Milan Kundera
Average customer rating:
- Great book for a different cultural perspective.
- masterful
- Kundera's most famous novel...
- Love, lust, revolution, repression, and philosophical digression
- This book changed my life...
|
The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
Milan Kundera
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 Classics
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Classics
| Literature & Fiction
| Book Clubs
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- Love in the Time of Cholera
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Immortality
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Two-Disc Special Edition)
ASIN: 0060932139 |
Book Description
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover -- these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. </p>
Customer Reviews:
Great book for a different cultural perspective........2007-03-08
Wars and invasions have always had heavy repercussions for private individuals, no matter what time period or what countries are involved. But taking the Milan Kundera text, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I got a firsthand look at what the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia might have been like.
Historically, Americans have had a binary outlook at the two superpowers post WWII, Russia and the US. Americans generally felt that America was good, while Russia was evil. In terms of Kundera, America might have been described as light, and Russia as being heavy.
Kundera himself doesn't really invalidate America's viewpoint on Russia, and if anything he solidifies it by showing the crucial scene with Tereza and the "engineer" she met at the bar. After she slept with him, she started reflecting on the whole encounter, from the underage boy at the bar, and man haggling her about serving him alcohol, to the way the engineer's flat was laid out and what books he had in his bookcase.
The paranoia Russia caused within the daily lives of Czech citizens could be felt by Tereza wondering if the engineer was in fact a spy and informant for the government. Had he taken pictures when he said he was going to make coffee? Was he talking to someone? Would the pictures be released to Tomas? This is one of the first times we really get a feel for what hysteria of the time might have been like.
Obviously I wasn't around in 1968, nor have I ever been to Czechoslovakia, but Kundera enlightened me to the heightened tensions that quite possibly existed there. Tereza wasn't alone in feeling the heaviness of Russia's presence. In another scene, Tomas, after writing his letter comparing Russia to Oedipus, was forced to make a retracting statement nullifying the opinions he expressed in his letter. Taking the high moral road and refusing to pen the pacifying statement, he was forced to leave his job as a surgeon. Clearly freedom of speech wasn't too high on the list of things to uphold at that time and place. It is sad to think that his whole way of life as a surgeon, his passion and purpose, was abruptly changed by the powers in the government.
While this story was fiction, it seemingly contains traces of metafiction, as the author himself left the country, just as many of his main characters did. And just as Heraclites said you can't step in the same river twice, no historical event can be exactly the same as any other historical event. Even so, there can be parallels along the riverbed of history. Life isn't so simple as to say with complete certainty that Russia was evil, or heavy. Like a basket of feathers and bricks, it was both heavy and light. But no matter how you portray it, or from which country or time you present it, occupation, at least from the pint of view of the overtaken, will always see the invaders as oppressive and ruthless.
But to really see the feeling Kundera evokes, you must read this book. In the same way Tomas "penetrates" all the different women, so did Russia "penetrate" Czechoslovakia. Great book for a different cultural perspective.
masterful.......2007-02-05
Kundera is such a masterful storyteller, and this novel is an enjoyable, powerful example of his skills. It was difficult to put it down! Credit also should go to the translator, who did a masterful job.
Kundera's most famous novel..........2007-01-29
It's hard to know what to say about Kundera's most famous novel that hasn't already been said. For those who have never read anything by Kundera, it will come as a shock; he writes in a metafictional way - always reminding the reader that these characters are made up. Kundera's style seems to be "tell, don't show," but he somehow makes it work. Above all, he is a philosophical novelist - his stories exist to illuminate his ideas. Which is not to say that he provides any answers: he always maintains that stupidity arises from thinking that one has the answer for everything - his books are about posing questions.
Love, lust, revolution, repression, and philosophical digression.......2007-01-26
Having seen (and disliked) the movie many years ago, I never thought of reading the book. However, I was pleasantly surprised! The rather cryptic title refers to the author's personal philosophy regarding relationships, which he explains in the book.
The story begins in Communist Czechoslovaka prior to the famous 1968 Prague Spring introducing the reader to Tomas, the womanizing doctor, and his future doting wife, Tereza. Firmly determined to never remarry after a painful divorce, he ultimately decides to take Tereza under his protection. Of course, Tomas figures that's no reason to give up his many girlfriends. So, they continue, but Tereza is tormented by Tomas' continous infidelity. The author, Milan Kundera, also portrays his affairs from the side of one of his steadiest girlfriends, Sabina. Throughout the book, we trace the personal histories of these three characters from before the Prague Spring to their separate emigration to Switzerland and their return to Czechoslovakia (without Sabina). We also learn about boring Franz, Sabina's desperate lover.
Like other Czech authors, Kundera's book starts off playfully, lustfully. But then it takes on an increasingly serious tone as the characters age and finally becomes almost painfully poignant at the end. The consequences of their earlier frivolousness come back to haunt them as the Communist authorities begin relentless persecuting them, ironically pushing them closer together emotionally than ever before.
All in all I surprisingly enjoyed the book. Towards the end, however, the book wanders wildly. (Did Kundera have a page quota to fill?) I recommend this book to anyone interested in Czech authors or personal relationships.
This book changed my life..........2006-11-23
...or perhaps more appropriately, this book speaks to my life - describes my life - reflects my life. I believe, once in a lifetime, you come across something that so clearly mirrors your view of the world, but in a strange, beautiful, and unimaginable way.
Taken as a story, it is a compelling tale of love, life and the struggles faced in Prague during the Russian uprising. But when taken on a deeper level, an "ur-level," this book speaks to one's view on oneself and their relationship to the eternal struggle of life.
This is a book I have been reading every year for the last 15 years, and every reading brings about new thoughts, new ideas and new perspectives. Trust me - you will love this book.
Average customer rating:
- You Must Read This Book
- thought provoking
- A lot of wisdom
- Revelations in literature
- A Window Into Kundera's Mind
|
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
Milan Kundera
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Essays
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
| Classics
| Comic
| Contemporary
| Literary
General
| Criticism & Theory
| History & Criticism
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classics)
- Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
- At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
- Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
- The Savage Detectives: A Novel
ASIN: 0060841869
Release Date: 2007-01-30 |
Book Description
"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world," writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his fascinating new book on the art of the novel. "Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose." For Kundera, that curtain represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has—a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. </p>
In this entertaining and always stimulating essay, Kundera cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, he suggests, a novel is thought about only within the confines of the language and nation of its origin, when in fact the novel's development has always occurred across borders: Laurence Sterne learned from Rabelais, Henry Fielding from Cervantes, Joyce from Flaubert, García Márquez from Kafka. The real work of a novel is not bound up in the specifics of any one language: what makes a novel matter is its ability to reveal some previously unknown aspect of our existence. In The Curtain, Kundera skillfully describes how the best novels do just that. </p>
Customer Reviews:
You Must Read This Book.......2007-05-15
If you write literary fiction, you must read this book.
thought provoking.......2007-05-12
It's a pleasure to read a Milan Kundera essay. Even apart from the ideas involved, which are stimulating, I appreciate his style. And he touches on Musil, Broch, Cervantes, Rabelais, Kafka, Tolstoy, Proust, etc. Kundera makes a compelling case for a view of the novel as an art form with a specific history. This essay is so rich, it's worth returning to a number of times, like the classics by Montaigne, Emerson, and so on. This is a joy to read.
A lot of wisdom.......2007-05-12
I gleaned a great deal of wisdom from this book of essays. Occasionally I would read passages that would discuss stories I haven't read and my mind would drift but, overall, I came away with a lot to think about regarding my own writing. I have dog-eared many pages, something I am reluctant to do to a book.
Revelations in literature.......2007-03-15
Milan Kundera's essay draws the curtain back to reveal the treasures of "die Weltliteratur" as he traces the threads of continuity in novels by Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Dostoevsky, Kafka and many more. He eschews the cultural "isms" that weigh down our understanding of literature.
Although a work of non-fiction, The Curtain is a beautiful exposition on aesthetics as it is applied not only to literature, but to music as well. Kundera tells us to read and re-read with new eyes, unfettered by pre-imposed cultural and socio-economic distinctions.
As Kundera outlines the "fragility of human certainties" found is so much of the world's great literature and implores us to understand the true worth of the novel so that we can embrace both its history and its essence. This is a poetic work of literary criticism that will be a worthwhile read for anyone interested in literary art.
A Window Into Kundera's Mind .......2007-03-09
Reading THE CURTAIN is akin to what I would imagine it would be like to hear Kundera lecture to a small group about literature. The tone is really quite intimate. His prose incredibly lucid (as always) and his ideas are so clear.
Average customer rating:
- A good introduction to Kundera's work...
- The book of silence and remembering
- Solid Kundera, but not his best effort
- Good, but Kundera has better
- Strange and wonderful
|
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Popular Fiction
| Literature & Fiction
| Book Clubs
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
- Laughable Loves
- Immortality
- The Joke (Definitive Version)
- Identity: A Novel
ASIN: 0060932147 |
Amazon.com
In one of the finer modern ironies of the life-imitates-art sort, the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there. This kind of disappearance and reappearance is, partly, what Kundera explores in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In this polymorphous work -- now a novel, now autobiography, now a philosophical treatise -- Kundera discusses life, music, sex, philosophy, literature and politics in ways that are rarely politically correct, never classifiable but always original, entertaining and definitely brilliant.
Book Description
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
Customer Reviews:
A good introduction to Kundera's work..........2007-01-29
This is one of Kundera's best works and a good place to start for an introduction to his fiction. I don't use the term "novel" because Kundera hesitates to use it. As he says in the text, this book is made up of little vignettes (with no common characters) which are different "variations" on the themes of laughter and forgetting. Like much of Kundera's work, it deals with the subjugation of the Czech people. When the Russians took over their country, they instituted a program of official "forgetting" - erasing the country's culture and history. The book is a good example of Kundera's philosophical style - with an emphasis on telling, not showing.
The book of silence and remembering.......2006-12-26
This is a very novel novel. If the novel, as an art form, is in essence a piece of work with something wrong with it, then this quirky book takes up all the possibilities inherent in that and weaves a magical piece of fiction out of several, recurring themes, like a musical variation.
Like the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the book tells the story of characters who occupy a curious, almost etheral existence as they grapple with the absurdities and terrors of Communist censorship in Czechoslovakia. Kundera's characters, certainly his male ones, are always highly intelligent and highly philosophical sexual beings. They love, they fret, and they die. There is much to be delighted about in this novel as characters struggle to find a voice in the face of censorship and are weighed down by the burdens of ageing and nostalgia.
Kundera is always souffle light in his style, but the very best literature of this vein (the Continental reflexive style) combines lightness with weight. And I found that many of the stories slipped out of my memory after sparkling and shimmering for the short time they remained in there. This is evidently a book I wil have to reread.
Also, try and pick up the edition with the author interview with Philip Roth at the back. Two great intellectual heavyweights ponder the architecture and themes of the novel, and life. Well worth reading if you can.
Solid Kundera, but not his best effort.......2006-08-14
I would have to agree with another reviewer that I would have perferred more storytelling in this book. The first chapter in which Tamina appears is magnificent--a simple and direct yet remarkably poignant story. Later in the book, however, Kundera lost my interest when his stories disintegrate into purely allegorical fantasy, and he rambles on about himself, Milan Kundera, a bit too much.
Kundera's mix of heavily symbolic story with philosophical musing was highly effective in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." As for this book, I found much beauty in the first half, but had to force myself through the second half. I recommend "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," or "Immortality" before "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting."
Good, but Kundera has better.......2006-03-30
This is a good book. I would recommend "Identity" and "Ignorance" befor this one, however.
Strange and wonderful.......2005-12-03
The only other book I've read of his is The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is one of my favorite books, and I've read other Czech authors as well, which I've always enjoyed. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting seems more like a collection of short stories than a novel, though with connecting themes familiar to Kundera's work: Prague in 1968, exile, sex, love, death, art and politics. This book uses much more symbolism than Unbearable Lightness, even venturing in magical realism at times. It is also much more 'intellectual' in the French sense than Unbearable Lightness. A good book, and worth the read, but I prefer more actual storytelling than this book provides.
Average customer rating:
- Essential reading for writers but also important for the novel itself
- Clear your head before committing to this!
- The Art of the Pretentious Novel
- How much value does a book have you don't remember?
- Kundera's Art
|
The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classics)
Milan Kundera
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
| Classics
| Comic
| Contemporary
| Literary
Semiotics
| Criticism & Theory
| History & Criticism
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Fiction
| Writing
| Reference
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Writing
| Reference
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Reference
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Look Inside Reference Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
- Testaments Betrayed: Essay in Nine Parts, An
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- The Joke (Definitive Version)
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
ASIN: 0060093749
Release Date: 2003-04-01 |
Book Description
<blockquote>Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express here the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels.
-- Milan Kundera</blockquote>
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. </p>
Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.</p>
Customer Reviews:
Essential reading for writers but also important for the novel itself.......2006-06-14
I am starting a novel this summer, and this book was recommended to me by my Creative Writing professor. Being a fan of Kundera already, I bought the book without question.
For the reviewer who said that Kundera writes pretentiously: I am actually amazed, since Kundera's lack of pretention and clarity surprised me. So much literary criticism is bloated and difficult to read, but Kundera is very simple, very concise, and yet also explanatory. Often he will make a statement, such as "All novels are concerned with the enigma of the self," which he not only explains but gives immediate examples, never letting the flash of his writing try to convey the point.
So much ground is covered in this tiny book: the difference between modernism and "establishment modernism," the craft of his own work, the history and purpose of the novel, insights into several of his great works, insights into European history, parallels between music and literature, etc, etc. Make sure to take notes, since your memory won't be able to hold everything in.
I praise Kundera also for his deep respect for the novel, not only arguing against those "established modernists" who claim the novel is dead or antiquated, but stressing the infinite possibilities of the novel and how the weaknesses of the great works show the paths future novels can take. Rather than being pretentious or snobbish, Kundera reaffirms the life of the novel as central to the question of the self, which is as infinite as the novel is.
This book is also essential for writers especially. For plotting out the structure for my work, Kundera's insights have been invaluable. Of course, Kundera doesn't suggest you write as he does, and you won't want to, but his radiant insight surely helped me find out what I myself wanted to do. Kundera's essays prompt exploration and possibility. A great read.
Clear your head before committing to this!.......2005-11-23
In this critical examination of the "art of the novel", Kundera meditates upon the existence or non-existence of "art" in novel-writing. It is a combination of narrative and philosophical ponderings highlighted by Kundera's famed lyricism. However, therein lies the the book's weakness. The dense language could lose your "average" reader and some issues, such as the meaning of art, begin to lean far more towards the philosophical rather than in analytical technique. Kundera tends to wander off on tangents.
The Art of the Pretentious Novel.......2005-10-01
I've read this book twice, but I admit I've not yet read any of Milan Kundera's other work. Maybe they're amazing. Maybe. But judging from this book--and from some of the other reviewers who have posted here--I'd guess they're about as unpretentious as a pale, young intellecutal discussing the merits of W.G. Sebald and Friedrich Nietsche at a Cambridge, Massachussetts tea shop.
This book DEFINES pretentious. The author knows you're an uneducated fool, and he will prove it to you.
That said, he's not an idiot, and a lot of his pompousness is justified. If you don't mind having a thousand things quoted at you that you've only read half of, or the author's overall snobby tone, then you really might find some good insights into a the structure of books and the weaving of stories.
...Or, you might find yourself scribbling death threats to the author in the margins. ...Yeah, that's a bad habit of mine.
How much value does a book have you don't remember? .......2005-01-13
I know I read this book. I read it all. I tried to learn about the art of novel- writing from it.
I have just read the Amazon reviews posted about this novel. A couple are good. They tell me that Kundera writes here about Cervantes, Sterne, Balzac, Dostoevsky and Kafka. They tell me the book has a seven- part structure as his novels do. They tell me that Kundera contrasts the art of the novelist with the thought of the philosopher- and that for him the art of the novelist is in portraying ambiguity and complexity. They tell me that this particular book is one of his best.
Now I have read other Kundera works. I know his work plays much with chance and infidelity and philosophical reflections by the characters on whether their disloyalty or love is bringing them to the incredible lightness of being which some seem bound to living in. They tell me too that the reflections touch about politics , Czech freedom, what it means to write under tyranny and what it means to live in the West.
But the truth is I having read this work on the novel by Kundera remember not one single sentence or thought from it.
This the impatient Amazon reader perhaps thinks says more about my own empty head than it does about the value of Kundera's work.
But I now wonder if something in Kundera's world and way of seeing things, his kind of liberation, his kind of emphasis on the incidental and very secular do not repel this religious reader seeking to feel that all, even in the novel, should have some kind of deep and permanent connection with the One Source of all true meaning.
It may be I have forgotten Kundera because his themes and understanding are ones I simply do not wish to know.
Kundera's Art.......2003-10-09
This relatively small book (165 pages) offers an engaging peek into the mind of a brilliant novelist and scholar. Consisting of interviews, speeches, and published work, Kundera expounds on his literary beliefs about what makes a great novel. My favorite sections are the interviews because of their immediacy and accessibility, although the author's most profound insights arise from his discussion of other authors: Kafka, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Flaubert, and others.
Writers, students of literature, and Kundera's faithful readers should find much to think about in these pages. This is not a light discourse on how to write a novel; Kundera takes his art seriously, in both deeply instinctive and scholarly ways. Those looking for a how-to book would be well-served to look elsewhere.
Average customer rating:
- The Political Deforms the Personal as the Self Wavers
- Super description of absurdity of socialism
- One of the Best Books I've Ever Read
- political or not
- "From whence a perfect joke must spring
|
The Joke (Definitive Version)
Milan Kundera
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
- Life Is Elsewhere
- Identity: A Novel
- Immortality
ASIN: 006099505X |
Book Description
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.
The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.
Customer Reviews:
The Political Deforms the Personal as the Self Wavers.......2007-05-25
"Optimism is the opium of the people A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity. Long live Trotsky!" This is the joke, sent on a postcard for all the nosy official world to see, made by Ludvik Jahn when he was a promising student and a leader of the University's Communist youth group. Its flippancy is a product of his desire to amuse himself by discomfiting Marketa, a serious and gullible young woman on whom he has set his romantic and erotic sights; the postcard is part of his strategy as a would-be lover. The powers that be do not see the humor in his joke, but rather a fatal character flaw with treacherous implications. (Perhaps they were more insightful than they knew - their response recalls Nietzsche's observation that a "joke is an epitaph on the death of a feeling", in this case an emotional commitment to an ideal that can never be a joking matter to its adherents.) This results in a judgment which brings him so low that it takes him years to recover from its aftermath: expulsion from the university and the Party, forced service in an army "work battalion" in the mines, followed by three additional years as a civilian miner - which adds up to half a dozen years of self-doubt and psychological isolation, its pain made more acute by a consciousness of his lost privileges and debased social status. He comes to see his sentencing by a gathering of fellow students as emblematic of humanity's failings as a whole -- people in groups act as a compliant and sometimes violent herd out of envy, fear, or an unfounded moral superiority based on misunderstandings of their own personal myths or the myths of a society that is deceiving itself; and, needless to say, many of the upholders of public morality are merely careerists and opportunists. In any event humans are untrustworthy in situations that demand honest thought and fair judgment, implying to Ludvik that he would have raised his own hand to condemn another man had the tables been turned. While Ludvik eventually recovers a decent position in society and a kind of toughened mental equilibrium, he struggles with his misanthropy and a desire for retribution (but he retains his ironical sense of humor, which takes a dark, absurdist twist that matches the events in his life).
In its structure "The Joke" is a polyphonic song of lament, recited by people about events from their shared pasts -- the national, collective past of the undiscriminating enthusiasm of youthful ideologues for the new Communist state of 1948; and the particular pasts of Ludvik, two of his old friends (Jaroslav and Kostka), the wife (Helena) of his youthful persecutor (Zemanek), and a strange, damaged woman from his period of societal punishment (Lucie). In the "musicological chapter" we hear Jaroslav's observations about the nature of Moravian folk music, accompanied by bars of musical notation. These illustrate an ancient mode of singing, in which each voice "personalizes" a song by singing in odd keys and awkward, shifting rhythms, as do the voices of lament in "The Joke" (the reader who knows little or nothing of the technical side of music and its notation still gets an interesting historical survey of a millennium's worth of folk-music and its relationship to both older and newer styles of music). Each voice tells part of the story of interlocking lives. The forlorn Lucie is the one person who is not a subject and remains an object throughout, so two versions of her story are told by Ludvik and by Kostka as part of their own stories. Each voice has a different purchase on reality and is driven by a different myth of the self and of things larger than the self, constructs by which individuals justify their actions. In Ludvik's and Helena's cases this exterior justification is their early allegiance to the ideals of socialism, in Jaroslav's his idolization of folk-art as a panacea for all of the woes of modern life, and in Kostka's a commitment to a highly personal Christian God. In each case there are moments when the individual despairs and believes that his "cause" may be nothing but a delusion or a means of avoiding personal responsibility for his own life.
Based on a chance encounter, Ludvik targets Helena in order to revenge himself against her husband, considering her sexual conquest and the cynical manipulation of her emotions to be an exquisite (and, in its details, sadistic) "joke" which will finally satisfy his cravings for revenge. But he sadly discovers that he wounds the wrong person and that even his real target, Zemanek, is no longer the man he once was; now the joke is on Ludvik, and it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. The "polyphonic" fragments of three voices accelerate their tempo in the last chapter, and there is a harmonic resolution of sorts - Ludvik "returns home", as it were, and reconciles with the friend of his youth, Jaroslav, whom he has hitherto identified with the stupidity and smugness of small home-town virtues which he fled long ago. (One of the many ironies in the book is that it was Ludvik who convinced the resistant Jaroslav to become an ardent Communist, and Jaroslav does so because the new State is a sponsor of all the folk arts. A parallel irony is that Kostka, the pious Christian, approves of the Party's expulsion of Ludvik, because he understands the Party as a faith, and no faith can tolerate corrosive skepticism.) In the end it is not clear how or if any of the damaged characters will move forward in their lives; much of the damage has been self-inflicted and based on illusions, which only makes it worse.
There are elements of an authorial self-portrait here, as one might expect from a first novel. To begin with the obvious, Ludvik is Kundera's age and has passed through the same national history and a similar personal history (as a student Kundera was expelled from the Party in 1950 for six years; readmitted, he was expelled again in 1970). Furthermore, Ludvik's and Jaroslav's characters contain something of Kundera's own early musical training. More autobiographically telling are the oblique references to Kundera's long poem celebrating Julius Fucik, a work which fit well with the regime's peculiar and intense cult of Fucik as an exemplary national hero of the resistance against the Germans during the Protectorate and a model for Communist youth, who are to be elevated and instructed by Fucik's "Reportage: Notes from the Gallows". On this note (poetry and Kundera's evaluation of it), the highlighted term "the lyrical age", a recurring idea in his work, makes its appearance. This phrase, which Kundera uses critically and almost with contempt or perhaps contempt mixed with regret, is meant to stand for each man's period of immaturity, in which he assumes postures and attitudes to impress the world, while all the time he is in a state of inner confusion and uncertainty about how to behave as an adult. The lyrical age is the age of imposture and narcissism. And the term has a double meaning, referring not only to individual psychology, but to the psychology of an era, specifically the years following the Communist take-over of the state in 1948. This was the lyrical age of Czechoslovakian Communism, which happened to coincide with the last vicious burst of Stalinism; it should be remembered that the participants in the Stalinist drama were motivated as much by a "collective joy" associated with the "construction of socialism and the new man and the new woman" as they were by fear of political trials and the penal system. In Kundera's case this was a period when he wrote lyrical poetry imbued with these political attitudes, especially his poem idealizing Fucik. Kundera obviously rues this phase of his own youth and, now a master of prose, gives us an unflattering alternative reading of Fucik's life. In this sense "The Joke" is an attempt to redress the excesses and impostures of Kundera's own youth.
(If the reader wishes to explore what Kundera means by "the lyrical age" -- and he means a great deal by it; it is something like a ramifying leitmotif in his work -- he can find more details in the author's own words in Kundera's "The Art of the Novel" and in an interview published in Antonin J. Liehm's "The Politics of Culture". The idea is also examined by Peter Steiner in his book "The Deserts of Bohemia". In his essay on the Slansky show-trial Steiner also supplies information that, for non-Czech readers, illuminates the pathetic character Alexej in "The Joke", who could well be based on Ludvik Frejka's son. Frejka was a former high-ranking economics official who was condemned to death for espionage and sabotage in this parody of a trial in 1952. And Frejka's son Tomas vilified him in the pages of the Party paper, "Rude Pravo" -- like Alexej, who bears a burden of socialist shame over his deposed father and writes a public letter denouncing him.)
Although it contains satirical elements (its portraits of Zemanek and Helena, its depiction of authority figures in the army), it would be a mistake to call "The Joke" a work of satire. Kundera considers his novels to be primarily what might be called "existential meditations". Much of the meditation is on people in a situation which is characterized by the inevitability of extreme politics as a background condition which permeates everything, including all human relations. This particular situation appears almost inescapable to Czechs (and Slovaks), especially to Czech writers during the period from 1938 to 1990. The dates of the book's composition and publication (1967) are very important in assessing Kundera's relationship with other writers and intellectuals who participated in the Prague Spring (1968) and were hammered down in various ways after the failure of the movement to establish "socialism with a human face." Kundera, like Ludvik, was still arguing for the maintenance of a reformed Communist state which would rationally carry out social and economic programs while allowing individuals civil liberties - this proved to be a pipe-dream. His recognition of the unviability of this idea is indicated by his self-exile to France in 1975. Another disturbing meditation, central to Kundera's way of thinking, is on the fluidity and "lightness" of the self, represented here by the masked alterations of identity that take place in the Moravian ritual "Ride of the Kings". The dissolving self is a subject fit for its own essay; and a subject notably treated by Karel Capek in his trilogy "Three Novels".
Now to the most important matter, the literary qualities of the work. Kundera is a thoroughly professional writer with literary goals and standards that he has set for himself (again, these are explicitly stated in "The Art of the Novel"). Since he has chosen to tell his story - or construct his existential meditation -- through the minds and words of four different characters, how well has he established the individuality of their voices? It can be said that three of the voices - Helen's, Jaroslav's and Kostka's - have something in common. Each of these characters is arguing with himself or herself within a system of ideas that is almost axiomatic, and they take their arguments to a logical extreme. At the same time they are questioning their relationship with their most cherished idea in order to evaluate the worthiness of their own lives (i.e., "Have I chosen to live a certain way correctly, or even wisely?"). Helen's choice is for the Party and its notion of society, even to the extent that her first love and marriage were based on their acceptability within this framework. Jaroslav's is for folk-art, based on a belief that it will save him (and others) by reconnecting them with a long and diffuse group identity (the village; the nation; the culture). Kostka's commitment is to God, apprehended through a highly personalized form of Christianity. Each believes he or she will be saved by his adherence to the chosen ideal. Ludvik, however, has fallen from grace, and, with that, from certainty; he no longer believes in belief, in the notion that such broader commitments are necessary or desirable, because they are a reservoir of self-deceit and self-justification rather than ideas which can withstand rigorous criticism. And so his voice stands out from each of the others, although it can be pointed out that he too becomes obsessive in the pursuit of revenge - his "myth" is purely personal, and it has been thoroughly formed and deformed by politics.
On a final note, the present reviewer's reading is based on the Faber and Faber edition of 2000, which is the only English edition that is "fully authorized and approved" by Kundera. In this edition's "Afterword" Kundera explains both the sources of the work's translation (Michael Henry Heim, other translators, and one key editor are involved) and the reasons why he felt the earlier four translations were unworthy or absolutely misleading. Don't skip the Afterword, since it is a miniature essay on the art of translation itself (and, in an oddly ironical way, a commentary on the "bad joke" which Kundera feels the English-language publishing industry has played on him, especially with this work). While in comparison to numerous other good novels this book merits five stars, I give it four because there are other novels by Kundera which I esteem more highly.
Super description of absurdity of socialism.......2006-07-06
This is perhaps the best book by Milan Kundera. Rarely has been the absurdity of socialism described so well and the sketch describing "socialist baptism" is truly hilarious. The book was published in 1968 in Czechoslovakia just before the Soviet troops came to liberate the Czechs and Slovaks from "the counterrevolution" and did not appear again for some 25 years. I also served in the Labour Regiments of the Czechoslovak army and can confirm the authenticity of the narration. The book is well written and is highly recommended.
One of the Best Books I've Ever Read.......2006-05-26
I loved this book from beginning to end. It's easy to forget that it takes place in Czechoslovakia in the 1960's, but why would you want to? That's what drives the story. I love the way Kundera weaves this story, giving the book no single narrator instead he lets the events unfold through several different characters. I got inside this book and it took some much emotionally for me to read it, but loved the ride. This is a GREAT book that I would recommend to anyone!!
political or not.......2006-04-08
At the end of the French edition I have there is a short comment of the author about the history of The Joke, including its interdiction in Czechoslovakia and the bad translations it had to go through afterwards. And finally, Kundera seems to feel relieved that now, when everyone forgot about the invasion of his home country, his readers don't see The Joke as a political novel, but simply as a novel.
Indeed, some of the reviewers on this site needed to mention that "one does not have to have a particular political interest to enjoy this book", "The Joke is, frankly, not very political" and I simply wonder why such a fear of the political. No doubt, Kundera is way beyond a simple journalist describing life behind the Iron curtain. But why would a romance or science fiction novel or even a "just novel" be better than a political one?
Take the political out of The Joke and we're left with an absurd novel. An unexplainable and ridiculous trouble over a post card, the hard life of a worker in the coal mines, where he has to stay for unclear reasons, a "stupid" young lady who doesn't seem to understand a man's idea of love and an equally stupid hateful sex affair which pushes another na?ve woman to suicide. Young, modern Miss Brozova, to whom Zemanek's and Ludvik's past were equally blameable, aberrant and indifferent, was thinking the same way.
I have asked someone about the movie made after The Unbearable lightness of being and all I heard was some vague memory of a few hot sex scenes. I have the feeling that both books are reduced to that in the view of many readers and it's a pity. If this is what we are looking for, I would recommend Pascal Bruckner - Bitter Moon: it's brilliant and no trace of politics mixed with sex.
The Joke is a masterpiece which combines them. And the postcard is only a minor but well chosen example of the many possible "jokes" of a regime. Kostka, the religious, didn't have to be caught with any postcards to get in trouble and his life is not any less a bitter joke. He tried, humble, the impossible reconciliation of his belief in God with the communist fatalities and still lost. Jaroslav, the folklore lover, tried a similar adaptation and ended up in an ambulance. Their lives, the romance, the sex, are all influenced by political circumstances, more or less directly. Which is why it's simplistic to judge them or Ludvik for his hate, need for revenge and incapability to forget, or the whole situation as a result of a badly misunderstood joke on a postcard. Isn't it why we love Kundera? Because he explains it so well and encourages us not to be simplistic?
Some said they found in the book many problems any of us can have at some point in life. Since the "some" come mainly from a democratic USA, I have serious doubts. And serious hopes that no one will ever have such problems. Unless, of course, we are talking about girls refusing to sleep with guys, the masks and stupidities of young age, rape, hate, revenge - all of them thought taken out of context, and which may indeed (and unfortunately) happen anywhere and to anyone. Actually, let's get rid of this low infatuation with ourselves which tells us to like a book only because "we find ourselves in it"; we do that enough in relationships all the time.
I really don't mean to give definitions and put The Joke in a literary category/genre etc, I even understand why Kundera had enough of his novel being considered political. I just don't think the other extreme is better; it would mean not only deleting pages and pages of the book, but also neglecting a big idea which makes the novel a believable, explainable and logical whole.
In conclusion, it's a rather simple (as in classic, not simplistic) novel (comparing to say, Immortality), yes it is not ONLY political, but lets not cheapen it by recommending it to Harry Potter fans.
"From whence a perfect joke must spring.......2005-11-27
A joke's a very serious thing."
So said the 18th-century English poet Charles Churchill in "The Ghost". And a silly joke was a very serious thing for Ludvik, the protagonist of Milan Kundera's first novel "The Joke."
Written and set in 1965 Prague and first published in Czechoslovakia in 1967, the novel opens with Ludvik looking back on the joke that changed his life in the early 1950s. Ludvik was a dashing, witty, and popular student. Like most of his friends he was an enthusiastic supporter of the still-fresh Communist regime in post-World War II Czechoslovakia. In a playful mood he writes a postcard to one of the girls in his class during their summer break. Since she seems, according to Ludvik, to be a bit too serious he writes on the postcard "Optimism is the opium of the people! The healthy atmosphere stinks! Long live Trotsky!" His colleagues and fellow young-party leaders did not quite see the humor in the sentiment expressed in the postcard. Ludvik finds himself expelled from the party and college and drafted to that part of the Czech military where alleged subversives form work brigades and spend the next few years working in mines.
Despite the interruption in his career Ludvik has become a successful scientist. But despite his success, his treatment at the hands of his former friends has left him bitter and angry. An opportunity arises when he meets Helena, an old friend now married to Pavel, the friend who led the efforts to purge Ludvik from the party. Ludvik decides to seduce Helena as a means of exacting his revenge. In essence this is the second `joke' of the novel. Although the seduction is successful things do not quite play out the way Ludvik expects, the novel's third joke' and he is left once more to sit and think bitter thoughts. Ultimately he decides that these sorts of jokes and their bitter repercussions are not the fault of the humans who set them in motion but are really just a matter of historic inevitability. Ultimately then one cannot blame forces that cannot be changed or altered.
Written in Czech (before Kundera left for France where he began writing in French) this is one of Kundera's more accessible works. The book is narrated through the voices of four people, Ludvik, Helena, Kostka, who has since become a Christian and absented himself from the commercial and political life of the regime, and Jaroslav whose love of traditional Czech folk music forms a nice counterpoint to life in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Kundera switches seamlessly from one voice to the next even as the changes in voice become more frequent towards the novel's conclusion. Although Ludvik is a bit self-absorbed that self-absorption is not nearly as all-consuming as one sees in the characters in Kundera's more recent efforts.
A word about the translation. There is an old French expression: "translations are like women - if they are beautiful, they are not faithful; if they are faithful they are not beautiful." This edition is designated by the publisher as the `definitive' translation. Kundera has expressed no small amount of dissatisfaction with earlier translations of this work and Kundera spent a lot of time working with the translator to ensure that the voice heard in the English version corresponds to the voice heard in the original Czech. Each reader may have a different opinion as to the beauty of the translated prose (I think it reads very well) but I think that given Kundera's blessing that it is, at the very least, faithful.
L. Fleisig
Average customer rating:
- Weak for Kundera
- Another Masterpiece of Introspection
- great
- We all can identify with it!
- It unraveled my Concupiscence for Knowledge.
|
Identity: A Novel
Milan Kundera
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- Slowness: A Novel
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- Immortality
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
- Ignorance : A Novel
ASIN: 0060930314 |
Amazon.com
The reader sits down to dinner with Chantal, who is waiting for her lover, Jean-Marc, in a seaside hotel. While waiting to be served, she overhears two waitresses discuss the unexplained disappearance of a family man. This blatant foreshadowing posits the central question of Identity: what we think we know about our intimates is predicated on projection, primal yearnings, and the deep denial of life's impermanence. Identity reads like a musical exercise; its playing out of themes is reminiscent of a fugue. An image dropped into the narrative will be revisited from a different vantage point, tossed back and forth between the lovers; out of it will be teased every possible meaning. The 51 sparse, tiny chapters reinforce the fuguelike feel.
The plot is simple: Jean-Marc arrives at the hotel; Chantal is out walking. Near misses and mistaken identities characterize his frantic search for her, offering Kundera the opportunity to philosophize on the unknowability of the "other." They reunite; Chantal blurts out the distressing thought that's plagued her day: "Men don't turn to look at me anymore." This launches the protagonists into sketchy flashbacks, stilted dialogues, and interior monologues, all loosely bound by their embarkation on an erotic journey.
Key bits from the characters' pasts become signature refrains. Chantal, for example, has buried a son, who died at the age of 5. Strands such as this are dropped lightly in the narrative, to be pulled through later chapters like a needle with different colored threads. Later, for example, the boy's death will trigger her unpleasant realization--that it was, in the end, a "dreadful gift." Children, she thinks, keep us hopeful in the world, because "it's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is; that's the world we've put the child into." Thus, her child's death has set her free to live out her genuine disdain of the world. Although the illogical extremes of Kundera's thought can be wildly dissonant and wondrously shocking, this reiterative device of Identity lacks energy. There's no sense of discovery about these characters. They remain flat; the style effects one like an Ingmar Bergman film when one is in the mood for Sam Peckinpah.
As if in serendipitous response to her pain in getting older, Chantal receives an anonymous "love" note. More notes follow. Will they prove Jean-Marc's attempt to sweeten her sad disclosure? Her sexual awakening begins to blur the boundaries of what's real. All well and good, but somewhere along the line, Kundera concludes that Chantal is weak because she's older. Age, we are asked to believe, becomes a wedge between the lovers, even though Chantal is only a few years older than Jean-Marc, who is himself only 42. And in the exploration of her sexuality on the wax and wane, Kundera succumbs to cliché: she is consumed too often by too many flames, and red is all used up as a symbol of violent passion. On the subject of male and female desire, Kundera is incomparably funny, and the novel sports some nervy images--masturbating fetuses; our human community joined in a sea of saliva; the ubiquity of spying eyes, harvesting information for profit; the human gaze itself, a marvel, jaggedly interrupted by the mechanical action of the blink. Kundera betrays a witty revulsion for the values and mores of the late 20th century.
But with sentences such as, "This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared," the reading experience reduces to an annoyance. Perhaps this is the fault of the translator attempting a breezy, colloquial tone. But it's sloppy and careless. Still the novel's an entertainment, a good companion. Reading it is like passing an afternoon in a sidewalk café, catching up with an old friend, say, with whom one has shared youthful cynicism and diatribes against the ignominies of human behavior. One will look back on such an afternoon and remember too many Galloises smoked, too many cups of coffee, moments of intense engagement that fell, alas, into the indulgence of a "retro" ennui.
Book Description
There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples--indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one.
With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation--and the vague sense of panic it inspires--the very fabric of his new novel. Here brevity goes hand in hand with intensity, and a moment of bewilderment marks the start of a labyrinthine journey during which the reader repeatedly crosses the border between the real and the unreal, between what occurs in the world outside and what the mind creates in its solitude.
Of all contemporary writers, only Kundera can transform such a hidden and disconcerting perception into the material for a novel, one of his finest, most painful, and most enlightening. Which, surprisingly, turns out to be a love story.
Customer Reviews:
Weak for Kundera.......2007-02-23
Years ago, I had read the first few chapters of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a bookstore. The words stayed with me always, until years later when I actually had the opportunity to complete the reading. Identity had a different effect. I chose it for a train ride because the book I was really searching for was not in stock. Unfortunately, I'm quite disappointed.
Kundera's characters are not believable. Then again, I understand why. This is Kundera we're talking about. I believe his emphasis usually to be on what he writes about the world and psychology. Less importance is given to how it is actually told (in my mere judgment). Honestly, not only have I yet to meet anyone who converses like either Chantal or Jean-Marc, the two protagonists are also boring and not relatable. By about the 24th (or so) chapter I found myself gauging the thickness of progress I've made in the pages versus how thick the book is, and was happy to realize that Identity is a short novel.
Chantal is average. I understand the importance of using everyday subjects in writing about life's generalities and quirks, which is how I generally view Kundera as a writer. I think it can be agreed upon that he writes his personal takes on psychology through characters and in fiction form. However, Chantal isn't even pleasantly average. We know nothing about her all the way until about chapter 42 when she begins fantasizing awkward sexual situations while riding a train into England from Paris for initial reasons obscure.
The plot is boring. Basically, a woman receives admiration letters in her mailbox each morning--which, by the way, we knew were from her existing boyfriend the second we read the first instance, yet it takes half the novel to reveal this information. Whether or not Kundera wanted his readers to know more than Chantal is ambiguous to me. Perhaps her ignorance and continual fantasies about whom the author of her letters could be is more of a testament to her weakness and susceptibility as an older woman than I had previously realized. Either way, the subject is irritating, and upon hearing the fuss about her first letter, I had no idea that this was the entire plot of the novel. Then it never went away.
When the woman (Chantal) realizes that her boyfriend has been making a checkpoint of her hiding spot for these letters (and consequently realizes that he has been writing them himself), she is offended, and he confused, for the woman he believes to be his loved one would never hide silly letters from him. Thus, he questions her identity, all in a short chapter-long internal struggle leading well, nowhere. Immediately following: an awkward and unnecessary run-in with Chantal's previous family. It is Chantal, however, who instigates the couple's separation.
I get it, I get it. Chantal in the beginning is not Chantal at the end. Somewhere along the line fantasy intrudes the (mediocre) story we had been reading. Parts are clever, but 80 percent of the book is a bore, frankly. There are some good quotes, but the story is not memorable enough for my taste. I particularly liked, "That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a leveling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status" (5). Also, "That `and that's how time goes by for them' is a fundamental line. Their problem is time--how to make time go by, go by on its own, by itself, with no effort from them, without their being required to get through it themselves" (79). I'm sort of glad to be through with Identity but I'll keep reading Kundera--my impression for this one is just weak.
Another Masterpiece of Introspection.......2007-01-08
This is one of the first novelas Kundera has written in French, and is certainly among the best in his long series of observations of human nature. Although all the novelas exist in the shadow of Kundera's great full length novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, they are all literary gems well worth reading.
great.......2006-08-30
This is a good book. I reads very quickly and remains witty and interesting the whole way through.
We all can identify with it!.......2005-12-20
This was the first thing I have ever read by this author and it was definitely good enough to make me interested in reading more Kundera stuff.
It is short. It moves along well, gathering speed as it goes. But the ending.... umm... well, more about this in a bit.
To simplify (greatly) I want to say that the novel speaks forcibly regarding what can happen when someone delves into the deep intimate inner spaces of another, uninvited.
What happens when certain "privacies" are violated. In a word, it can be tragic. Even in the case of two people who are enjoying a healthy relationship, in all other respects. As is the case with our two main characters in this story: Jean-Marc and Chantal.
They are a loving, mutually devoted, intellectual couple. After the death of her five-year old son, Chantal left her husband to be with Jean-Marc. They met at a ski-lodge. They enjoy a somewhat bohemian lifestyle, filled with lots of restaurant dates and two-sided philosophical conversation.
Everything is sort of tickety-boo, until Chantal reveals to Jean-Marc her specific inner angst.
"Men don't turn to look at me anymore," she says.
At first, this very much puzzles him. Why should such a thing matter?
"Is that really why you're sad?" he asks.
Jean-Marc is confused because.... well, shouldn't it be enough that he himself is enthralled with her? That he chases after her?
But Chantal has spoken what was in her mind.
And now it's... out there.
What will happen?
What will Jean-Marc do, with this information?
The story makes me ask myself: Is it possible to know too much about someone you truly love?
Should each person in the relationship be allowed their secrets?
Allowed some privacy?
The ending of the book.
A bit of a disappointment for me. Both in the structure of the ending, as well as the summation itself. A little too abrupt, inconclusive, contrived, and confusing, for me.
And I mean, an ending is darn important. Darn tootin' it is.
But for the enjoyment of the subtleties of the rest of the book, and the gorgeous language (even in translation) throughout, I would still highly recommend it.
If it was 800 or 900 pages and had the same ending? Yes, I would have kicked the nearest innocent stranger right in the shins!
It unraveled my Concupiscence for Knowledge........2005-08-21
I felt relieved and frustrated that the novel was a trifle hundred and sixty six pages exquisitely enjoyed in less than a week. I wanted more of the experience, and at the same time I know that what made the experience great was that it was short-lived. Authors through their books with their writing style have a way of provoking. Some incite change. Some authors provoke a sense of wonder, lending us new eyes to see what we have already seen or possibly allow us to see what we can never see for ourselves. My favorite authors have great command of the language enough to invoke the different experiences of sensory pleasures. The divine torture of having to choose from a feast of tummy-filling mouth-watering offerings. The heady nuances of mingled smells. The textures, surprises and depths of touching and seeing and hearing. A good number of conniving contrivances provide us with mystery, guiding us through a labyrinth of secrets, lies and delusions only to reveal the awaited truth in the end, or sometimes not. A lot of them send us through the variances of emotion. Frustration. Jealousy. Despair. Notwithstanding, victory, amusement, euphoria. Some even successfully provoke us to boredom and then further to sleep. All of them, almost always even if they try to deny it, attempt to provoke thought. Milan Kundera's 'Identity' provoked in me, in his own words, "a promiscuity of ideas."
Kundera provoked me to contradict and agree with myself at the same time. To the ultimate end of finding what is actual (vs. the perceived), the real (vs. illusion), and true knowledge (vs. theorized absolutes). I've always prided myself of being open-minded. "Identity" concretized that the concept of openmindedness is holding on to an idea while considering an opposing thought. It doesn't mean that I have no fidelity to my convictions. It just means that I recognize that my convictions may be flawed, which may need some revision or even complete overhaul. Milan Kundera teaches us to ask the right questions; the answers are secondary if at all important.
Average customer rating:
- another persons shoes
- Nostalgia ("nostos"-return, "algos"-suffering)
- You can't go home again
- Nostalgia
- Ignorance
|
Ignorance: A Novel
Milan Kundera
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Romance
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Look Inside Romance Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- Identity: A Novel
- Slowness: A Novel
- Farewell Waltz: A Novel
- The Joke (Definitive Version)
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
ASIN: 0060002107
Release Date: 2003-09-30 |
Amazon.com
Bypassing the question of whether you can ever go home again, Milan Kundera's Ignorance tackles instead what happens when you actually get there. Ignorance is the story of two Czechs who meet by chance while traveling back to their homeland after 20 years in exile. Irena, who fled the country in 1968 with her now-deceased husband Martin, returns to Prague only to find coldness and indifference on the part of her former friends. Josef, who emigrated after the Russian invasion, is back in Prague to fulfill a wish of his beloved late wife. As fate would have it, the two have met before in their former lives, and the before-skirted passionate encounter is now destined to transpire. However, as in the story of Odysseus, which this novel so deliberately parallels, every homecoming brings with it a conflicting set of emotions so powerful that one has to question whether the voyage is really worth the pain. Expertly tackling the philosophical and emotional themes of nostalgia, memory, love, loss, and endurance, Kundera continues to astound readers with his masterful ability to understand and articulate issues so central to the human condition. --Gisele Toueg
Book Description
Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."</p>
Customer Reviews:
another persons shoes.......2007-02-24
This was an account of the move from one world to another and how if affected both the person who left for a better life and those who were left behind. It is a good way to see the world through the eyes of an emigre and the deep changes such a move creates in relationships among friends and family.
Nostalgia ("nostos"-return, "algos"-suffering).......2006-09-28
It's been a while since I've read Milan Kundera but I'm glad I've started reading his recent work. I loved THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING years ago.
I picked up IGNORANCE because I was intrigued with the idea of two Czechs returning to their homeland after 20 years and resuming their relationship. While the novel doesn't chronicle the "love story" between Irena and Josef (most of the novel traces their journeys home that leads to their meeting), it does expose how unreliable our memories and interactions can be.
What we've done, what we remember, how we move on.
As usual, Kundera delivers more than what I was looking for.
You can't go home again.......2006-07-12
"Ignorance" is a story about memory: how much are we actually capable of remembering and how often do our memories fail us? In this novel, two characters encounter each other at a Paris airport during a return trip to Prague. Josef and Irena both fled the country twenty years ago during the Russian invasion. When they bump into each other at the airport, Irena immediately remembers an encounter she had with Josef some twenty years beforehand. Unfortunately, Joseph has no memory of her, although he chooses to keep that information to himself. They exchange phone numbers and agree to meet up again in Prague. Before that happens, the reader is treated to a series of flashbacks. We learn that Irena left Prague because her first husband, Martin, was wanted by the authorities. Josef was disgusted by Communism and left to start over in Denmark. Both characters have built new lives for themselves and are haunted by the memories that resurface when they return to the country they once called home. Additionally, there are many new and annoying aspects of Prague that they have to adjust to, and the old acquaintances that Josef and Irena once knew are now practically strangers to them.
Milan Kundera's novel parallels the story of Odysseus. Irena and Josef have both traveled long journeys and eventually returned home. They experience many conflicting emotions and feelings of nostalgia. Eventually Irena and Josef arrange another meeting, which turns into an incredibly painful experience for both of them.
There are many different themes in this book, but I think the biggest one is that people can't escape their pasts and they can't recreate their pasts, either, no matter how hard they try. "Ignorance" is a subtle but beautifully written book. Personally, I think it's incredibly sad and depressing, but the story is one that everyone will be able to relate to in some way, as we all have memories that we cherish and some that we'd give anything to forget.
Nostalgia.......2006-01-25
This short book describes the feelings and perceptions of a Czech that emigrates to France during the communist era who returns to her homeland after many years. It will surely be a delightful read for those living away from their home countries.
But the issues are universal: How does human memory work? What is the difference between what we remember and what we would like to remember? How do other people remember us? Are we freed by the future or captured by the past? Aparently simple questions that Kundera magnificantly puts to the readers throught this beautiful novel.
I doubt this is Kundera's masterpiece. But it is short, interesting, and enjoyable. Recommended.
Ignorance.......2005-09-13
Ignorance, by Milan Kundera, is a small novel but big on ideas. Playing like a watered down Odyssey, two Czech émigrés return to post-communist Prague after twenty years. A chance meeting in the airport stirs memories of long ago that leads to an interesting study of our memory, its limits and unreliability, and how, in our ignorance, we can take it for granted and trust it too much.
Irena fled to France during the Russian invasion; Josef to Denmark. Both have built new lives, made new friends, and forgotten who they were. After the fall of European communism in 1989, they return to their city only to find that it's no longer theirs; it's full of tourists, whores, and restaurants the Czechs can't afford. A chance sighting in the airport causes Irena to engage Josef in conversation; she remembers him from a conversation twenty years ago. They agree to meet, and, as the novel builds up to their rendezvous, they go about their homecomings - meeting parents, friends, and, ultimately, themselves - to discover that Prague is no longer home.
Stylistically, the book is a dream. Although little happens in the novel - a conversation here, a wander there - it is the narrator's asides that gels the experience, wandering off into philosophical mode, or giving atypical history lessons - all the time, maintaining a poetic tone. The prose is terse, but just right to create the surreal atmosphere it needs to succeed. It wanders effortlessly between the different characters and the lessons learned from their actions.
The characters are well drawn, although their focus is completely on their homecoming, their memory, and doubts about their patriotism. Their actions are believable; their conversations intelligent. Prague, as a character, is underdone - little of the city is given, and, after twenty years, it would have been nice to know the visible changes that time has wrought.
Overall, Kundera has provided an appealing novel, doubtless inspired by his own circumstances as a Czech émigré. While it may not be to the tastes of all (i.e. those seeking action) it does endow us with food for thought, something to consider about our memories. And, at least for me, the true thrill was watching how the philosophical and historical asides came together to complete the novel, and reinforce the characters' feelings.
Average customer rating:
- Great observations, but what happened to his style?
- An entirely unique author.
- In Praise of Slowness
- Undisputedly original, with an erratic charm of its own...
- Not up to usual Kundera standards
|
Slowness
Milan Kundera
Manufacturer: Harpercollins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Eastern European
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- Identity: A Novel
- Farewell Waltz: A Novel
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- Ignorance : A Novel
- Immortality
ASIN: 0060173696 |
Amazon.com
After the gravity of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, <B>Slowness</B> comes as a surprise: it is certainly Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, with, as the author himself says, "not a single serious word in it."
Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, sperated by more than two-hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic, finally culminating in poignant cross-century encounter sure to linger in the reader's mind
Despite Kundera's disclaimer about the novel's seriousness, <B>Slowness</B> resonates with a profound meditation on contemporary life, the secret bond between slowness and memory, the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed.
Book Description
Two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic in this, Milan Kundera's lightest novel. In the 18th century, the marvelous Madame de T. summons a young nobleman to her chamber and gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love. In the same chat at the end of the 20th century, a hapless intellectual experiences a rather less successful night. Distracted by his desire to be the center of attention at a convention of entomologists, Vincent misses the opportunity to be with a beautiful stranger and suffers the ridicule of his peers.
A "morning-after" encounter between the two men brings the novel to a poignant close and provides a unique insight into the different mind-sets of the two centuries. As Vincent prepares to speed off on his motorcycle, he has already obliterated the memory of his humiliation. The young nobleman, on the other hand, relives the delicious pleasures of the night as he lies back on the cushions of his carriage.
Ruminating on how the pleasures of slowness have disappeared in today's fast-paced, future-shocked world, Kundera explores the secret bond between slowness and memory and the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. As provocative as it is entertaining, Slowness is Kundera in top form.
Customer Reviews:
Great observations, but what happened to his style?.......2005-08-24
I struggled to give this book 4 Stars. I rather feel like 3, but that would put it in the league of far less intelligent books. Slowness is a very inspiring reflection on speed and memory, lust and enjoyment, truth and fiction, individuality and acting. It is also an ironic commentary on today's intellectuals and the media. And it is a story about love and eroticism. Maybe that's the problem with this book: It is too much that Kundera tried to convey in just about 150 pages. If you read closely, you get the point, but whereas Kundera preaches slowness and enjoyment, he practices speed and overload. His style is usually witty, sparkling, elegant and yet full of meaning - elements that are also occasionally present in Slowness. But here they have a hard time to stand out between passages of smart-aleck feuilettonism and the unconvincing attempt to be erotic, provocative and psychoanalytic simultaneously (it rather comes off as quite funny but both pretentious and vulgar at the same time). Even Kundera's usually refreshing experiments with form and style seem somewhat contrived. This book is still a notworthy read - philosophically inspiring, frequently quite funny and definitely original - but it's well below the esprit and stylistic brilliance of Immortality or Unberable Lightness of Being.
An entirely unique author........2005-01-30
Let this be only the first of Kundera's books you read. It was my first, and now I've read everything of his that has been translated into English and if there's more I'm willing to learn another language to get to it. This book is humorous, but that is the least of it. I've never read an author with such perception, such a wily mind. It's impossible to get his characters or their lives out of your mind. Reading Kundera makes life, other people, and the whole world make more sense. And less sense, at the same time.
In Praise of Slowness.......2004-09-30
Ironically, Slowness is a brisk read. The book is 156 pages long, and it could easily be read in one or two sittings. I, however, took my time, impelled, in part, by the theme of the book-slowwwnesss. And yes, the book can be enjoyed at a slow pace-that is until you hit the latter 100 pages, when the plot turns into a farce, and the prose reads so easily, so joyfully really, that you cannot help but finish quickly.
As always with Kundera novels many specific lines struck me, and I commemorated them with dog-eared pages. One quote seemed to be lifted from another Kundera novel, Immortality. In Slowness Kundera writes, "...beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them. When people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel."
Kundera is talking abut Immaculata, a character who has just jumped into a pool fully clothed, but he could just as easily be talking about Agnes, the heroine of Immortality: "the essence of her charm, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me."
Reading Immortality, you sense Kundera's compassion for Agnes; reading Slowness, with Immaculata, and the various other characters, you sense Kundera's contempt (although this may be too strong a word: in Kundera's terms, most of the characters here aren't even deserving of contempt.)
But Kundera does show compassion for several characters from an 18th century novel, characters who seem to embody the ancient idea of slowness-an idea all but lost to the modern characters of Slowness, all of who seem to be caught up in various fiascos. (These fiascos culminate in a ridiculous scene at the side of a swimming pool in a château.)
I read the book during the course of several mornings, and then I finished the last 100 pages in one sitting, in the evening. It is a good book for Kundera fans, although I am not sure I can agree with the critics line, quoted on the front cover of the book: "audacity, wit, and sheer brilliance." What does Kundera have to do to earn some mediocre praise?
Undisputedly original, with an erratic charm of its own..........2004-06-13
Same place (an old castle), different times, interlinked stories of lovers, Kundera himself, and a multitude of carefully described peripheral characters that somehow complete the story behind the stories. All that, in a book of merely 176 pages?
However, there is much more to "Slowness", because the real protagonist of this short novel is time, and its nature. Kundera makes some interesting observations that are quite true, from my point of view. He points out the connection between slowness and pleasure on the one hand, and slowness and memory on the other. It is fairly evident that he wants to make us think about the dangers of the speed that seems to characterize our modern society. Where are we headed?. And is it worth the price we will have to pay?.
Is this book for everybody?. Certainly not: there are some scenes with sexual content that are inappropriate for very young readers, and that older readers might find distasteful. Despite that, I believe that many people will like "Slowness", mainly due to the fact that the novel is undisputedly original, with an erratic charm all of its own. The story wanders from one character to the other and from our days to the distant past with an almost perfect inconsistency that hides an omnipresent connecting factor: time.
All in all, I think that those who are fond of the strikingly unusual will enormously enjoy this book, but only if they are able to pay little attention to the defects in "Slowness" in order to concentrate on what makes it worth reading.
Belen Alcat
Not up to usual Kundera standards.......2003-10-27
Let me begin by saying that this is not a bad book. In fact, if it were written by an unknown, nameless author I might find it rather brilliant. However, when compared with other Kundera works, this one falls, saddly, short. It lacks the self propultion of his other books. In addition, the sweet meloncholy of his other characters is missing in this text. All in all, this book is worth reading. However, if this is your first encounter with Kundera,I would recommend reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Ignorance first.
Average customer rating:
- Milan Kundera, one of my favorite authors
- Spend your time elsewhere.
- Among Kundera's most inspired
- Life is Elsewhere
- A quiet meditation on life and art
|
Life Is Elsewhere
Milan Kundera , and Aaron Asher
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Eastern European
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Foreign Languages
| Reference
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Look Inside Reference Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- Identity: A Novel
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
- Laughable Loves
- The Joke (Definitive Version)
ASIN: 0060997028 |
Book Description
The author intially intended to call this noel, The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes scarosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made hima poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce.
Customer Reviews:
Milan Kundera, one of my favorite authors.......2006-10-29
I finally borrowed another of Milan Kundera's books to read from the university library. I didn't enjoy it as much as I did The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However there were still a lot of incisive and thoughtful passages.
What I like most about Milan Kundera is his marvelous skill in capturing the essence of his thoughts in words, and also the thoughts themselves which reveal a kindred soul in deep contemplation of human and life. Whenever I read his books, I feel a longing to write something as deeply revealing as his books.
Life is Elsewhere is about the life of a young poet named Jaromil. The viewpoint is erected at his demise, as the writer tells us. The poet and his mother's relationship are one of the main subjects in this book. The writer says he meant to name the book The Lyric Age but changed the title at the last moment because the publishers worried that no one would buy a book with such an abstract title.
Many critics see this book as a satire of literature, of literary talent, and of life. However, as I read the book, I didn't perceive it as a satire. I felt it to be honest, sometimes brutally so, but still with sympathy and self-pity wrapped around it. Every aspiring artist is bound to go through some of what Jaromil went through.
It especially makes one wonder how literary genius can be defined or if it even can be defined. The writer himself writes in the preface that Jaromil is not a bad poet. I kept that in mind as I read the book. Jaromil is in fact a very sensitive though naive and immature poet. Nobody can be the absolute judge of literary talent.
Spend your time elsewhere........2006-03-09
I bought the book after reading the 1st chapter where "the Poet is conceived". Unfortunately, it was downhill from there.
This book tired me out so much with the way it rambled on and on. It seemed far too self righteousness and preachy; it was almost pretentious. It was also difficult to empathize with it's main character who was a pathetic, untalented, mama's boy poet.
Having read and enjoyed a few other Kundera books, I really tried to give this a chance. It was a struggle to finish it. If you don't like ending up hating the protagonist, your time is better spent reading something else.
Among Kundera's most inspired.......2006-03-04
Although 'Life is Elsewhere' is not one of Milan Kundera's most celebrated novels, it is without doubt one of the most intimate and beautifully written.
Detractors and critics of Kundera often gripe that his characters are unpleasant, underdeveloped and shallow human beings. All these critics need to do is read this novel to see how incorrect this assertion is. Within 'Life is Elsewhere' we see an intimate account of the life and development of a young poet named Jaromil, with a specific focus on his relationship with his mother. The beautiful manner in which this relationship is rendered allows us to appreciate a subtle interplay between the poet's relationship with his mother, and his relationship with the female sex in general.
When one hears of a novel about such a relationship, one is tempted to picture the story of a man who is utterly dominated by a controlling and posessive mother, however this is not how Kundera develops their bond. Here what we find is the story of a mother and child relationship whose closeness transcends the usual maternal bonds. Intertwined with this relationship is the poet's passion for his art and his use of it to express and promote his socialist political ideologies.
The skill, beauty and dexterity with which Kundera interweaves the many facets and relationships of this novel, as well as the depth of character present, should be enough to assuage even the most ardent of his critics.
Life is Elsewhere.......2005-05-27
In Kundera's book you meet Jaromil at the moment he is concieved. His mother loves him so much and has so many great hopes for him. She wants him to become a poet. Once Jaromil grows old enough to write, he starts writing poetry. Throughout the novel, you meet all of the people that change Jaromils life: the Painter, the Student, the Redheaded Girl, the Man in his forties, Xavier, and many others. I rated this book three stars because, although it was a great read, it was a little hard to follow. By the time I reached the end of the book I had forgotten what happened in the beginning. I enjoyed that not all the characters had specific names, they were only called what they were, a painter or a poet or something like that. I have never read a book so filled with poetry and thoughts like this before.
A quiet meditation on life and art.......2004-01-16
Life is Elsewhere is the first novel by Milan Kundera that I have read, and it was the first he wrote. The edition I have, however, was edited and touched up to confirm to the more accurate French translation with the help of the author, so I am assuming it contains a little more maturity than when he wrote it thirty years ago.
The story is very simple, it is about a struggling young poet's first twenty or so years of life, from birth to death. He is the only named character (excluding Xavier, but don't worry about that), and this adds to the sense of familiarity we feel with him.
Another important character is his mother, and we are often privy to her emotions and thoughts away from her poet son. She is quite obsessive about him and wants to make sure his life is how he wants it poetically, but as he grows older, she becomes rather jealous of his growing attraction to females that aren't her.
I really enjoyed the narrator's tone of voice, at times he was an impartial observer, at other times he made little comments about the characters/predicaments, and at other times he threw all that away and started having a one-sided discussion with the reader - even indulging in little flights of fancy away from the main story. I have no idea if this is a Kunder staple or not, but it really worked in this story and I wouldn't mind seeing it again.
The poet is a selfish character, moreso as he becomes older, and this can sometimes be hard to read. He treats his girlfriend very poorly, and looks at life and love with the obsessive attitude of a teenager, which can sometimes be a little difficult to read. He considers his art and drive to be greater than any others, and this makes him arrogant, but he truly is a great poet so this is moderately understandable.
In summation, I very much recommend this book. It was very sad in places, and when it wasn't sad, it was a great meditation on life.
Average customer rating:
- Laughable Greatness
- Love Advice from a Man of the World
- Honesty, cynicism and melancholy shrouded in undescribable tenderness
- Early Kundera, including one of the century's greatest stories.
- Not Laughter and Forgetting...
|
Laughable Loves
Milan Kundera
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Short Stories
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Eastern European
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Foreign Languages
| Reference
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Look Inside Reference Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
- Life Is Elsewhere
- Identity: A Novel
- Immortality
ASIN: 0060997036 |
Book Description
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road--only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.
Customer Reviews:
Laughable Greatness.......2007-06-22
Milan Kundera is in fact a literary genius. He manages to develop stories in a unique way, they are light and easy to read, yet they manage to be thought provoking at the same time. Kundera makes you laugh and think about the complexity and simplicity of human nature. I believe the seven stories found within this volume are linked together in theme, and there is also some reappearance of characters. The theme seems to regard the immortality of eroticism, of our libido - our sexual being doesn't age but only serves to remind us of our youth. I particularly liked the "Hitchhiking Game," which makes one wonder - how well do we know each other, or better yet, how much of us do we really reveal to each other? "Symposium" was an interesting discussion about Eros, echoing and modernizing Plato's "Symposium." "Eduard and God" is another gem to be treasured, it explores religion in the context of socialist movement and its interplay with sexuality, as well as the serious and unserious side of things. The stories are about "laughable loves" as they demonstrate how silly at times men (women included) act on the part of our ancient instinct and desire.
On a side note, this translation is extremely poor. I found quite a few typos and grammatical mistakes. It would be great to read this in its original form in Czech. I feel like alot of Kundera's wit is lost in translation.
"Laughable Loves" is definitely worth reading!
Love Advice from a Man of the World.......2006-12-26
Milan Kundera is, perhaps, what Woody Allen probably wishes he were: a non-neurotic European gentleman; a cool customer who knows a few things about love, and doesn't mind sharing them. And he has lived a professional life of art under a repressive Soviet bloc regime, to boot.
Laughable Loves is my first stab at Kundera, and what a find! Here is a thoroughly modern (though several decades old) collection of sketches of romance young and old, foibles and conceits timeless and ubiquitous, and comedy blatant and tongue-in-cheek. The book starts out modestly with young couple whose blithe role-playing takes them to darker places in their hearts and minds than they'd ever imagined. Kundera then gives us a pompous professor/art critic who goes to great lengths to avoid a man who solicits his critique while halfheartedly protecting his young mistress; a bitter man who seeks to recapture a love he once let get away; a doctor, ex-Don Juan, who is full of himself and, ultimately, full of IT; and, among others, an atheist teacher who flirts with religion to get close to a girl, and flirts with the principal to save his career, with unexpected results.
The stories are metaphysical puzzles (especially Dr. Havel) and teasing meditations on love, lust, and life from a lover-philosopher. Kundera makes no apologies and explores amoral terrain with authority--and wit. What a taut, satisfying collection of short stories. The question is not whom to read next, but what to read...
Honesty, cynicism and melancholy shrouded in undescribable tenderness.......2006-12-22
I just came across this collection of short stories, and as a devoted Kundera fan, I quickly devoured it amidst Christmas preparations, letter writings and other more dreary readings. And what a delight! This is early Bohemian Kundera, written while he still lived in then Czechoslovakia, and it is quite evident that he has not yet matured into the thoroughly seasoned writer that produced masterpieces such as "Life is Elsewhere", "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Immortality". However, this is unmistakenly literary genius in the making, and the mood throughout is simply captivating.
The themes all deal with aspects of human sexuality - mostly from a Man's view. The stories have a raw sense of humanity to them - sometimes it can be uncomfortable reading; however, it has an undeniably tender undercurrent. Even when a character behaves despicably, I remained sympathtic with the human behind the actions. It just feels irresistably honest, and it is quite easy to get seduced by such well-portrayed human complexities.
Among my favorite stories were "The Old Dead Must Make Room for the New Dead", which portrays the dilemma of whether to preserve a diffuse, but beautiful sensual memory or replace it with a graphic, but uglier version that will ultimately erase the former. "Edward and God" is another gem that deals with sexual longing and the fickleness of Religion (Atheism is cleverly presented just as irrational in its dogmatisms as Christianity).
Finally "The Hitchhiking Game" is a classic portrayal of how easily perceptions can be irreversibly altered.
I highly recommend this short-story collection; however, if you are reading Milan Kundera for the first time, I am tempted to recommened one of his more famous works...
Early Kundera, including one of the century's greatest stories........2006-08-23
This collection of early short stories by Czech novelist Milan Kundera (who should surely be in the running for a Nobel sometime soon) contains one of the greatest short stories of the 20th century. "The Hitchhiking Game," a tale of two lovers who play an identity game that goes much too far and shakes their own fragile identities, is a marvelous, unpretentious dramatization of one of the central themes of Modernism's most important philosophical movement, Existentialism. Here Sartre's idea that we define ourselves through our actions is combined with the notion of personality as social performance to create a work of art as startling as Ingmar Bergman's 'Persona'. P.S.: I understand that Kundera also directed a film of this story sometime in the 1960's--part of the 'Czech new wave' cinema movement.
Not Laughter and Forgetting..........2004-07-14
"Laughable Loves" was originally published in three separate editions with a total of ten stories. Eventually, three of the stories were dropped and the order of the last two pairs of stories was switched. Kundera, by making these changes, tried to combine the stories into one unified work, like "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting."
It didn't work. The seven stories are, frankly, not connected. They give a good picture of life in Czechoslovakia at the time, but combining to form a picture of a life in a certain period at a certain place does not make one unified work. It's a collection of short stories, not a single novel.
But who cares! Erotic, comic, frightening, lighthearted, perceptive - all of these and more are easily applicable adjectives (for, for example, "Symposium," "Nobody Will Laugh," "The Hitchiking Game," "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire," and "Eduard and God" respectively). The short stories are above all interesting and not as tough-to-read (some would say pompous and pseudo-intellectual) as Kundera's later works. The two best stories are "Eduard and God" and "The Hitchiking Game." "Symposium" isn't far behind. It's fun, it's literary but neither boring nor pretentious - enjoy!
Authors:
- Stanley Kunitz
- A.I. Kuprin
- Vyacheslav Kupriyanov
- Hanif Kureishi
- Katherine Kurtz
- Ellen Kushner
- Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak
- Henry Kuttner
- Manfred Kyber
- Thomas Kyd
Authors
Authors