Milan Kundera has died
variety.com
variety.com
And then he will go on an, as a critic, analyze the book right there for you and what it means, in between the story.
I love how he uses ideas from Hegel, Nietsche, Beethoven, Bach Stravinsky (all music history), etc. etc. etc. and dives deep into the poetry of one idea. For example in Unbearable, the eternal recurrence. That singular points of experience are as the tree falling in the forest when no one's around, it has no impact. That for an event to have weight it must happen repeatedly, in different contexts, stories, etc, but essentially the same occurrence, over and over again. What does that mean for your life and the patterns of your life?
How much I've gone into rabbit holes of some great people exploring Kundera, and how much more beautiful Beethoven is to me now. He's made his Op. 111 one of my favourites.
These books changed me for the better at the time and I think about scenes from each in my daily life all in about the same sort of way. Beautiful imagery, pointed human condition takeaways. Got under my skin and stayed there.
Unbearable Lightness had such a quality in the writing that stuck with me wherein he would twist a scene into something else in the span of a paragraph or two. There's a scene wherein Tereza goes to the top of a hill that comes to mind. The entire opening of the book was at the time unlike anything else I had read.
Makes me want to go re-read that era of my life again and explore more of each of those author's works.
It isn't really too much of a novel because it has a very thin plot with very little drama or tension. It is more like a deep reflection. But it is very good.
The book's perspective on human condition is very cynical. My understanding, when I read it, is that by "unbearable lightness" what the author means is that we are absolutely irrelevant and the whole idea of "meaning of life" is just pathetic.
Yeah, I know: I sound like an atheistic teenager. But, please, don't get fooled. Kundera wrote a billion times better than me. He deserves to be read, even if I sound childish.
If you like Albert Camus you'll love Kundera (and vice-versa).
It’s also, of course, a very political novel in its depiction of life in the Soviet Bloc and of popular movements. It’s a very pointed critique of collectivism.
This. I don't get the sense that Kundera himself is advocating for either lightness or weight. The novel asks a question that's as much philosophical as it is psychological, and the beauty lies in the question itself rather than any answers.
To quote Kundera: "On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth."
The novel contains various asides where the author says what the book is about and it's not this.
Heaviness and lightness are two different attitudes towards life. Lightness is not committing to anything, chasing experience, infidelity, pleasure, and so on. If anything, the novel comes down on the side of heaviness: tenderness, commitment, marriage, having a dog even though it will die, etc.
If you read a lot of his books they all turn out to be pretty similar imho, but it fit my vibes when I was like 18.
Another book that's great for re-reading is "The master and Margarita", pretty layered in terms of the different experiences you can have reading it.
The title is absolutely great.
And, I agree: the plot is barely worth mentioning. In fact, I once started watching the movie and stopped halfway through because it was just so banal and uninteresting. The great stuff is in all the little observations and considerations that aren't really part of the "story".
One of the classics, no question.
RIP.
On a side note, I think some books just click very differently with people. For example I could not for a love of anything in the universe connect such praise Peter Handke got for some of his work to my experience reading it
In truth I don't even remember the plot, but I do poignantly remember the evocative language and beautiful prose, even in its English translation. It was just such a subtly piercing way to look inside people in everyday (yes, boring) situations as they struggle with love and meaning. It's the same "big" questions any literary novelist tries to tackle, but if that's not your jam, the writing won't do anything for ya. Nothing wrong with that. Kundera is a niche/cult favorite, not necessarily a mass market page turner.
There are authors I dislike too, despite their popularity. Tolkien and RR Martin for their verbosity, Barbara Kingsolver for her tendency to go on long rambly tangents about her personal life. Thoreau had his ups and downs. Etc. There are more great books and authors than a person can read in a lifetime anyway. To each their own!
To an audience which might be falling asleep, or minds drifting as they stare at the fire.
That's part of his magic, and few other authors match it.
Contrast to Harry Potter, which is a stream of visual images.
Maybe I'll give it another shot though, based on what you said
I think there's a book where this idea is pushed to the utter extreme: it's Ulysses by James Joyce. Apparently it's a book about mundane people doing mundane things on a unremarkable day. But Joyce made a point to write a book about all these details, all this tissue of daily life which is commonly omitted in books, or even suppressed and distorted to fit to a stylistic or moralistic mold. I's a book about how a person lives a day on the low level, how maybe an alien would see it.
Of course authors are free to write as they wish. I'd never tell someone "Yo, you have too much detail for my tastes." I just wouldn't read them again. They have their own fanbases, I'm sure, just as I have my own preferences for writing style. Nothing wrong with that, right? In fact I wish there were a good recommendation engine for books based on previous reads, writing style, setting, length, etc.
> with a title I could not connect to anything in a book
You.. might have skipped all the interesting parts, then? The book is not about the story; the author overtly says near the start that he's inventing the story to illustrate an idea, the idea of 'lightness' vs 'heaviness' and how, he says, it governs our lives.
Edit: Aha, here it is, closer to 20 years old: https://idlewords.com/2005/11/dating_without_kundera.htm
Edit: and he’s posting just another few pages down in this thread, haha.
The book literally explains the title, at length. It is part of the meta-commentary running through the book.
This is very true. I tried reading Unbearable Lightness after seeing the movie, but I just couldn't finish it. It's a great book, but it just didn't pull me in the way it has others. Someone upthread mentioned One Hundred Years of Solitude and that has been one of my favorite books for at least the last 25 years. Marquez speaks to me in a way that Kundera doesn't and that's fine.
The film isn’t anywhere close to the book, but it has a heart of its own. A film from another era of film making than the present.
That being said, after the discussion here, I'll probably give it another go.
> It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth. Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue— perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
For some reason the one line that stuck in my memory after all these years (having devoured his oeuvre in my early 20's, more than 20 years ago), is this:
> "Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling... it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
(Forgive the paraphrasing, it's from memory.)
It was filmed during Prague Spring and banned almost immediately after its release.
Looks like a login name from "matfyz"? Hello, my colleague :)
There was a plot point (and such a small part of the book) about how the government uses public life - belonging to a political party, having certain friends - against the individual to get what they want. And if they don't: they try to destroy the person's live. At the same point, the government is also changing history by taking people out of photographs, etc.
Topical(?), even for today.
I do find this sentence quite unkind towards Dave Matthews though: "Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless". If a hack is talented and "pays his dues", he stops being a hack, surely? What does it take to be an accomplished artist then, apart from being David Bowie?
Your question cuts to the heart of what makes art art, and I can't answer it. But hard work and perseverance doesn't make a hack into an artist; it just makes them a more prolific hack.
It's funny - as someone seemingly a little bit younger than you, I'm pretty sure your top recommendation, The Master & Margarita, did replace Kundera, at least in my experience.
(which - no disrespect to Bulgakov and tongue planted in cheek - is a shame, because Kundera's better!)
I like Murakami, but I think he'd make for a poor "sexually-transmitted book". Most women I know would treat a line-up of his work on a shelf as a bit of a red flag, actually.
[0] https://idlewords.com/2005/11/dating_without_kundera.htm
He is.
(Well, on the Internet anyone can be a cow, but bar shenanigans on this specific post, this cow and that cow are the same cow.)
I still disagree with your reading on Kundera, though I found unbearable lightness of being his least interesting work. The joke, "risibles amours" and immortality are great.
Somebody who like both Kundera and Boulgakov.
As novel, it is hard for me to split between immortality and the joke. The joke touched me more, immortality is more "serious".
But hey, I am French, so my immune system against this kind of thing is definitely weak. And I did read those as teenagers, and girls were definitely part of the appeal, at least originally
This man was a giant of humanities and European culture embodied. He was a global treasure and a source of some much needed intellectual goodness. Once they go, they don't come back, and we are stuck with monsters and idiots.
My wife claims Snow Crash constitutes the same phenomenon from her perspective. The reason she first read it is that every high match on every dating site she had in the 2005-2010 era was a dude that mentioned this book on his profile somewhere.
Not intending to shit on Kundera. Reading this book didn't change me because I was 18 and about to spend the next decade going through a ton of transformative life experiences that would change me far more than reading anything at all possibly could, but I still remember it being a well-written, thought-provoking book.
The philosophy in the book went over my head, but I enjoyed learning about the Prague Spring.
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick - Peter Handke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
Of course I had to read the book again, here:
https://archive.org/details/isbn_0060912529
This is such a complicated book. On the first page, there is a statement about the unimportance of a war between African nations that "altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment."
The word "blacks" was triggering to me, it felt insensitive to speak of the death of a mass of people as insignificant, and then refer to those people as "blacks" (I'm adding that it feels like that stops at recognizing much more about them than the color of their skin). Though of course Kundera never used the term "blacks" himself, that was the translator:
"Nemusíme je brát na vědomí stejně jako válku mezi dvěma africkými státy ve čtrnáctém století, která nezměnila nic na tváři světa, přestože v ni zahynulo v nevýslovných mukách tři sta tisíc černochů"
Google translates this entire passage with the word "blacks" as well, but the individual word černochů as "black people."
He also talks about Hitler, being touched by his portraits, and recalling that his family members perished in Hitler's gas chambers. That's a subtle discussion that would be dangerous today!
But, the entire passage is his wrestling with what is significant and what's important, and how death and permanence changes our relationships to all that. Profound.
Remember that for most Czechs until very recently, black people were characters from stories, if not fairy-tales, not someone whom they would actually ever meet in person. Until today, except for the biggest cities with international universities, the country is almost totally white with a few Vietnamese immigrants in between.
The history of empires and subjugations took a completely different course here than in the former colonial and slavery powers to the west. Here, both the elites and the yoked ones were always native Europeans. Black people were, save a few documented individuals, as absent from local history as the Japanese samurai.
Also, Kundera grew up in a communist setup - was praised by then then kicked, accepted again and kicked again. And possibly (as in is suspect of) gave someone to STB.
I guarantee you that whatever you see as danger of saying something is nothing compared to actual real danger back then.