Night Train to Lisbon

I read a book about a man reading a book. And the book he was reading was about a man who read a lot of books. Gregorius (the man reading the book) has lead the quiet and insignificant life that most of us will discover to have lived; his only eccentricity was his passion for classic books and translation ancient Greek and Hebrew. A strange episode brings him to read a book in Portuguese, a language he does not know. Therefore Gregorius is not just reading, as he needs first to undergo the effort of translation; Gregorius is basically giving to the book the attention that every writer would dream of. Prado, the man who has written the book, could not care less. Writing for Prado was just an observation tool, a mechanism and a ritual in order to give meaning to his own life. The relation between reader and writer is therefore sublime, as Prado is basically giving color to Gregorius' life, and Gregorius is apparently the only man on earth really knowing Prado. A good book, intense, well built. The characters are strong, and able to create links beyond space and time between them, by the process of writing and reading. However not an excellent book, I am afraid. To make his story plausible, Mercier (the author of the book), has to use well-known mechanisms (for instance all-live savings well invested to allow Gregorius to spend a large amount of time doing nothing, or the fact that every person was always willing to give Gregorius a good interview, or the omnipresence of chess-game); this failed attempt to plausibility is futile and unnecessary, and subtract energy to the book. However, the existential questions which are posed by this atheist preacher, the deep investigation of the human soul, let us forgive and forget those literary blunders and support us in our mid-life crisis.