MixedThe Los Angeles Times...a man's soul (here manifested as a distraught woman speaking a foreign tongue) sends a message of distress that provokes a midlife shift, a repudiation of the world, a turning inward. A sacred text is found, a new language undertaken, a spiritual journey begun ... Night Train to Lisbon is the third novel of Swiss author Peter Bieri, a philosophy professor writing under the pseudonym Pascal Mercier ...a very long, ambitious book that's feverishly overwritten. It begs comparison with Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, another international blockbuster featuring overheated prose and a mysterious book-within-the-book ...partly a disquisition on language, consisting of various personal, philosophical ruminations strewn through the novel as counterpoint to Gregorius' journey ... Ornate language and melodrama persist throughout.
