Book club with Lindsay

I’ve just started a novel that promises to be fantastic. I received it in the mail at work all wrapped up in Easter packaging. There in nothing better than getting an Easter book from your parents.
It’s called Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier. It made me smile after only the second page because it reminds me slightly of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

I simply love books in which the characters have a particular reverence for books and words. It makes a lot of sense to write about that; because most people who read novels can relate to characters who give words and language such heightened admiration.

So far in the book Mundus Gregorious (best name ever right?) is a professor of dead languages and finds a book by a Portuguese philologist that intrigues him so much he decides to strike out for a new life and travel to Portugal to meet the man. As he travels he learns Portuguese and begins to translate the author’s text. Some bits of the translation that I love:
In truth the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft….when it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a bran- new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.

And then another passage that Mundus repeats to himself often and turns over in his mind:
Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us, what happens with the rest?

I love the way this phrase is repeated at different points in the book. When I first read it, I thought it sounded terribly negative. As if we have all this potential and all these different lives that we fetter away living our one straight and narrow path, while the possibilities fall away into the trash as we continue along; those possibilities getting fewer and fewer as we get older and go more stubbornly along our path.
I have always tried to think of it in quite the opposite way. I don’t often regret anything in life because when I start to I remind myself of something my dad said. “There is no point in regretting something that didn’t happen because what did happen is your actual life and it can’t, now, possibly be any other way.” I think I am paraphrasing poorly, he said it in a way that made a lot of sense. As in- any possibility that was realized leads to everything else in your life that ends up being good or wonderful or inspirational, so how could it possibly be any other way?

Later on, Gregorious is considering how he is breaking out from the path he has always been on and he repeats the words to himself.
Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us, what happens with the rest?

This time it felt more positive to me. There is a curiosity about what all the “rest” is and how we must explore as much as we can in our small life. We must let the little delineations from our routine- the nagging little aspirations- ride their course and meander where they may, so that they are no longer delineations, but a different life.

It’s rainy and dark in San Francisco and I’m feeling worn down from a big night on the town last night. I can’t wait to curl up with tea and leap in the world of Mundus for the evening.