The Wall Street Journal-20080119-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Books- Literary Hero-Worship
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books: Literary Hero-Worship
Night Train to Lisbon
By Pascal Mercier
Grove, 438 pages, $25
A MIDDLE-aged Swiss high-school teacher browsing in a second-hand bookshop comes across a collection of essays by a writer he has never heard of, in a language (Portuguese) he has never studied. Picking through the text with the aid of a dictionary, he is enthralled by the writer's reflections on the difficulty of expressing ideas and experience in words. Within hours, the teacher abandons his hometown in the heart of Europe and travels to the writer's native city on the continent's western edge.
Such is the conceit that propels "Night Train to Lisbon," an ambitious novel by Pascal Mercier, a Swiss-born writer and philosophy professor now living in Berlin. Mr. Mercier makes literary hero- worship a kind of theme, showing it to be, by turns, an intellectual quest, an act of self-discovery and, in the case of his earnest main character, a disturbing obsession.
Amadeu de Prado, the Portuguese writer that has so captured the teacher's imagination, turns out to have died more than 30 years earlier. Thus begins a second journey, into the past, as the teacher -- a man named Raimund Gregorius -- tracks down Prado's relatives and friends and reconstructs his life. Prado, we learn, was an aristocrat and distinguished physician who took heroic risks, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in resistance to the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal. He emerges, in many ways, as the opposite of the stodgy and introverted Gregorius. Yet their common loneliness and love of language mark them as spiritual kin, and Gregorius eventually identifies with the late author to a frightening degree.
Gregorius's voyage into Prado's past ultimately leads him to see his own life in a new light, though not necessarily a happier one. Readers may feel exhaustion more than enlightenment. The repetitive and plodding way in which Mr. Mercier tells Prado's heroic story leaches away all suspense. And Gregorius is simply too dull to inspire much concern. The already slow narrative breaks periodically for generous quotations from Prado's prose: meditations on time, memory, God and death, among other things. They are occasionally provocative but often overwritten.
The idea of stepping into the world of a beloved book and virtually inhabiting the life of its author is a seductive one. But "Night Train to Lisbon" is not likely to stir such longings.
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Mr. Rocca is the Vatican correspondent for Religion News Service.
