Pascal Mercier - Night Train to Lisbon

Rich, dense, star-spangle Night Train to Lisbon is about ends and means, language and loneliness, betrayal and complicity, intimacy and imagination, vanity and forgiveness.

Harpers

Have you ever been overwhelmed by an abrupt impulse to leave your old life behind and start a new one? Many of us feel the temptation; very few give in to it Night Train to Lisbon is a novel of ideas that reads like a thriller: an unsentimental journey that seems to transcend time and space. Every character, every scene, is evoked with an incomparable economy and a tragic nobility redolent of the mysterious hero Pascal Mercier now takes his rightful place among our finest European novelists.

Sunday Telegraph

I heartily recommend [this novel] I also loved The Tin Drum and Darkness at Noon and The Outsider . If those sound like your kind of novel too, Night Train to Lisbon stands comfortably in that company.

Irish Independent

Mercier draws together all the great existential questions in a masterful novel.

De Volkskrant

A serious and beautiful book

Le Monde

A book of astonishing richness A visionary writer A deserved international hit.

Le Canard enchan

Powerful, serious, and brilliant One of the genuine revelations of the year.

LHumanit

One of the great European novels of recent years

Page des libraires

In this book, reading becomes experience One reads this book almost breathlessly, almost unable to put it down A handbook for the soul, intellect and heart. In reading it, one learns to value time with a book: a rich, fulfilling lifetime.

Die Welt

A book of style, narrative depth and philosophy I read it in three nights. Then I was convinced to change my life.

Sddeutsche Zeitung

A sensation The best book of the last decade A novel of incredible clarity and beauty.

Bcher

Originally published in 2004 in Germany by Carl Hanser Verlag.

This edition originally published in the United States of America by Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This updated paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2009
by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright Carl Hanser Verlag Muenchen Wien 2004

The moral right of Pascal Mercier to be identified
as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Translation Barbara Harshav 2008

The moral right of Barbara Harshav to be identified
as the translator of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of both the copyright owner
and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it
are the work of the authors imagination. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities,
is entirely coincidental.

The epigraphs are taken from:

Coplas de don Jorge Manrique by Jorge Manrique,
translated by Henry Longfellow (Boston: Allen & Ticknor, 1833)

The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Michel de Montaigne,
translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1948)

The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa by Fernando Pessoa,
translated by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 2002)

First eBook Edition: January 2010

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Contents

Nuestras vidas son los ros

que van a dar en la mar ,

ques el morir

Our lives are rivers, gliding free

to that unfathomed, boundless sea,

the silent grave!

Jorge Manrique

Nous sommes tous de lopins et dune contexture si
informe et diverse, que chaque piece, chaque momant, faict son jeu.
Et se trouve autant de difference de nous nous mesmes,
que de nous autruy.

We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in
composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own
game. And there is as much difference between us and
ourselves as between us and others.

Michel de Montaigne , Essays, Second Book, 1

Cada um de ns vrios, muitos, uma prolixidade
de si mesmos. Por isso aquele que despreza o ambiente no o
mesmo que dele se alegra ou padece. Na vasta colnia do nosso
ser h gente de muitas espcies, pensando
e sentindo diferentemente.

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that
the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same
as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast
colony of our being there are many species of people who
think and feel in different ways.

Fernando Pessoa , O Livro do Desassossego

The day that ended with everything different in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like countless other days. At quarter to eight, he came from Bundesterrasse and stepped on to the Kirchenfeldbrcke leading from the heart of the city to the Gymnasium. He did that every day of the school term, always at quarter to eight. Once when the bridge was blocked, he made a mistake in the Greek class. That had never happened before nor did it ever happen again. For days, the whole school talked of nothing but this mistake. The longer the debate lasted, the more it was thought that he had been misheard. At last, this conviction won out even among the students who had been there. It was simply inconceivable that Mundus, as everyone called him, could make a mistake in Greek, Latin or Hebrew.

Gregorius looked ahead at the pointed towers of the Historical Museum of the city of Bern, up to the Gurten and down to the Aare with its glacier-green water. A gusty wind drove low-lying clouds over him, turned his umbrella inside out and whipped the rain in his face. It was then that he noticed the woman standing in the middle of the bridge. She had leaned her elbows on the railing and was reading in the pouring rain what looked like a letter. She must have been holding the sheet with both hands. As Gregorius came closer, she suddenly crumpled the paper, kneaded it into a ball and threw the ball into space with a violent movement. Instinctively, Gregorius had walked faster and was now only a few steps away from her. He saw the rage in her pale, rain-wet face. It wasnt a rage that could be expressed in words and then blow over. It was a grim rage turned inward that must have been smouldering in her for a long time. Now the woman leaned on the railing with outstretched arms, and slipped her heels out of her shoes. Now she jumps . Gregorius abandoned the umbrella to a gust of wind that drove it over the railing, threw his briefcase full of school notebooks to the ground and uttered a string of curses that werent part of his usual vocabulary. The briefcase opened and the notebooks slid on to the wet pavement. The woman turned around. For a few moments, she watched unmoving as the notebooks darkened with the water. Then she pulled a felt-tipped pen from her coat pocket, took two steps, leaned down to Gregorius and wrote a line of numbers on his forehead.

Forgive me, she said in French, breathless and with a foreign accent. But I mustnt forget this phone number and I dont have any paper with me.

Now she looked at her hands as if she were seeing them for the first time.