He gets new glasses and finds out how poor his old ones were – a metaphor for what is happening to him. As the narrator learns of someone else’s life, he reflects upon his own. His sister tells us “…his soul was made of words, in a way I had never experienced with anybody else.” We begin to question the narrator’s sanity as he almost starts to become the person he is shadowing, even seeming to start having his physical ailments.ĭuring the course of the story we see how the fictitious author wrestled with the Big Questions of good and evil and love. He interviews family and friends, and former teachers, even camping out in the author’s abandoned school building. In the story, he intersperses many deep passages from the fictitious book. (The author, who writes in German, is Swiss and has been a philosophy professor.) The narrator goes back to retrace the life of the Portuguese author and finds he is deceased. He quits his dull job of many years (in the same school he attended as a boy) and hops a train to Lisbon even though he doesn’t even speak Portuguese. She is Portuguese and he then begins reading a work by a Portuguese author and becomes obsessed with finding out about the author. One day he stops a despondent young woman from jumping off a bridge. A teacher of dead languages (Latin, Greek) at a Swiss prep school has no real friends or even much of a life to speak of.