Night Train to Lisbon (Pascal Mercier, 2004)

Unusual read for me - a (relatively) current novel.  I liked this quite a bit.  Thoughtful, deliberate, meditative, unusual.

A teacher (Gregorius) of classics in a Bern (Switzerland) high school has an enigmatic (and brief) encounter with a Portuguese woman while heading to his school.  He's ready for change; runs into a book by a Portuguese author (Amadeu Prado) by happenstance in a local bookstore immediately after this encounter; the book speaks to him (let's say) and he ends up on the night train to Lisbon.  And just like that:  Gregorious is retired from a long-ish career at his high school and off to some developments in Portugal.

The book discovered by Gregorius included a collection of essays by Amadeu (a Portuguese doctor who wrote for his own understanding, not an author).  Amadeu had ended up in some very difficult situations under the Salazar dictatorship (of which this book gave me a good overview) some thirty years previous, and died of an aneurysm shortly after those events.  Gregorius searches for information to understand Amadeu and his writings (and, simultaneously, himself).

Characters were very well developed:

Adriana - Amadeu's older sister
Melodie - Amadeu's younger sister
Father Bartolomeu - Amadeu's high school teacher
Joao Eca - torture victim
Jorge O'Kelly - Amadeu's best friend growing up
Mariana Eca - eye doctor
Silveira - Portuguese businessman with whom Gregorius strikes up a friendship
Maria Joao - Amadeu's confidant (going back to high school)
Estafania Espinhosa - joined resistance, came between Amadeu and Jorge.

We learn about Amadeu's father (twisted by disease, a judge), mother, wife (Fatima); Gregorious's family ; etc.

They traveled to Finisterre - what a great place-name.

I don't know exactly what this was about.  The characters explore words, books, philosophers, knowledge, self-knowledge, limits of knowledge, religion, relationships, love, mortality, decisions when faced with power (torture), on and on.  They play chess and smoke.  They observe that heavy readers are different people.  Somehow in all this I actually cared about the characters (though sometimes the passages from Amadeu's book seemed long).  This is worth reading, and I think worth revisiting.