For most people a great deal of life is spent following the same routine. For some, there is a certain amount of safety and comfort that can be derived from the security of knowing exactly what you will be doing when, while others feel seriously constrained and trapped for the same reasons. While those who fall into the latter category usually feel like they are missing out on something more exciting, the feeling that life is passing them by, those in the first instance can go years in complete contentment.

However, if at any point in their lives those same people ever experience an event that jars them from that routine, or causes them to have a moment of introspection beyond what they would normally exert during their day - the results can be severe. If you have completely sublimated all of the dreams and hopes that you once may have had, suddenly waking to that fact is a lot worse than being aware of it all along. What had previously been a comfort, suddenly becomes an unbearable burden that threatens to suffocate you.

In Pascal Mercier's Night Train To Lisbon, published for the first time in English by Grove Press and distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada, Raimund Gregorius has been teaching classical languages (Latin, Classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew) at the same school in Berne Switzerland for decades. Day in and day out he has followed the same routine of teaching school, watching his students through the shield of his thick-lensed glasses, and wearing his crumpled corduroy suits.

But then a chance meeting with a Portuguese woman one rainy morning on the way to work has him start to worry at the edges of the veneer of his routine like its a dead patch of skin. His love of language has been limited previously to those that are as dead as his life has been staid and ordered. There is something about this woman though, that her voice - the way she pronounces the word for her mother tongue in her native language - makes Portuguese sound like water to a man wandering in a desert.

Looking for something, and not quite sure what, perhaps the woman who had mysteriously appeared and disappeared the day before, Gregorius finds himself in a Spanish bookstore. Attracted to a particular book by the way another person treated it with some reverence, he picks it up. It's in Portuguese, and not being able to read a word of it he has the bookseller translate the title, A Goldsmith Of Words, and translate the opening lines for him.