Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier – translated from German and first published in English in 2008
I chose this book because it was supposed to be like Shadow of the Wind, which I loved and because it enabled me to travel from Switzerland to Portugal within the book, thus passing over France which I had already visited and Spain, which I needed to visit last in Europe before crossing over into Morocco. However it isn’t nearly as good as Shadow of the Wind. Raimund Gregorius is an eccentric middle aged professor of ancient languages at a colledge in Berne. One day he meets a Portuguese woman standing on a bridge and decides to change his life. He buys an obscure book written by a Portuguese man Amadeu de Prado and decides to travel to Portugal to track him down. Unfortunately he turns out to be dead but Raimund is undeterred and seeks out his friends and family in Lisbon. There was rather too much introspection and pages and pages of Amadeu’s philosophical thoughts, which were rather incomprehensible to me, so it was a bit of a slog to finish the book. 4/10
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