Stuck in Critical Thought

'Night Train to Lisbon’ (Pascal Mercier, 2004)

Jeremy Irons as Raimund Gregorius in the 2013 film adaptation (dir. Bille August).

Have you ever thought about something so hard that your brain hurt, your vision went fuzzy, and your head began to spin? Did you find it impossible to shake the urge to push that thought to its logical extreme, no matter how much discomfort it brought you? Was the need to know so compelling that you pressed on thinking, despite the pain it brought?

If so, Night Train to Lisbon may be the book for you.

Written by the late philosophy professor Peter Bieri (under the pseudonym Pascal Mercier, from fellow philosophers Blaise Pascal and Louis-Sébastien Mercier), it follows Raimund Gregorius, a quiet, middle-aged Classics teacher from Bern, who, after rescuing a Portuguese woman on the verge of suicide, decides to abandon his steady life overnight. Inspired by the mysterious woman, Gregorius chooses Lisbon as the first stop on his journey to a new way of living.

Gregorius brings along a slim volume of thoughts penned by one Amadeu de Prado, a young doctor who had lived and worked in Lisbon under the Catholic-authoritarian Estado Novo regime (1933–1974). He rapidly becomes enthralled by Prado’s writings, devoting his time in Lisbon to tracking down those who knew the man before his untimely death in the mid-1970s. Through discovering more about Prado, Gregorius believes that he may be able to answer hidden questions about his own life — and perhaps even about existence itself (this is, after all, a novel written by a philosopher).

It soon becomes clear that Prado was a man motivated by an obsessive desire to search for truth. As Gregorius slowly translates Prado’s text, we are drip-fed insights into the good doctor’s late-night musings on God, knowledge, love, pain, death, self-understanding, the purpose of existence and much, much more. Prado was someone who, according to his reclusive sister Adriana, rarely slept. By day he laboured away at his clinic, by night he sat alone, spilling his complex, jumbled thoughts onto the page in a desperate attempt to give order to an untidy and untruthful world.

Gregorius, having so recently abandoned all his old certainties, is naturally drawn into Prado’s quest for meaning. Until the incident with the Portuguese woman, Gregorius had been content to plod through life, trotting out Latin declensions and ignoring the clumsy flirtations of sixth form girls. But now his fusty tranquillity has been shattered, and it is only by following Prado’s footprints that Gregorius can slowly piece together a new truth. To do so, he must enter Prado’s realm of relentless questioning and draw from it the same energy that once animated the good doctor.

Night Train to Lisbon certainly carries intellectual heft, but it’s also possible to read Mercier’s novel as a warning against lapsing into a state of obsessive overthinking. Prado is a man tortured by his own inability to take anything lightly. We read that, as a teenager, he was approached by a girl in the schoolyard who asked why he wasn’t throwing a ball around with the other boys. “I read this book”, he replies, “[a] book about saints, Thérèse of Lisieux, Teresa of Ávila, and so on. After that, everything I do seems so banal. Simply not important enough. You understand?”

This intellectual severity becomes a problem in adult life, as he is unable to face the world without surrendering to an intense need to rationalise and logicise everything around him. Matters come to a head when Prado provides emergency aid to the hated chief of the Estado Novo’s secret police, who arrives at his surgery on the verge of death. The realisation of what he has done (which is spelt out for him by a rather unforgiving crowd outside) leaves Prado with a moral conundrum from which he never recovers.

The tortoise-like figure of Gregorius becomes electrified by Prado’s way of thinking. As he reads through the passages of Prado’s book and stages increasingly personal discussions with the latter’s family and friends, Gregorius begins to question everything around him — his life, his relationships, the purpose of learning. In one way this is liberating (as symbolised by his amusingly awkward outfit changes), but it also marks the acceptance of a new burden. Tellingly, towards the end of the book, Gregorius begins to experience dizzy spells — the very symptoms encountered by Prado, the overthinker-in-chief, shortly before his death.

Night Train to Lisbon is a slow burner, rolling and contemplative rather than pacy and exciting. Its descriptions of Lisbon, all winding backstreets and rattling tramcars, are gorgeous, and its characters often reflect a sympathetic, nuanced understanding of personal spiritual suffering. Yet readers may also detect a quiet discomfort within the novel. The twin stories of Gregorius and Prado are life-affirming in a sense, but they also present a gruelling existence, of individuals trapped by their inability to experience the world in a non-critical, carefree manner. There are times, increasingly common as the book goes on, where you wish that the young Prado had just sometimes left his books behind and picked up a ball instead.