MixedThe Wall Street JournalA middle-aged Swiss high-school teacher browsing in a second-hand bookshop comes across a collection of essays by a writer he has never heard of, in a language (Portuguese) he has never studied ... Such is the conceit that propels Night Train to Lisbon, an ambitious novel by Pascal Mercier...makes literary hero-worship a kind of theme, showing it to be, by turns, an intellectual quest, an act of self-discovery and, in the case of his earnest main character, a disturbing obsession ... Readers may feel exhaustion more than enlightenment ...Gregorius is simply too dull to inspire much concern. The already slow narrative breaks periodically for generous quotations from Prado's prose... The idea of stepping into the world of a beloved book and virtually inhabiting the life of its author is a seductive one. But Night Train to Lisbon is not likely to stir such longings.
