Some months ago, I was a few cents short of free shipping on Amazon and so I looked at books by some authors I liked for something to add to my order and stumbled across a copy of Winter in Lisbon for $548. (I looked again today, and the book can be yours from Amazon for just $59.99.) Unsurprisingly, the book lodged itself in my mind as something I should seek out at a price I could afford and after I found The View from Downshire Hill for half what Amazon was charging from an international seller on Abe Books, I had the idea to look there for Winter in Lisbon (plus I avoid buying from Amazon just generally). Amazingly, they had a copy available for $6.06 plus $5 shipping and $1 tax and so I got my copy for $12 and change. (Today the cheapest available edition on Abe is $46. Sorry.) It turned out to be a discharged library edition, but was in fine condition and, most importantly, was $12. I have to admit, the cost and scarcity of the book definitely lingered in the back of my mind as I was reading it, especially at the beginning. Sometimes I thought, I am reading this extremely valuable book; I must understand why it's so valuable. And then sometimes I thought, this book was allowed to go out of print in English; obviously there's a reason. Eventually I mostly got over this superficial aspect of reading it and got absorbed in the story. In the end, I really liked it.Winter in Lisbon uses a narrative device I hadn't thought much about previously, but which I found quite interesting: first person narration by a character who is rather incidental to the main events of the book. I spent some time reflecting on this last night after finishing the book, trying to remember where else I had seen it and two books came to mind - both of which I read upwards of 20 years ago: The Razor's Edge and The Great Gatsby. In Winter in Lisbon, the narrator's story alternates between San Sebastian in the past, when the central characters first encounter one another, and Madrid in (the book's) present, when he is reunited with the person whose story he is really telling. (You'll notice that neither of these locations is the titular Lisbon. Some of the book's key events take place in Lisbon, but the narrator admits he's never been there.) Everything that comes in between is told as a second- or even third-hand report, based on conversations the narrator and central character have in present-day Madrid. Occasionally, the narrator knows more than he could possibly know from having heard the story from another person, but you get lost in his telling and you don't mind.
