In some respects Erich Maria Remarque has had a curious career, but it is a great tribute to this aging literary veteran of World War I that now, at the age of 66, he has produced what may be his best novel. A famous European counterpart to Hemingway, Remarque has, through the years, almost converted a handsome minor talent into a major one; whereas Hemingway almost reduced his own large talent into a more limited one.

At least I think "The Night in Lisbon" is Remarque's most brooding and thoughtful novel; it is the novel most involved with the destiny of 20th-century man. It is the novel in which the artist most fully comes to grip with the meaning of his own life and his own historical period, and which he leaves to us as the testimony that art is always the final witness to history….

In the forties...