I had an overwhelmingly negative reaction to Pascal Mercier’s “Night Train to Lisbon,” a book our reader’s group chose this month. After a couple hundred pages it was clear to me that things were not going to get better but I ploughed on, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, the author never give it to us.
In theater, when someone says “hey, want some peanuts?” it’s something you notice. The second time it’s either a coincidence or a phrase that puts the audience on alert. The third time you hear “hey, want some peanuts?” you’ve entered the world of farce. This is what happens when a boring Swiss man, who can just barely manage to read Portuguese with the aid of a dictionary, is showered with manuscript after manuscript after letter after letter after note after valedictory speech by people who eagerly and inexplicably invite him into their lives — and who all seem to have reams of the stuff — never (as one would expect) in a single closet or shoebox. And, to boot, these are all people who just happen to be able to recite, verbatim and at theatrical length, arcane passages from these profound nuggets they have preserved apparently just for the eyes of the Good Burgher Gregorius — people who are always alive after 80 or 90 years, and who are always conveniently at home when Gregorius calls. Farce.
Then I disliked our epistolary hero, Amadeus. The dude had it all — money, private schools, parents who encouraged him, pushed him to excel, sisters who worshipped him. He had looks, brains, and talent. Yet he spent his life whining about everything. Where did all this Weltschmerz come from? And it is a mystery to me, given the vast quantity of letters he appears to have written incessantly, how he actually managed to study for medical school or even run a practice. Maybe it’s just me but, despite the many observations he raised in the hundreds of pages of italics which have now permanently damaged my eyes, there was never a true center to Amadeus. Thus the many relationships he had with friends, family, comrades, his wife, or his lover, were like gears that never actually meshed in reality. Mercier only projects a cardboard gearworks. This book, then, was never anything more than a highbrow Harlequin romance.
If I disliked Amadeus, I despised Gregorius. Here was a guy who chose to spend his life being a shmoe, with his nose firmly stuck only in past realities — or more accurately – in comforting fictions. And he had absolutely no sense of the world he actually lived in. Personally, I can identify on one level with a fellow with bad eyesight who loves languages and is bewitched by a feeling that speaking in, and living in, a different culture gives you a kind of second life. But Gregorius had such an unbelievably tenuous grasp of the reality around him, even in Portugal, that the book just didn’t work for me. Gregorius was less than the cardboard cutout Mercier presents us.
I wrote these notes in Mexico, where many people have done precisely what Gregorius did — taken off suddenly and started a new life. But you know what? These people manage to have cocktail parties, spouses, friends, hobbies, pictures on the wall, and they don’t take up trying to learn Farsi while simultaneously memorizing Spanish conjugations at the Gringo language schools. I wanted to slap Gregorius. Hard. But then he had that mysterious neurological condition that went nowhere, like most of the plotlines in the book.
For a book written in the God voice, Mercier’s characters are incredibly two dimensional, especially the women. In over 400 pages, we should have known Gregorius’ mind much better, or that of his sisters. But with an excess of blah-blah and an almost total lack of dialog, how could we ever learn who any of these people are?
Then there’s what passes for plot. Besides the massive number of PASSAGENS INSUPORTAVELMENTES PRESUMIDOS UNBEARABLY PRETENTIOUS PASSAGES a reader must suffer, I kept waiting for something to happen. And, as the joke goes about a waiting Swiss wife, nothing much ever did. The structure of the whole book rests on flat, inconsistent, implausible characters and piles of disconnected thought written in a score of third person voices, all of which sound suspiciously identical.
And why the hell would Gregorius ever begin his quest in the first place? An apparently suicidal woman writes a phone number on his forehead and he instantly decides to run off to Portugal? Please! We never learn who is on the other end of the phone in Lisbon, but it was apparently a working number — unlike our protagonist. To me this dropped detail, one of dozens, points to shoddy literary workmanship. Mercier’s book reminds me of THE ARTIST. I know both the book and the modern silent film won awards for their — uniqueness — but I just can’t see why.
One of the things our bourgeois, prep-school revolutionary, Señhor Amadeus, rails against is Kitsch. If he had ever truly been a living, breathing character, he’d be rolling over in his Lisbon grave over this book.
One of the definitions of the German loan word Kitsch is “a tasteless copy of a work of real art.” Another common definition is “art that chooses aesthetics that convey exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama.” I think both of these more than apply to the book. Mercier’s characters constantly spew forth melodramatic utterances worthy of Mexican telenovelas. But, frankly, all the characters sound the same. Whether it’s Amadeus at seventeen or Jorge, or Adriana, or Silveira.
Our old friend, the real writer, Milan Kundera, calls Kitsch “the absolute denial of shit” – in other words, a sanitized, Disneyesque reality that poses no real questions and only forces sentimentality down our throats. While Mercier makes hundreds of sad observations, there is no truly coherent point of view, there are no questions asked in earnest. Only incessant “why mommy’s.”
Art historian Clement Greenberg (Art and Culture, 1978) equates uninspired adherence to “academic” schools of thought with Kitsch. Mercier may not belong to an Academie des Beaux Arts but, when we peel away his pseudonym, it turns out that Herr Doktor Peter Bieri is indeed an ex-academic who (in extreme contrast to some of my esteemed ex-academic, truly artistic friends) has not strayed far from the dusty papers of a past life as philosopher of time, mind, and ethics. Sadly, we are treated to pages of italicized ramblings that I suspect have largely been pulled from Bieri’s own private journals.
Ultimately, Gregorius returns to Bern, looks up his ex-wife, gets checked into a clinic by his Greek opthalmologist chess-playing, always on-call for psychological counseling buddy, and the novel grinds to a merciful but long-overdue end. But in the absence of any real plot or meaningful character development, the ending is very unsatisfying — especially after 438 pages of literary torture.
Will Gregorius put on his new glasses and stylish clothes, fuck the brains out of Florence and take her off to Salamanca – or anywhere but Bern? Or will he stay in those thick glasses and academic corduroy and go back to the dreary job that Kägi is holding for him?
You know what? Who gives a shit?
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