Night Train to Lisbon

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Night Train to Lisbon is a novel by Pascal Mercier ( pseudonym of Peter Bieri ) from 2004. It tells of a classical philologist who is suddenly seized by the “dreamlike, pathetic wish” to be able to turn back his time thirty years in order to “ to stand once more at that point in my life and to be able to take a completely different direction than the one that made me who I am now ”(p. 169).

The novel was translated into 32 languages ​​and sold more than 2 million times in German-speaking countries alone.

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Kirchenfeld Bridge in Bern

Raimund ("Mundus") Gregorius - 57 years old, has been an extremely reliable and popular teacher of Latin, Greek and Hebrew at the Berner Gymnasium Kirchenfeld for 33 years and since his divorce more in his books than in the real world - meets one morning on the way to school of a woman who is standing on the Kirchenfeldbrücke in the pouring rain , reading a letter, crumpling it up and throwing it into the river and giving Gregorius the impression that she will kill herself in the next moment. He rushes up to her, speaks to her, finds out that she is Portuguese and invites her to join him in his Latin class. Before the end of the lesson, however, the stranger gets up, leaves the classroom in silence and just as suddenly disappears from his life again. During the long break, Gregorius also leaves school prematurely, perhaps with the intention of looking for the mysterious woman. In doing so, he came across a thin book with a yellowed cover in a second-hand bookshop, entitled Um ourives das palavras , published in Lisbon in 1975 and written by Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado, a Portuguese doctor and philosopher who wrote during the Salazar era -Dictatorship lived in Portugal. The bookseller reads and translates for Gregorius not only the title (A Goldsmith of Words) and the introduction to the text (where the author speaks of himself and his kind as archaeologists of the soul ), but also one of his shortest sections: If it is so, that we can only live a small part of what is within us - what happens to the rest?

Raimund Gregorius is already so moved by these few words that he decides to learn Portuguese and to go in search of that goldsmith of words, to whom he immediately feels kindred because nothing is more sacred to him than poetry and The flawlessness of the language and because he is also moved by the question of his as yet unlived life. The next morning, he makes himself instead as usual to go to class, on the journey, not without letter logging off with his head teacher and his step in the words of Marcus Aurelius to explain: "a life that only one, each . But it is almost over for you, and you have shown no consideration for yourself in it, but acted as if your happiness was about the other souls ... But those who do not pay close attention to the movements of their own soul are inevitable unhappy. ”He travels via Paris to Irún , from where the night train continues to Lisbon. There it turns out that Prado died of a cerebral haemorrhage ( aneurysm ) more than 30 years ago .

The Praça do Comércio and the Tagus River in Lisbon

The main part of the novel now describes how Gregorius meticulously - after having lighter, more modern and better glasses fitted to him in Portugal by the ophthalmologist Mariana Eça and thus also enabled a visually clearer view of his surroundings - in Lisbon and the surrounding area traces the hidden life of the gifted author. To help him with his research, Mariana advises him to visit her old uncle João, who had contact with Amadeu de Prado during the Portuguese dictatorship as a resistance fighter, who had gone through the hell of torture and now lives in an old people's home across the Tejo . The Sunday chess games with him become a first important source of information for Gregorius. He learns that Prado had only studied medicine at the request of his strict father (a judge who had to pronounce injustice during the Portuguese dictatorship and who therefore later committed suicide), but that he had nevertheless become an excellent and uncompromising doctor: he once saved his sister Adriana, who adores him beyond his death, gave her life with a courageous knife stab in the neck ( cricothyrotomy ) when she had choked and threatened to suffocate. But he also saved Mendes, the notorious and feared secret service murderer, who had been assassinated, from certain death by means of a heart injection, without considering that this would make him an avoided traitor in the eyes of his friends and “him break the heart ”should.

Just as head over heels, like Gregorius left for Lisbon, he interrupts his stay in Portugal for three days after two weeks and flies back to Bern because he suddenly panic abroad and he is afraid of losing if he does not return home . to the place where he knew his way around . There he sneaks to school at night, then walks like a sleepwalker past his parents' house and the apartment of his much younger ex-wife Florence, goes to university the next day, sits down in one of the empty lecture halls and yet has it everywhere Feeling of being in the wrong place. Confused, he flies back to Lisbon.

Gregorius not only contacts Prado's two sisters, but also his former teacher, who is now over 90 years old, as well as Prado's best friend and companion Jorge O'Kelly from the resistance against the Salazar regime and his girlfriend at the time, Estefânia Espinhosa that Prado was also in love with. So Gregorius, as a passionate chess player, carefully moving step by step, comes ever closer to his main character and detective reconstructs the former constellation of their accompanying figures. Both from their stories and from Prado's partly philosophical, partly psychological and poetic recordings in his Goldschmied der Wort (Goldsmith of Words) gradually emerges the image of a life marked by severe breaks and great passions, which in Gregorius triggers a kaleidoscopic stream of consciousness of thoughts, memories and dream images and him gives an idea of ​​the possibilities his existence would have had to offer if he had been more courageous in the past.

“The fear that life would remain incomplete, a torso; the awareness of no longer being able to become who one was aiming for. That was how we interpreted the fear of death. But how can one, I asked, be afraid of the lack of wholeness and coherence in life when, once it has become an irrevocable fact, one no longer experiences it? … Our lives are fleeting formations of quicksand, formed by one gust of wind, destroyed by the next. Forms of futility that blow away before they have really formed. "

When the dizzy spells from which Gregorius had been suffering for some time became more frequent and severe, he called his Greek friend, the ophthalmologist Doxiades in Bern, who (along with his favorite student Natalie Rubin) was the only contact with his hometown during his five-week stay in Portugal. He advised him to be examined in Switzerland. Gregorius takes one last rental car trip to Galicia to the Spanish Cape Finisterre (“end of the world”), the place where Prado once separated from his great love Estefânia. After almost causing a car accident twice on the way, he returns the car early and prefers the train journey again. Back in Lisbon, he says goodbye to all of the people he has spoken to. Then he goes to the train station and starts the journey home. In Salamanca he follows a last spontaneous inspiration, stops for two days and visits Estefânia, who is now working as a historian at the university there. She provides him with the missing piece of the mosaic for his picture of Prado by explaining the exact circumstances of their love affair. Ultimately, Prado had to get Estefânia to safety in Spain. Fascinated by her person and her report, Gregorius temporarily toyed with the idea of ​​settling in Salamanca, even hastily inspected a few empty apartments, but then changed his mind.

When he arrived in Bern, he first had his many farewell photos of Lisbon developed. Many have become nothing , with the rest he notices how the past is already beginning to freeze under his gaze . Suddenly he thinks he knows what he wants. He buys new films and wanders through his hometown for two days to photograph the essential places of his life, but when he looks at the result, they are strange images, they had nothing to do with him. Two more short phone calls - one to Florence, his former student, to whom he was married for five years and from whom he has now been divorced for nineteen years; the other with João, the aged uncle of his Portuguese ophthalmologist, with whom he played chess every Sunday in Lisbon - then he has Doxiades take him to a clinic: “What if you find something bad?” asked Gregorius. "Something that makes me lose myself?" The Greek looked at him. It was a steady, steady look. “I have a recipe pad,” he said.

Reviews

The novel was received mostly positively. Otto A. Böhmer calls the novel in his review ( Die Zeit , November 25, 2004, No. 49) a "fantastic train journey inward" :

“Pascal Mercier has written an impressive book, an awareness thriller with depth and without guarantee. There is no guarantee, not in the lottery and not in life, unless you boldly issue it yourself and stand up for it, against the pretensions of supposedly better knowledge. The philosophy, at least the great philosophy that is not concerned with the day-to-day business of rational reflection, has more to say than it dares to say, thanks to Peter Bieri, who keeps his Mercier. "

Claudia Voigt writes in Spiegel (4/2004):

“Prado's fictional writings are inserted into this novel like a second book. As a reader you move on three levels, you watch with excitement how Gregorius puts together the dazzling puzzle of Prado's life from the stories of various people, while at the same time getting to know Prado's own thoughts. And then you experience Gregorius' cautious change from a conscientious Latin teacher to an open, curious person. 'The stories that others tell about you and the stories that you tell about yourself: which ones come closer to the truth?' Says Prado's book.
After five weeks of winter, Gregorius is returning from Lisbon to Bern. He may be terminally ill. He suffers from a strange vertigo. He hardly recognizes his old life. But he has traveled far into the world of thought and with him the reader of this wonderful novel. "

Tom Liehr in the online portal literature almost pure :

"Mercier's eloquent, highly eloquent and usually very exciting book leads through Portuguese history and philosophy, tells of friendship and dependency, develops extremely interesting and original approaches that supposedly originate from the pen of the - invented - Portuguese, sometimes seem to contain banalities, but actually deal almost exclusively with the 'central' issues. A wonderful, very intelligent read, original and only at times very detailed. He can be forgiven for the fact that the virtual main character, Amadeu de Prado, is ultimately an abstraction of the author himself, because it has succeeded admirably. "

filming

Since the end of 2011, Swiss C-Films has been producing the film adaptation of the novel in cooperation with Studio Hamburg, directed by Bille August . The shooting in Bern and Lisbon was completed in the first half of 2012. The main role as Raimund Gregorius is played by Jeremy Irons . Bruno Ganz , Mélanie Laurent , Jack Huston , Martina Gedeck , Charlotte Rampling , Lena Olin , Christopher Lee , Burghart Klaußner and August Diehl can also be seen in other roles . The film Night Train to Lisbon had its world premiere at the Berlinale 2013 and was released in cinemas in March 2013.

Book editions

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "It was probably boring for Mr. Berset" (Tagesanzeiger, March 15, 2012)
  2. ↑ Alexander Sury: Obituary for Jaime Romagosa. In: The Bund. Tamedia Espace AG, May 27, 2020, accessed on May 27, 2020 . The bookseller as a real template
  3. ^ Criticism in Time
  4. ↑ Criticism in the mirror
  5. ^ Criticism on Literatur-fast-pur.de
  6. ↑ Star cast in a CH book adaptation
  7. ↑ Night train to Lisbon in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  8. ↑ C-Films website with details on the film accessed April 19, 2012