> Orig. Published 2004, originally written in German
> Swiss author
> Epigraph #1: "Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave!" - Jorge Manrique
> Epigraph #2: "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
> Epigraph #3: "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." - Livro Do Desassossego
> Setting: Starts in Bern, Switzerland...travels to Lisbon
> Characters: Raimund "Mundus" Gregorious (beloved teacher of dead languages, struck by a lovely woman saying the word "Portuguese" in that native tongue and it sends him on a new journey), Amadeu Inacio de Almeida Prado (author of "A Goldsmith of Words", the book which accompanies Mundus on his journey, Adriana (Amadeu's sister), Melodie (Amadeu's other sister), Fatima (Amadeu's wife), Estefania (brilliant resistance fighter, woman Amadeu fell for, but was lover of his bet friend, Jorge, had to escape before being imprisoned), Jorge (Amadeu's best friend), Mariana Eca (eye doctor to Gregorius), Joao Eca,( Mariana's brother, tortured for working with the resistance, confides in Gregorius)
> p.15..."He loved the Latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. Because they didn't make you say something. Because they were speech beyond talk. And because they were beautiful in their immutability."
> p.17..."Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us--what happens with the rest?" - from Amadeu's book
> p.24..." I know no greater certainty than this; that all human action is only an extremely imperfect, ridiculous, helpless expression of a hidden internal life of unimagined depths that presses to the surface without ever being able to reach it even remotely." - Amadeu
> Title: p.28.....Mundus takes the night train to Lisbon to begin his adventure
> p.29..."Those who do not observe the impulses of their own mind must of necessity be unhappy."
> p.31..."To be able to part from something, he thought as the train started moving, you had to confront it in a way that created internal distance."
> p. 38..."It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges."..."Silent Nobility"
> Mundus has a fear of gong blind....very nearsighted....one of his first experiences in Lisbon is breaking his glasses......metaphor for fear of missing out on life......he sees a Portuguese doctor ...metaphor continues as he sees the world anew
> he get to know a city via the books in its secondhand stores
> p.77..."It had hurt Gregorius that she saw it like that and that she didn't understand when he spoke of the magic and luminosity of good sentences." ....referring to his mother
> p.79..."That the familiarity of inside and the familiarity of outside can be so far apart that they can hardly be considered with the same thing?"...reminds me of the theoretical basis of my dissertation, the three forms of self....presenting, ideal, extant
> p.81..."They all had the same image before them and yet as Prado said, they each had seen something different because every piece of a human's outside world seen was also a piece of an inside world."...can't quite tease this line apart
> p.82....wakefulness....price is loneliness.....Hmmmm
> p.87...Gregorius gets new lighter glasses and is amazed that he can see so much more clearly....the metaphor continues
> p.88..."The real director of our life is accident--a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm."...words from Amadeu
> p.97..."Was it possible that the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else?"....similar to my experiences as a therapist
> Vocabulary: 1) casuistic: oversubtle; intellectually dishonest; sophistical:
> Gregorius "recoils" when Prado describes a particular lecturer as "parchment"....his nickname at school was "Mundus, the Papyrus"
> p.144..."Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.".....love that line
> p.151..."When Amadeu finishes reading a book...it has no more letters. He devours not only the meaning, but also the printer's ink."....would like to think I am that way too! :-)
> p.157...."It's an unrecognized form of stupidity, he would say, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity."...existentialism's anger
> p.168...Amadeu's valedictory speech from hs, preserved by his sister ...entitled. "Reverence and Loathing for the Word of God""I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty.".....this speech given just as Salazar has come to power and is squashing the Church
> p.194...Amadeu saving Mendes was pivotal in his life....fulfilling the Hippocratic oath, yet experiencing deep guilt over the atrocities Mendes would go on to commit
> p.196..."It was this doubt that Adriana cursed. She had wanted the brother all to herself and had felt that you can never have for yourself someone who isn't on good terms with himself."
> p.218..."...loyalty was important. It was not a feeling, he thought, but a will, a decision, a partisanship of the soul."
> p.231..."In youth we live as if we were immortal. Knowledge of mortality caper around us like a brittle paper ribbon that barely touches our skin."
> p.236..."... we humans consider the world a stage concerned with us and our wishes He considered this illusion the origin of all religion."....Interesting idea!
> p.242...the notion of the internal and external reality...the self other see v. the self internally experienced
> Trains....central notion to the novel....they represent travel, and return from travel ....."a magical moment, a moment of silent drama when the train comes to a complete halt with final jolt?"...Gregorius experiences what Amadeu dreamt of...."What could be more exciting than resuming an interrupted life with all its promises?"
> p.243 "What matters is to move surely and calmly, with the appropriate humor and the appropriate melancholy in the temporally and spatially expanded internal landscape that we are. Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.".....Amadeu wrote this, Gregorious experienced the internal expansion....I wonder if in this age of the internet, virtual travel will suffice to achieve these goals?
> p.264...Homesickness..."...it's like an unbearable thirst, maybe I have to know all the train routes so I can come home any time..."
> p.276..."When a lifetime is short, no rules apply anymore. And then it looks as if you cracked up and are ripe for the loony bin. But basically it's the other way around: the ones who belong there are those who don't want to admit that time is short."... I believe this.
> p.291..."It was crazy thought Gregorius: both men, father and son, had lived on opposite hills of the city like opposing actors in an ancient, linked in an archaic fear of each other and in an affection they didn't find the word for and had written letter to each other that they didn't trust themselves to send Clasped in a muteness neither understood and linked to the fact that one muteness produced the other."...Not an unusual father son relationship
> p.294..."But when we set out to understand somebody's inside?Is that a trip that ever ends? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?"....key to the meaning of this journey of Gregorius's
> p.299..."To live for the moment; it sounds so right and s beautiful, Prado had remarked in one of his brief notes, but the more I want to, the less understand what it means.".....I think I strive to live "in" the moment, rather than "for it".
> p.308...the mysterious publishing company, Red Cedars, that published Amadeu's book......Adriana's last sight before passing out when she choked and Amadeu saved her life were the cedars outside the window, looking red in the sunset light
> p.310...Final farewells...."...takes fearlessness: you have to be able to endure the pain of dissonance. It is also about acknowledging what was impossible. Parting is also something you do with yourself: to stand by yourself under the look of the other. The cowardice of a farewell resides in the transfiguration: in the attempt to bathe what "was" in a golden light and deny the dark. What you forfeit in that is nothing less than the acknowledgement of your self in those feature produced by darkness."
> How many of are, indeed, shaped by "...a s
> Amadeu considered Melancholia "a timeless phenomenon and thought it was one of the most precious ones that humans knew."
> I almost cried at the power of the final farewell between Amadeu and Jorge....all that Amadeu felt was needed in a farewell and incredibly powerful....later Gregorius tries to achieve this in his farewells
> Amadeu buried the chess set he and Jorge had played on, to keep Jorge with him.....so poignant
> p.334..."...we invented the soul to have a subject of conversation, something we can talk about when we meet one another. Just imagine if we couldn't talk about the soul:! What should we talk about with one another? It would be hell!
> p.341..."Memento Mori"...do not understand this section
> p.351..."Imagination and intimacy, aside from language, those were the only two sanctuaries he allowed."
> The final sentence of the valedictory speech, which Amadeu edited out for fear of being considered blasphemous by the priest: "I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and reaching for the wind."
> p.369..."I live in myself as in a moving train."
> Amadeu's anger that teachers and parents did not provide guidance to help the young to "avod wasting our soul on useless, self-destructive anger?"
> Amadeu comes to peace with the cause of his "derailment" in life..."he had disappointed all expectations and broken all taboos, and that was his bliss."
> A perfect ending......Gregorius, at peace with himself and his life, having defied expectations and taboos, goes bravely to meet his end.
> p.424..."I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom." Estafania, after the powerful experience of Amadeu understanding her fully.
> LibraryThing Review: This novel will, without question, be one of my all-time favorites. No kidding! Reading "Night Train to Lisbon" was an intellectual, philosophical, literary feast. Gregorius, a teacher of dead languages, commits the first impulsive act of his adult life and begins the most crucial journey of his entire lifetime. His journey ends up consisting of the quest to understand the life of another man, Amadeu Prado. In the course of the journey, Gregorius and the reader meet Adriana, wearing a ribbon at her neck to cover a mysterious scar. We meet Jorge O'Kelly, Amadeu's best friend and worst enemy. We meet the women from Amadeu's life, including his wife, his lifelong intimate confidante, and the woman who ignited his passion. We meet resistance fighters from the time of Salazar's regime. We meet physicians, bookstore owners, and students. The cast of characters is rich and varied. Most importantly we are allowed the time to ponder the meaning of life, of love, the critical nature of farewells, of the magnificent power of words, especially poetry, and the amazing power of feeling known to another person. This is a powerful and moving literary masterpiece, in my opinion!
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