Night Train to Lisbon

A Thought Experiment Disguised as a Novel

The premise of Night Train to Lisbon is a philosopher’s thought experiment disguised as a novel: what if, at fifty-seven, you simply left? Raimund Gregorius, a Swiss classics teacher in Bern, stops a Portuguese woman on a bridge one morning, follows an impulse, and boards the night train to Lisbon with a book he has just bought — A Goldsmith of Words by the fictional Portuguese physician and writer Amadeu de Prado.

Reconstructing Amadeu de Prado

In Lisbon, Gregorius tries to reconstruct Prado’s life — a man who was a student prodigy, a physician, a poet, and eventually a member of the underground resistance against Salazar’s Estado Novo dictatorship, before his death at forty. He interviews the people who knew Prado: his sister, his school friends, the women who loved him, the resistance members who worked with him. Prado emerges not as a hero but as a complex, sometimes destructive figure whose idealism coexisted with personal failures that were equally passionate.

Lisbon, Light, and Saudade

Mercier’s Lisbon is the best in fiction. The city’s specific light — sharp and golden in ways that are different from any Mediterranean city — its quietness, its fado, its relationship with time and melancholy, the specific character of its streets and neighbourhoods, are rendered with the precision of someone who clearly knows the city intimately and loves it without sentimentality. The untranslatable Portuguese word saudade — a longing for something absent, something irretrievably lost — is never mentioned, but the novel is entirely saturated with the emotional register it describes.

A Book Within a Book

What gives the novel its peculiar structure is that it is, in large part, a book about reading a book. Interleaved with Gregorius’s wanderings are extended passages from Prado’s A Goldsmith of Words, the slim volume of aphoristic, melancholy philosophy that set the whole journey in motion. These fragments — meditations on loneliness, loyalty, mortality, the tyranny of the lives others expect us to lead, and the impossibility of ever fully knowing another person — function as the novel’s intellectual spine. Pascal Mercier was the pen name of Peter Bieri, a Swiss professor of philosophy, and the book carries the unmistakable seriousness of a thinker who has spent a career on questions of self-knowledge and free will. Prado’s writings are not decorative; they are the argument the narrative dramatises, and many readers come away quoting them as if from a genuine sage.

The Estado Novo and Its Shadow

The historical engine beneath the philosophy is António Salazar’s Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime that ruled Portugal from the 1930s until the Carnation Revolution of 1974, propped up by the feared secret police, the PIDE. Prado’s story turns on a moral crisis born of that era: as a doctor, he saves the life of a despised PIDE torturer — honouring his oath while betraying his conscience — and is driven by guilt into the resistance. Mercier uses this material to pose his hardest questions about moral responsibility under tyranny: what we owe to our principles versus our patients, how guilt reshapes a life, and whether courage can ever fully redeem an earlier compromise. The resistance sections give the novel’s abstractions real human stakes and keep its philosophising tethered to flesh and blood.

The Question at Its Core

Beneath the plot and the city lies a single insistent question, the one that hooks Gregorius the moment he opens Prado’s book: We live only a small part of the life we have within us — what happens to the rest? The novel is an extended attempt to take that question seriously rather than rhetorically. Gregorius has been, by his own account, the most reliable and predictable of men — nicknamed “Mundus,” a walking encyclopedia of dead languages, married to his routines. His flight to Lisbon is not a midlife crisis in the clichéd sense but a genuine philosophical wager: that there might still be time to meet the selves he never became. Mercier refuses to resolve this neatly. Gregorius does not transform into someone bold and new; he simply learns to hold his own life up to the light and examine it, which may be the most any of us can do. That refusal of easy catharsis is precisely what gives the book its grown-up melancholy.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Verdict

Night Train to Lisbon is a divisive book, and honestly so. Its pleasures are real: a profound, unhurried meditation on identity and the unlived life, a peerless evocation of a city, and a genuine philosophical seriousness rare in popular fiction. Its limitations are equally real. The pacing is slow and interior, the philosophical passages can run long, and Gregorius himself remains more a vehicle for contemplation than a fully fleshed character — the ideas are often more vivid than the man thinking them. The 2013 film adaptation directed by Bille August, starring Jeremy Irons as Gregorius, captured Lisbon beautifully but found the novel’s depth of thought far harder to translate to the screen. For readers who want propulsion, this will frustrate; for those willing to drift, insomniac and adrift, through a city of memory while turning over the choices that made them, it is quietly unforgettable.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — A slow, cerebral, and beautifully atmospheric novel of the unlived life — demanding patience, and rewarding it.

Reading Guides

• Pascal Mercier Books in Order
• Where to Start with Pascal Mercier
• Books About Portugal: Essential Reading for Visitors to Lisbon and Beyond
• Best Literary Fiction of All Time