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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a cross between "Casablanca", "Lord Jim" & "The Death Ship", January 8, 2003
This review is from: The Night in Lisbon (Paperback)
This is a very good book by a very good author. It contains elements of suspense, mystery, intrigue, and romance. It is one of the best novels I've read about the plight of regugees at the outbreak of WWII (with similarities with the first part of Traven's "The Death Ship"). It is the tale told by one refugee to another over the course of a night in Lisbon (hence the title). The narrator is the listener and the story he is told builds into a very good romance that reminded me a lot of the movie "Casablanca". While an endless and exciting series of arrests, escapes and near-misses is going on, we discover a special kind of love between a man who returns to his wife after a number of years of exile. In the topsy-turvy world of Europe at the outbreak of WWII, the standards for conventional romance and fidelity are lost in the need for something more flexible. The reader may question many aspects of the love that is expressed in these pages but not the love itself. I was impressed as I have been with other books by this author. Remarque portrays the chaos of life during WWI as well as Heinrich Boll portrays it in post-war Germany. This is a novel with terrific insight to the times in which it takes place and the capacity for love to prevail against overwelming odds. I'd rate it a 4.5.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Moving Tear-Jerker that's very Casablanca in theme, September 2, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: The Night in Lisbon (Paperback)
Remarque has a gift with words, he can paint a scene so clearly--that it will be forever etched in memory. This novel is a tragic love story that takes place in the beginnings of WWII, and the dialogue has a sense of Hemingway in it. What a beautiful novel to read, my eyes would well up with tears because it was so utterly moving. The novel tackles themes like love, survival, justice, war, identity, and the meanings of life--the two narrators of the story come alive, and I almost felt like I could hear all the emotions and inflections of their voices. But, Remarque has always had a talent--All Quiet..was also a brilliant novel. The back cover of this novel describes the story very very well. The Night in Lisbon is a novel that moves quickly amd brushes you up in its wings; it is a book that can be finished in 2 or 3 days. I highly recommend it to anyone that has discovered Remarque or would want a taste in spellbinding literature. The Night in Lisbon, is a night that I won't forget.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Remarque Survives Another War, November 9, 1999
This review is from: The Night in Lisbon (Paperback)
Erich Maria Remarque is an unchallenged master when it comes to describing what happens to people whose lives are disrupted by war. In "The Night in Lisbon" he does this with an intensely personal voice which makes the reader feel oddly present in the scene.Remarque's language is simple and direct, his metaphors and similes provoking and at times startling. In this novel he uses what is basically the rather uncomplicated story of two lovers seeking safety in war-torn Europe to explore a multitude of far more complex themes: the degenerations and transformations of civilizations, the vagaries of perplexing personalities, the roles played by memory and hope in our understanding of the self, and people's varying conceptions of time and eternity, to name but a few. Remarque accomplishes all of this in the swiftly moving pages of an essentially short novel, tells a highly entertaining tale in the process, and, when it is done, leaves the reader's mind tempted with further questions about the compelling characters just left behind. There is some dated material in "The Night in Lisbon", such as the many crude epithetical grenades lobbed in the highly deserving direction of the Nazi dictator and his gangs of thugs and thugesses. Remarque's references in this unrefined vein seem too obviously placed to curry favor with American readers fresh from their own horrific experiences of war and holocaust, and perhaps suspicious of a German novelist and his sypathies. And one might wonder, as some reviewers have, how the narrator might realistically tell his story in the space of one short Portuguese night without losing his voice or simply running out of time before breakfast."The Night in Lisbon" may not belong in the very front ranks of the brilliantly beribboned regiments of world literature, but it remains nevertheless a shimmering and exotic bird which flutters cooly and confidently through the literary skies.One does well to listen to its plaintive cry, to watch its unusual shadow elongate across the fictional landscape, and to ask oneself just why it flies as strangely as it does.
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