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On Pierre
I had insomnia again last week, during that long expanse between Sunday evening and Monday morning. Roughly speaking, it was one of those cases where I’d slept for a short amount of time, then woken up in a panic and wasn’t able to fall back asleep. I remembered that my friend Balckwell (黑井先生) had released the final version of his novel Pierre and the Ambiguities a few days earlier, so I downloaded the .epub, converted it into a .mobi, and spent half an hour looking for the cord to connect my girlfriend’s old kindle to my computer and transfer it so that I could comfortably read it in bed in the dark with the just-barely backlit screen. I read until a little bit before sunrise, falling asleep after finishing the first half. I read another chapter on the bus to work the next day, then finished the whole book on Tuesday. (I should note this was my second time reading it — I’d read an earlier version last year.)
It felt strange reading from a Kindle again. I’ve spent most of the past year reading paper books, thus why it took so long to find the Kindle cord. Pierre seems like a book best read in bed in the dark, the exact circumstances I read it that sleepless night last week. So the Kindle was necessary — the lamp in my room is a bit too bright. Its light dissolves away the spirits emanating from the book and its narration. The narrator in particular had a candlelit quality to them. Despite the anachronism, I imagined the narrator as being a voice from pre-war Vienna, yet set free the grip of time. Someone who’d spent many fruitful hours talking about the works of Freud the music of Schoenberg, and whatever else was in vogue in those days. Somehow that narrator has found themself in the 21st century, observing a video-game-playing library-book-reading creature both of and out of our time with interest. I can almost imagine that there is something more to the affinity between the protagonist Pierre and this narrator, like Pierre had been sent a questionnaire in the mail about what kind of voice he’d like narrating a book about him. His own first-person voice would be out of the question. Some of the options were quieter and some louder, but this one, butting in to insert his learned opinions from time to time, made Pierre feel at home and lended his life the gravity it needed.
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