Pascal Mercier, author of ‘Night Train to Lisbon’, dies
What is conscience? Is free will, or rather the “tool for freedom”? As a philosopher, Peter Bieri addressed these questions.
The Swiss writer, who was born in Bern in 1944 and worked as a novelist under the pseudonym Pascal Mercier, has died aged 79, his publisher, Hanser Verlag, confirmed on July 4.
Following “Perlmann Schweigen” in 1995 and “Der Klavierstimmer” in 1998, “Nachtzug nach Lissabon” (“Night Train to Lisbon”) became a huge bestseller in 2004.
The novel was a selection from DW’s 100 German Must-Reads series.
diverted bibliophile
Everyone has dreamed about it: what would happen if you disappeared overnight and started all over again somewhere else, somewhere where no one knew you?
From time to time this imagined scenario is very attractive, but in reality only very few people have the courage to start all over again like this. Fear of the consequences of such an action tends to paralyze people. But why?
Pascal Mercier sought answers to these questions in his book, sending a quixotic classical philologist on this adventurous journey.
The protagonist, Raimund Gregorius, is a scholar par excellence who teaches Greek and Latin at a secondary school in Bern, Switzerland. He is divorced and seems more connected to books than life. He has conducted the same routine for the past 30 years and is reverently called “Mundus” by his students.
Then, one day, an amazing thing happens: Gregorius meets a woman on his way to work at school. She is alone in the rain on a bridge. Does she want to kill herself? The mysterious Portuguese woman writes a phone number on her forehead and then disappears.
Everything changes after that. Raimund Gregorius turns his life upside down. He buys a book in Portuguese, a language he had only mocked until then, and reads the lines of an author named Prado he doesn’t know:
“Given that we can live only a small part of what is in us — what happens to the rest?”
ready for an adventure
Gregorius sets out on a journey to find “rest” from himself. He takes an overnight train to Lisbon. The only thing he takes with him is a credit card and a desire to find out more about this mysterious author. But the more he discovers about Prado’s life, the more complex his questions become. Even the things Gregorius is certain about are called into question.
“It is a mistake to believe that the pivotal moments of a life, when its habitual direction changes forever, must be loud, raucous dramas, washed over by fierce internal waves. This is a cheesy fairy tale started by drunken journalists, filmmakers in search of flashes (…). Indeed, the dramas of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably smooth.”
Source: DW
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