Pascal Mercier

The chance encounter with a Portuguese woman dislodges all the pieces so far set securely in place during Raimund Gregorius’s life. For years he had taught Greek and Latin and Hebrew at a Swiss lycee. He lives alone but had been married. His days are defined by repetitions and well established rhythms. More or less at the time of this chance encounter Raimund acquires the book, A GOLDSMITH OF WORDS written by a Portuguese doctor, Amadeu de Prado and published in 1975. He knows no Portuguese but the bookseller translated the introduction for him, out loud. We are told that “He heard sentences that stunned him, for they sounded as if they had been written for him alone, and not only for him but on this morning that had changed everything.” For instance he heard, read from the book, “Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its colour, and its melody.”

Setting about translating de Prado’s book, slowly, patiently, he devours the doctor’s meditations. By eight o’clock the following morning, determined to find out more about this remarkable person, Raimund is on the train to Lisbon.

A chance meeting on the train with a local businessman helps our searcher-after-truth to find his feet in Lisbon. There follows a visit to what appeared to be Amadeu de Prado’s grave, but this engenders a sense of emptiness: “how disappointed he would be and how disappointed he would become if he couldn’t meet the melancholy man who had wanted to reset the Portuguese language because it was so hackneyed in its old form.” As a doctor de Prado was obliged to treat a notorious torturer of Portugal’s terrible Salazar dictatorship. After that, knowing he had done this, opponents of the regime spat on him in the street. From that moment on he did penance by assisting the resistance, eventually becoming known to some as The Godless Priest. On Christianity he had declared, “A religion whose centre is a scene of execution, I find disgusting – Just imagine if there had been a gallows or a garrotte. Just imagine how our religious symbolism would look then.”

Raimund Gregorius’s search for the spirit of this mysterious man whose writing is so abstract, so mystically driven, becomes a voyage of self-discovery. What, he is obliged to ask himself, might his true self actually be, after having avoided contact with it through so many years?

That this book has sold over two million copies may be some testimony to the idea that readers are exhausted with those all-defining Jungian storylines and even with those patronising tales of boys and girls from the Third World who escape poverty only to become citizens of the USA and graduates of an Ivy League university.

Gregorius consciousness returns again and again to the writings of this Portuguese doctor. Is this an authorial device? Or is it simply the means by which the author can communicate directly, avoiding the problem of having the illusion of a character he has created holding forth as they do, say, in Thomas Mann’s MAGIC MOUNTAIN? In his writings Prado states: “Is it so that everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? Is that why we renounce all the things we will regret at the end of life? Is that why we seldom say what we think? Why else do we hold on to all these broken marriages, false friendships, boring birthday parties?”

This is a wonderful book causing the mind to become engaged in an exploration of what the idea “self” might actually mean. It comes as no surprise to discover that the author, Pascal Mercier, is a 64 year old professor of philosophy. What might prove a surprise is that this philosopher has something insightful to say about the condition of us poor, sad and oh so very lost human beings.

The Book

Mercier, Pascal: Night Train to Lisbon / translated by Barbara Har Harshav - Grove Press, 2008. - 438 pages ISBN: 978-0802118585 Original title: Nachtzug nach Lissabon (German)