Dublinesque Read Online Free PDF

Japanese word
hikikomori
means “isolation.” They shut themselves up in a room in their parents’ house for prolonged periods of time, usually years. They feel sad and have hardly any friends, and the vast majority spend the day sleeping or lying down, and at night watch television or concentrate on the computer. Riba is very interested in the topic because, since he left publishing and stopped drinking, he has been withdrawing into himself, and in effect, turning into a Japanese misanthrope, a
hikikomori
.
    “I’m going to a funeral in Dublin for the age of print, for the golden age of Gutenberg,” he tells Celia.
    He doesn’t know how it happened, but it just came out. Her eyes burrow into him. Silence. Unease. Before she starts shouting, he begins to explain.
    “What I mean is the funeral, ever delayed, of literature as an endangered art. Although really the question should be: what danger?”
    He notes that he has got himself tied into knots.
    “I would understand perfectly,” he continues, “if you asked me that question. Because the fact is the thing that interests me most about this danger is its literary nuances.”
    He thinks that now his wife will unleash her anger; instead the opposite happens, as he starts to sense a sudden warmth, a certain sort of loving intensity. But it’s also as if Celia has taken pity on him. Can that be it? Or maybe she’s taken pity on the golden age of Gutenberg, which perhaps in this case is the same thing? Or is she fond of danger, seen from a literary point of view?
    Celia looks at him, and asks him if he remembers asking her some days ago to rent the only David Cronenberg film he hasn’t yet seen. She shows him the DVD of
Spider
she has just got out, and affectionately suggests they watch it before dinner.
    He does indeed like Cronenberg, one of cinema’s last real directors. But it all seems a little strange to him, because he never asked to watch this film. He glances at the DVD and reads that the film is about “a lonely man failing to communicate in an inhospitable world.”
    “Is that me?” he asks.
    Celia doesn’t even answer.
    In the opening sequence of the film, a young man called Spider is the last person to get off the train, and it’s clear right away that he’s different from the other passengers. Something seems to have seriously clouded his brain, and he stumbles as he alights with his small, strange suitcase. He is handsome, but he has all the signs of being highly mentally-disturbed, maybe a lonely man failing entirely to communicate with an inhospitable world.
    Celia asks Riba if he’s noticed that, in spite of the heat, Spider is wearing four shirts. Well, no, he hadn’t noticed this peculiar detail. He excuses this by saying he hasn’t yet had time to focus on the film. Besides, he says, he doesn’t normally notice those kinds of details.
    Now he troubles himself to count the shirts. And he sees it’s true. The man is wearing four in the middle of summer. And what about the suitcase? It’s very small and old, and when Spider opens it, we see it contains only useless objects and a little notebook where, in minuscule handwriting, he writes down his illegible impressions.
    Celia asks him about Spider’s handwriting, she wants to know if it doesn’t remind him of Robert Walser’s when it became microscopic. Well it’s true, that is what it’s like. The introverted, microscopic calligraphy of the frail young man who answers to the name of Spider makes one think of the days when, before he entered the first lunatic asylum, the handwriting of the author of
Jakob von Gunten
became gradually smaller and smaller, due to his obsession with disappearance and eclipse. Then Celia wants to know if he’s noticed that there is scarcely anyone on the streets of London’s gloomy, inhospitable East End, through which Spider is wandering.
    He notices that Celia hasn’t stopped asking him questions since the film began.
    “Has someone asked you to