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Comment by ssijak | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who disliked "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Sometimes if I just try to find more depth and meaning in a book just because of other people did, I stop to wonder, should I? Book with an uninteresting and shallow plot, with no depth in any way that pushed my thinking in some further direction, with a title I could not connect to anything in a book. Maybe it is just me and that slice of time in my life when I read it did not click. But I vividly remember the place I read it and how I wondered what am I missing haha

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

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Even though Lightness is one of my favorite books, it really won't speak to everyone. It has a lot of angst and philosophy and reflections on the human condition from the perspective of poly lovers during wartime, written by a male Czech author. Each of those could be a way to relate, or distance, the writing from the reader.

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!

I understand what you mean about Tolkien, he describes seemingly random crap at length and doesn't really care about the plot, but it's not really accurate to call him verbose. The entirety of the Lord of the Rings has less words than two ASOIAF books or WoT books. I recently re-read LotR for the first time since childhood and what struck me is just how compact they are compared to modern fantasy.

Really? I tried to read the first few chapters but couldn't get into it... just seemed like so much unnecessary detail. What might be a minute or two in the movies took forever in the books.

Maybe I'll give it another shot though, based on what you said

If the details seem unnecessary but keep reappearing, maybe it's because the author finds them necessary, important, or even the main subject of the work.

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.

I mean, I love ethnographic or "day in the life" nonfiction books, learning about different real cultures that way. But when they're about fictional cultures, I dunno, it feels like it'd just be better to experience that in a RPG video game or movie or something... (as a matter of personal preference only).

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.

It's a slow beginning. Tolkien focuses a lot on Hobbit culture as it's important to the morality of the narrative but it picks up very quickly. Oftentimes important events are only briefly summarized by one character to another as they meet up or narrated in brief chapters. That said, his writing style definitely isn't for everyone.

ASOIAF are massively verbose tho. It amounts to argument that more verbose books exists, not that Tolkien is not verbose.

The Twilight series has a higher word count than LotR + The Hobbit if that's a more apt comparison for you

Every speck of glitter must be individually described.

Yes, the thing with Tolkien, is he was telling stories which are meant to be TOLD, as in oral, spoken out loud.

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.

Can't agree, but also,

> 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.

No. I think I liked it, but it’s been a while since I read it. I’m trying to find a blog post from someone about 10 years ago that was like “10 books to talk about on a date to signal you’re sensitive and intelligent that are better than ULoB”. I think it was an author who used to be posted to HN fairly often.

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.

> with a title I could not connect to anything in a book

The book literally explains the title, at length. It is part of the meta-commentary running through the book.

> I think some books just click very differently with people.

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.

I recommend The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, it’s much better IMO. Not sure why Lightness is more famous, perhaps just the title is more interesting.

No doubt the (very excellent) film.

Is the film very excellent? I've been kinda avoiding it out of fear of slopping up the book

Daniel Day Lewis plays a lead and I enjoy his acting in everything he’s been in.

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.

Slavoj Zizek didn't like ULoB, maybe just to be contrarian, I dunno :).

Sounds interesting. Remember the source?

Oof, I found it, but it's just an offhand comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqpxT_iJ8Mc approx at 1 minute.

I didn't like it either. Felt like Catcher in the Rye meets the iron curtain. But admittedly I have probably below average tolerance for introspective books. If I want to introspect, I'll do it myself.

That being said, after the discussion here, I'll probably give it another go.

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