This made Lisbon at the time an extraordinarily interesting place, filled to the rafters with refugees and would-be émigrés who would spend their days waiting in lines at embassies and travel agencies, and their nights-if they had the money-feasting on lobster and duck (there were no food shortages in Portugal) and driving out to Estoril to play Baccarat at the casino. It is also the capital of the only country except Switzerland to remain neutral throughout the war, hence the only city from which, in the war years, ships were still sailing and planes flying to New York. For one thing, it is the westernmost port in Europe.
Lisbon was meant to have taken up at most a chapter, only once I got my couple there I couldn’t get them out. As I originally planned it, the story would take the couple to Bordeaux (where they would obtain visas for Spain and Portugal), over the International Bridge into Spain, and across Spain and Portugal to Lisbon, where they would pause only to await the ship (the Manhattan ) that the State Department was sending to rescue them and other stranded Americans. At first I had not intended for it to be set in Lisbon I had envisioned it as a road novel, following an expatriate American couple (the wife Jewish) as they made their way from Paris back to New York in the summer of 1940, in the wake of the German occupation. I’d gone to Lisbon to research a novel I was writing, the novel that would eventually become The Two Hotel Francforts. In 2009, for instance, I had the pleasure of reading José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in Lisbon-specifically at the York House, an old hotel frequented by Allied spies during World War II. Occasionally I’ve gone one step further and read a novel in the city where it is set. New York-where do I begin? (Well, actually, I know exactly where to begin, with Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day.
London- Rachel Cusk’s Transit, Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, and about a thousand others. Paris-Jean Rhys’s Quartet, Mavis Gallant’s A Fairly Good Time, and about a thousand others.
Is it an oddity of mine that sometimes I will read a novel just to spend some time in the city where it’s set? Looking back, I’m struck by how often this impulse has driven my reading decisions.
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