The Night in Lisbon

The Night in Lisbon is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque published in 1962 that quickly climbed to the top of the American best-seller list.
The story takes place in 1942 in Lisbon, Portugal. The first-person narrator is a refugee from Hitler Germany and has come to Lisbon to try to get on a ship to America. Although, he and his wife both miss the necessary visas and tickets. On one evening he is staring at a ship anchored in the river Tagus, ready for departure to America the following day, when a stranger approaches and offers him two free tickets on the ship and a passport with a valid visa in exchange for keeping him company and listening his story. The stranger introduces himself as Josef Schwarz and explains that this is the name entered on his passport, but not his real name. Although, the narrator doubts the genuiness of the offer, he acceptes it.
During the course of that night, the two strangers move from cafés to night-clubs that are still open on the late hours as Josef Schwarz recounts his story. He starts from 1938 with how he received the passport of Josef Schwarz in Paris after five years as a refugee from Nazi Germany and finishes just few days before present. Schwarz`s story is quite romantic and it contains a lot of gripping encounters with Gestapo, near-misses, arrests and escapes.
Although, Remarque himself had no difficulties leaving Europe in 1939 with his wife because he already was a successful author, he has written this book about refugees who didn`t share his fortunate faith, explicitly, making it a very believable story.
I would recommend this one for anyone who is interested in 20th century European history as it is a very detailed book about exile from the Third Reich, but if you are just looking for something romantic and exciting then this might still be for you.

50 books you should read before you die: All Quiet on the Western Front

Probably all of you have seen the list of 50 books you should read before you die on a metal bookmark. I`ve even seen a few different versions of it. I stumbled on one of those lists last night and I found that I have already read many of the books from the list and those really were some of the most impressive books I`ve read. So I decided that I will complete this reading list and I`ll wrote a short review of every book on the list with minimal amount of spoilers. "Complete" maybe wasn`t the best word, because I may still leave some of them out. Like The Bible for an example. But I hope you will enjoy the reviews of the books I will read!

Erich Maria Remarque`s All Quiet on the Western Front.

This book tells a story of Paul Bäumer, a 19-year-old schoolboy who is urged by his schoolmaster to join the German army shortly after the start of World War I. It`s not an heroic story. It`s a story about the everyday horror of a World War I soldier - the constant fear of death, the constant treat of artillery fire, gas attacks and bombardments, hunger, the struggle to find food, loss of comrades, detachment form civilian life, dealing with permanent physical injuries and the role of random chance in surviving or not.
Through the experiences of Paul Bäumer, the reader sees that war can`t be divided into the bad and good sides. There are just people forced to fight each other for distant reasons a lot of them don`t even understand. People who in different circumstances might get a long quite well, maybe even be firends.
One of the most effective chapters in this book tells a story, how Paul after leathally wounding a French man, has to stay with him in a crater for countless hours. There he realizes the most painful truth. The man he had killed, is a man just like him. A man who may had even been worth more because he already had a family of his own to wait for him to return home, while Paul only had his parents and a sister.
What makes this book a 50 books you should read before you die list worthy read, is the effect of making the reader think about how he truly feels about war. And I can make a bet that anyone with half a brain will end up thinking pacifistic thoughts.



Here is the list of all the 50 books:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

Some questions for the followers. Have you got around to any of the books on the list? If the answer is yes, then which and did you like them?

I just noticed that there are actually only 36 books on this list. Well, I`m not gonna rewrite the full post because of that. Let`s just leave it as it is. Maybe it was rounded up to sound better.