![]() ![]() And this seeing and meaning is embedded in its context. For Kundera, what fiction does so well is say to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.”įor Kundera, the novel is a technological object that allows new ways of seeing, and of making meaning. He starts with Miguel de Cervantes and moves through the lists of generative fiction writers to fellow Czechs Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek – who, he claims, show that a strength of fiction is that it tolerates uncertainty, in a way politics and religion cannot. In The Art of the Novel (1986), he outlines a history of how novelists unpacked various dimensions of existence. Here, his deep understanding of the background to what we now know as the novel, or the long traditions and changes that characterise artistic practice, genuinely illuminate the field. Where I uncomplicatedly follow Kundera’s lead is not in his novels, but in his essays. I vacillate between feeling offence at what feels like misogyny, and reading it as a searing critique of misogyny. For a 21st-century woman, too, his tone and style in the writing of sex scenes – and the representation of women more generally – can present as outdated masculinity. This can be an unsettling style: a disruption, rather than a simple pleasure or an aesthetic experience. The focus of Kundera’s novels is their wrestle with questions of knowledge, the complexity of being and a constant uncertainty. And the sorts of issues that appear so often in fiction – a quest for the self, the telling of a tale, the achievement of resolution – are set aside. The logic of beginning, middle and end is barely acknowledged. ![]() This makes for a restless story, one that shifts to and fro across locations, times and contexts. In 1975, he fled his home for exile in France, and continued writing works of fiction that mostly followed the signature structure he first developed in The Joke: multi-part, multi-voiced novels, where the narrator interpolates critique, commentary and philosophical statements in the text. His dream of paradise was not realised, of course. Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise – the age old drama of a world where everybody would live in harmony. Perhaps this capacity to hold contradictory thoughts can be explained by something he said to Philip Roth: Weight and lightness, laughter and forgetting, repetition and change, politics and sex: his first four novels incorporate such dualities. We can exchange the weight of eternal recurrence for the lightness of being alive, here and now. But he also develops an erotic narrative that seems to suggest lighthearted sex can allow us to live fully in the moment. In Unbearable Lightness, for example, the narrator discusses Nietszche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence – the possibility we live the same life over and over. But in each novel, Kundera offers some humour – often bitter, but capable of leavening the otherwise bleak, and densely reported, content. In what is perhaps his best-known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) – adapted in 1988 as a movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche – he continues his interrogation of totalitarian politics, exploring the Prague Spring and the brutality of Soviet control of Czechoslavakia. His first collection of (not very good) poetry, Man, A Wide Garden (1953) – published when he was only 24 – was decidedly Soviet in tone and content.īut when he wrote his first novel, The Joke in 1967, then wrote Life is Elsewhere in 1969 (published in 1973), both of them shot through with political satire, and he was expelled from the Communist Party and subsequently fled into exile. Kundera knew about oppression and inhumanity. Interrogating totalitarianism, with humour I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any. Says the narrator of this section, who necessarily cannot be part of that group: They laugh the laughter of angels while below them, the executioners are killing political prisoners. In one section of the novel, a group of the Communist faithful, dancing together in a circle, rise into the air and soar over the city. This, Kundera’s third novel, affirmed my own anxiety of the absence of a stable truth, and of my incapacity to resist the longing to belong, even to the most damaged society. ![]() Someone visiting the property pressed on me a copy of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and I was immediately and utterly captivated.
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