion. Yes. If you’re going to travel on a European night train, you’ll need to make a reservation – you’ll be asked to choose one of the different types of accommodation available.

Dehghan, Saeed Kamali (23 June 2017). "Why Iran has 16 different translations of one Khaled Hosseini novel". The Guardian . Retrieved 10 March 2021. Berlinale 2013: Competition Now Complete". berlinale. Archived from the original on 10 April 2013 . Retrieved 25 January 2013. 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 Night Train to Lisbon is a sensuous tale of the pursuit of love and passion against all odds, set in the 1930s when the world was on the brink of war and suspicion of loyalty, motivation, and intent -- to both country and lover -- was at flood tide. Night Train to Lisbon spends considerable time contemplating ideas, exploring on one hand Gregorious' contemplation of self and the other de Prado's journal and philosophies. [3] Epigraphs include Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Second Book, I, “De l’inconstance de nos actions” and Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego (Portuguese: Book of Disquiet/Restlessness).

Night Train to Lisbon : Book summary and reviews of Night Night Train to Lisbon : Book summary and reviews of Night

In Lisbon, Carson and Alec begin an intense love affair, but their bliss is threatened when Carson's uncle reveals that Alec might be a spy for Germany. He insists that it is essential that Alec be trapped and brought to justice, and the only person who can deliver an unsuspecting Alec to the proper authorities is Carson. Desperate to believe in her new love -- and terrified of discovering she has fallen for a traitor -- Carson must choose whether to prove her lover innocent or leave him to face the consequences on his own. My initial view of Night Train to Lisbon is that the reader is almost forced to follow the pattern of the novel's main character, Raimund Gregorius, attempting to explicate a book much like Raimund did when trying to comprehend the writings of a Portuguese doctor, Amadeu de Prado. Dr. Prado had been active in the resistance against Salazar the Portuguese dictator & Prado's words seized Raimund's imagination, causing him to suddenly flee his secure position as a teacher of classics & to entrain for Lisbon. One could have the hope that he would become more real by reducing expectations, shrink to a hard, reliable core and thus be immune to the pain of disappointment. But how would it be to lead a life that banished every long, bold expectation, a life where there were only banal expectations like "the bus is coming"?” But when we set out to understand somebody’s inside? Is that a trip that ever ends? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?” Taxis: In Lisbon, there are also many taxis, beige and, generally, cheaper than those of other cities in Europe.Peter Bieri, better known by his pseudonym, Pascal Mercier, is a Swiss writer and philosopher. The book was originally published in German in 2004, and was first published in English in 2008. 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. Bücher, die von Büchern handeln, von Menschen, die versuchen die Geschichte von Büchern auf den Grund zu gehen, sprechen mich sehr an. Nach Der Schatten des Windes und Besessen war dieser Roman ein weiteres Werk, in dem der Protagonist mehr oder weniger durch Zufall an ein altes Buch gelangt, sich in die autobiografische Geschichte verliebt und auf die Suche nach Spuren des Autors macht. But what I cannot forgive or forget are the pitiful attempts at philosophy the book espouses, particularly through the supposed writings of the dead Amadeu de Prado. They read like the ramblings of a conceited teenager. Later, it seemed to dawn on me that what Raimund continues to do after briefly meeting a Portuguese woman on a bridge, someone he never sees again, is not that far distant from what he has been doing for ages, mining old books written in classical languages for shreds of meaning.

Night Train to Lisbon - Pascal Mercier - Complete Review Night Train to Lisbon - Pascal Mercier - Complete Review

The sister of the fictitious author 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. In the years afterward, 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.” The novel does attempt to probe the motivation to change course in life & to comprehend the forces that determine behavior, as when he reads from a Prado letter: I start trembling at the thought of the unplanned & unknown but inevitable & unstoppable force with which parents leave traces in their children that, like traces of branding, can never be erased. The outlines of parental will & fear are written with a white-hot stylus in the souls of children who are helpless & ignorant of what is happening to them. We need a whole life to find & decipher the branded text & we can never be sure that we have understood it. Raimund's enchantment with the life of Amadeu de Prado, who had enjoyed a brilliant childhood, causes him to work at translating the thoughts of the man, while pursuing clues to the man's later life in Lisbon, always it seems in search of deeper meaning about the moral decisions that had been made & which ultimately determined Dr. Prado's fate.There were the people who read and the others. Whether you were a reader or a non-reader - it was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people. When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty.Normally, I would just leave it at that. It's a nice quote I hadn't heard before. But, in the current climate, I am concerned that I will have my account closed down by the GR censors if I don't explain myself more fully, so I guess I'd better do so. Andere Figuren, die wenig zur Handlung beitragen, diese lähmen und den Leser langweilen, wie die jüngste Schwester von Amadeu, die Berner Studentin von Mundus und seine mühsame Ex-Ehefrau werden gleich ganz weggestrichen und fehlen nicht einmal. Das sagt auch viel über die Wichtigkeit dieser Personen für den Roman aus. Auch das Ende wird umgeschrieben, die angedeutete Analogie zwischen Amadeus Aneurysma und Mundus gesundheitlichen Problemen, die Pascal Mercier ohnehin auch nicht weiter verwendet, obwohl sich diese Wendung sogar anbietet, bzw. sie der Autor sogar vorbereitet hat, wird gar nicht erwähnt, stattdessen wird ganz zart ein Happy End in Portugal signalisiert. But oh yes, I was forgetting, I need to justify myself. I am not, of course, comparing the very mild form of censorship that Goodreads has recently been practising with the horrors of the Salazar regime. That would be an absurd insult to all the brave people who resisted this appalling dictator, whose unashamedly Fascist government managed to cling to power until 1974, four years after Salazar's death. I would like to know more about how they succeeded in doing that. Presumably there were enough people on the inside supporting them, and they were sufficiently brutal about eliminating anyone on the outside who spoke up against them, that the large mass of citizens who just wanted to live quiet lives figured it was better to accept the status quo. 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