Almost a decade ago, I suppose, my cousin recommended this book to me. I set out to find a copy of it and discovered that it was no longer published as a separate title and that I would have to pay $60 for an anthology instead a few dollars for the single title. So I didn't buy it. I discovered about a year and a half ago that Penguin was going to put out a soft cover and so I put in an order for it. After it came in, I immediately retrieved it and set to reading; however, it turned out to be so intensely boring and difficult to read that I kept setting it aside. Exactly how many times I picked it up and then found some excuse or other to wonder on to something else, I am uncertain, but I would guess that it was some number less than 50 and more than three.
In any case, I've finally read it through, and I am very glad I did. Only the first 100-150 were boring. After that things pick up and the remaining 200 pages are only mildly boring. It is nonetheless a very interesting book with a very apt title. It seems to be something of an experiment in writing - sort of a self-referential thing. Literally everything about the book is ambiguous. The language itself is ambiguous. The smiles are ambiguous. Good and Evil are ambiguous. Human relationships are ambiguous. The point of view of the narrator is ambiguous.
I'm glad I finally slogged through it, because I it's really a very interesting book later on (at about the time Pierre has his first argument with his mother). The dialog, however, is downright annoying at times, although, I think that this serves some strange, artistic purpose - to emphasize the sterility of some of the characters, perhaps to show how divorced they think they are from the problems of ordinary men.
Pierre is a character much like Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot , and yet strangely different. Myshkin, as I recall, was always presented with choices of good and evil, and it never occurred to him to do what was evil, however, he always clearly recognized the good. Pierre, on the other hand, was faced with a situation in which many conflicting 'goods' arose and he had to decide what was highest good. He never acted selfishly, but, like all noble people, always suspected his own motives and was forever a harsh critic of himself. His problem seemed to be that he set his goals to high. He wanted to act like Jesus, but he lacked the certainty of Right and Wrong that was the martyr's gift.
The book has a terrible ending, though, as does The Idiot . Pierre is an outcast, he is the most noble person in a sea of self-centered iniquity and eventually loses his sanity in the service of everyone else's desires.
I wouldn't recommend this for everyone. Supposedly it's an important work, though, and it's compared to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," The Scarlet Letter , and the poems of Emily Dickinson. It's also supposed to be a 'corrosive satire' of the romantic novels of the day, according to the guy who wrote the introduction. That may be true. But it's still pretty hard to get into at first. For someone like me who reads very slowly, it's almost unbearable.
