A review by ellaep
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, Barbara Harshav

4.5

When I started writing a review it suddenly became several paragraphs long and I had to calm down a bit. I really adored this book, and I think what I loved the most was the main character. I love the plot: man gets a sudden shock to his monotonous life, somehow becomes a bit obsessed with a book in a language he doesn’t speak, and then goes to a foreign country to learn absolutely everything he can about it. BUT I am a character girlie through and through and I absolutely loved our main character. It felt similar to when I read “A Gentleman in Moscow” and I felt so safe and calm inside of the MC’s head. I wanted to keep experiencing the world through his eyes, wanted to fall in love with a book, and wanted to completely adopt his obsession with languages. He and I share very similar fears about ourselves and I thought it was kind of comforting to see them in another person and still feel like I cared about them, which feels so vulnerable to say, but oh well whose gonna read this review anyways lol. 

I deeply wish I would’ve read a physical copy instead of listening to an audio-book, not because there was anything wrong with the narration, but because some stories feel like offerings at the altar of literature and of language, and listening to them feels somehow sacrilegious (like The Secret History which discusses language and learning with so much care that you feel like you need to see the words in front of you).