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Pascal
Mercier, The Night
Train to Lisbon. Translated by Barbara Harshav. Grove
Press, New York, 2008. German original published 2004.
Reviewed by John Bedell
I
have a friend, a molecular biologist, who believes that within a
generation we will be able to rewire our genes and live to be 200. I
rather doubt this. After all, there is nothing more fundamental to life
than death and decay, and I suspect defeating it will be a very hard
problem. Yet I return to this idea again and again because I find it a
useful thought experiment. Wondering how things would be different if
we lived to be 200 leads me to all sorts of interesting thoughts about
our 80-year lives. Such as, it seems obvious that 150 years is too long
to pursue one career. Is, perhaps, 50 years to long to pursue one
career? More generally: if you lived to be 200, what would you do with
the extra time? Why aren’t you doing that now?
I mention this
because Pascal Mercier’s fascinating novel is very much concerned with
exactly these questions. It asks us to examine how we spend our time,
and, more deeply, what our relationship is to time and its passage. It
is a brooding, melancholy book, and only intermittently entertaining.
But it is consistently thoughtful and sometimes beautiful, and it has
held my attention like the most compelling mystery or thriller. It is
not a book for everyone, but anyone who wants to think about life,
death, love, and time will find it marvelous and may even fall in love
with it.
The American edition of this German book comes equipped
with extravagant praise from a raft of European novelists and literary
journals. After reading it, said one Danish reviewer, you are not the
same person as when you began. A German journal called it “a handbook
for the soul, intellect, and heart.” So I began it with high hopes and
was somewhat put off that I quickly got bogged down. In the beginning
the plot follows one the most conventional possible tropes, the
mild-mannered, middle aged man who finally manages to break free of his
crabbed existence and live. Raimund Gregorius is a teacher of ancient
languages at a Gymnasium
in
Switzerland. His knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew is superb, and
he is a good enough teacher that he has many fans among his students.
But that’s about it. He was once married, to a former student, but she
left him after five years of increasing boredom and discomfort. He has
only one friend, his ophthalmologist, and his only recreations are
reading and chess. Then one day he runs into a mysterious woman on the
bridge by his school. Afraid that she is about to jump, he approaches
her, and then instead of jumping she writes a phone number on his
forehead. It is raining and she is clearly upset, so he takes her with
him to his school to dry off. She speaks with an accent, and he asks
her where she is from. Portugal, she answers, in a voice that
captivates him.
After the woman disappears, Gregorius visits a
book store specializing in Romance languages. The proprietor shows him
an obscure book of thoughts jotted down by a Portuguese man named
Amadeu Prado. Gregorius becomes obsessed with this book, begins to
learn Portuguese, and the next day he is on the train to Lisbon. I
found this part of the book tedious, both because of its relentlessly
conventional plot and because Gregorius spends page after page
wondering why he is doing this and whether he ought to go home. I
wanted to say, enough already, you have to do this because you are the
boring professor in a midlife crisis novel, so just accept it and get
on with your adventure!
In Lisbon Gregorius slowly translates Prado’s book and tries
to find out everything he can about Amadeu Prado. Here Night Train to Lisbon
begins to come alive. Prado’s book is a series of disconnected musings,
each from a paragraph to a few pages long. They are marvelous pieces of
writing, both because they are spoken in a completely different voice
from the main narrator’s and because some of them are striking and
thought provoking. You can imagine that a bookish, thoughtful man like
Gregorius could become obsessed with the book and its author. As
Gregorius searches for Prado by talking to one old friend after
another, he becomes a character as present as Gregorius, and a lot more
interesting.
Prado and his friends were all involved in the
resistance against Portugal’s fascist dictatorship, which lasted until
1975. (As it happens I have read three recent European novels that
feature memories of fascism and resistance. I am not sure if this is a
quirk of my taste, or if in Europe, where nothing has happened since
1989, a writer who wants to treat political themes has to work with old
memories.) Prado’s friends tell Gregorius about that time, and the
risks and choices it involved. The passages on the resistance are good,
but they are not as powerful as the excerpts from Prado’s little book.
These are the real heart of Night
Train to Lisbon.
Prado’s subjects include the problem of how to express unconventional
thoughts in written language, which is saturated with convention; how
we are shaped by our families; what makes relationships important;
whether love can save us; why we are afraid of death; and how we ought
to spend our lives. Prado was an extraordinary character, admired by
many men, loved by several women, and as we learn about his life he
becomes the author of his amazing book. We believe the striking words
spring from his life and his mind. The intertwining of Gregorius’ own
personal crisis with his search for Prado, his steady progress through
Prado’s book, and Prado’s own life, makes for a compelling intellectual
journey.
I could go on and on about the insights and the
striking phrasing of Prado’s book, but that would rather spoil it, and
so I will give only two examples. This is from a section titled “The
Shadows of the Soul”:
The
stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself:
which come closer to the truth? Is it so clear that they are your own?
Are you an authority on yourself? . . . In such stories is there really
a difference between true and false? Is the soul a place of facts? Or
are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?
Another
section of Prado’s book describes a conversation he had with a friend
about the fear of death. His friend, captivated by the performance of a
gifted pianist, buys a grand piano and plans to learn to play. But once
it arrives in his house he realizes that he is too old to ever learn to
play with real skill, and this plunges him into gloom and thoughts of
death. They ponder different reasons why we might be afraid of death.
Is it just because we want our lives to go on as they are, more of the
same forever? Because we fear the nothingness of unbeing? Prado’s
friend’s experience with the piano suggests a different notion. Perhaps
our fear of dying might be the fear of having our future cut off. When
we are dead, we will no longer have any chance to do the things we have
been putting off but thought we might get to one day:
The fear of death
might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had
planned to be.
There are many more such nuggets, and also much interesting
conversation and reflection. Night
Train to Lisbon
is one of the most richly thoughtful books I know, and once it gets
going it is a pretty good read, too. If you're in the mood to reflect,
think, or brood, find a copy and read it.
According to the back
of his book, Pascal Mercier is a philosophy professor. Why, I have been
wondering, did he write his book as a novel, rather than as an essay or
even a monograph? Money might have been one motive, I suppose, but
although Mercier has ended up making a pile of money from this book I
have trouble believing that he planned on it. I imagine his millions
are coming as a big surprise to him. I think his motive in writing this
novel was to express thoughts that he finds interesting but didn't want
to put forth as his own. Mercier seems to be a sort of café
philosopher, who likes to toss off ideas and striking phrases but
doesn't want to have to defend them. So he creates a larger than life
character – aristocrat, resistance fighter, Latin lover – and passes
his insights off onto Amadeu Prado. He thus bypasses the
academic
discourse that passes for philosophy these days and reaches people
interested in what he has to say. Writing
as Amadeu Prado, he is free to be
bold, cursory, contradictory, derivative, or anything else he wants to
be, as long as the result is interesting. If
someone says, "But Pascal, this argument really doesn't follow," or,
"Pascal, this is just a restatement of something Augustine said 1700
years ago," he just shrugs and says, "It's a novel! What do you
want?"
Another thing that struck me about this book is the
strange attitude toward poetry. Prado and Gregorius are both said to be
great lovers of poetry. Thinking
is the second most beautiful thing, Prado once
wrote. The most
beautiful is poetry. Like
so many other romantic souls in our agnostic age, they seek their
divine experiences in love and art, and they speak about poetry as if
it could sometimes combine the two. Given all this, I found it odd that
there is no poetry in the book. There are literary quotations of
various kinds, but no verse, unless you count the opening of St. John’s
gospel. When the chracters discuss chess, their speech is full of
detailed allusions to famous games and players, differing styles of
play, and the like. But when they talk about poetry, all is
abstraction. They speak of poetry but not of poets or poems. Why?
I have the impression that Mercier actually doesn't know a thing about
poetry, certainly not about any being written today. He likes the idea
of poetry, and he dreams about contemplating beautiful words that
express true thoughts, but actual
poetry plays no part in his life. His characters lave lost their faith
in god, but retain their belief in poetry, music, and political action.
Pascal Mercier has no faith in any of those things, either. What he
offers us as
a replacement for religion and
philosophical certainty is not the refined beauty of poetry, but
something more like conversation.
He invites us to talk over life and what
it means, without illusions, and without any expectation that we will
discover they truth. There are no rules in this discourse, only
thoughts, feelings, and words. It
is not comforting, but it is fascinating and moving. It is intellectual
life as I like it best. Mercier may not be a great philosopher or a
great novelist, but he is a wonderful thinker and a fine writer, and
this book is a treasury of thoughts and words.
January
27, 2009
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From the
Commonplace Book
Given
that we can live only a small part of what we are, what happens to the
rest?
-Pascal
Mercier
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