Pufft!
Wow!
This is it. Kundera is the writer, the only writer, to read. He is the one. He matters.
Why do even other writers exist in a world where he exists, or existed? I can understand why writers wrote before him, but how could they write after Kundera wrote? I’m even grateful that writers before Kundera existed, specifically about Franz Kafka, since they inspired Kundera to become a writer himself. But once he started writing, and wrote novels that talk about everything that a reader might want out of a book – I don’t think there was any need for more authors, books, or stories.
Had they not existed, and Kundera was the only writer, the last writer, everyone then would be reading him, and discussing him. It would then have been a Kundera-ic world (and why isn’t there a proper noun associated with Milan? I find that disrespectful and neglectful), one about which Kundera might’ve written about in one of his novels: a world where every reader reads and discusses Kundera. Heaven!
I was so inspired by Kundera during this book, that I decided to print myself all his body of work, and read everything by him that has been translated into English. But that was yesterday. Today, this fateful Monday on July 25, 2022, that I took on myself (I know the manner I’m writing this review, I sure am gonna hate reading it), to finish this novella, I went through emotions that exaggerated on the feelings of yesterday.
Rereading his, probably the most hailed book, ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ a few months ago, I remember going through such equally intense moments of euphoric feelings of intimate psychological arousal. But since I was either having lunch, or reading it in the office, I wasn't allowed the space to fully dwell, albeit externally, in the significance of the moment. Today, in my room and worry-less, I had all the leisure to continually and deeply ponder and orgasm in what amazing thing I had just read. Despite knowing, and confessing in a video I made earlier this month, that I would love this book, I couldn’t have gathered the amount of emotional upheaval and stimulus that I went through today. It was joyously exhaustive, reading this book.
While there were profound insights during the many great passages in this story, the one that particularly stopped me in my consciousness, was an abrupt, revelatory, and magnificent moment of understanding myself by reading something on these pages about a particular act and its psychological logics that takes place between teenage couples. And what entails from this rather branching story, is a tale of passionate young love, that reflects all other passionate young loves, but with the commentary from Kundera about the psychological aspects of why we behave a certain way towards our partners, that we wouldn’t dare do with our friends of family.
Torture, suffering, eroticism of the suffering, sadism, jealousy, possessiveness, and unpickable emotions like these, amalgamate into this sweet, tragic, and innocent love story – one that duly reflected my own behaviors of irrational self-hatred and a helpless inability to love, or sustain a relationship.
Kundera writes about emigration in this novella; about being an émigré, and about the ‘great return’ home. The story takes place in Paris and then Prague, but it also features Sweden and Denmark. It has no protagonist, but a number of equally presented characters: Irena, a widow, mother of two girls but living with none – Gustaf, Irena’s second husband, a Swede from Prague who lives in Denmark – Josef, a widow, who visits Prague for a few days, where lives his brother, his sister-in-law (but not a real sister), best friend N., and his childhood memories of being a snot – there's Irena’s mother; Irena’s friend, Sylvie; Irena’s friend, Milada, and also the poor girlfriend: they make up the peoples of this deeply beautiful and fascinating story.
But there’s political aspects to this book: communism; the fall of communism; the confusion of the people; wrongly-buried, patriot poets and butchers; capitalism and the English-way. Psychological aspects: nostalgia, the reality of the past, the unreality of the present, the ignorance of people, the unknown future, the Odyssey and need to return despite the suffering, the earnestness of self-destruction in love, the inequality of shared memory, the feebleness and timidity of memory, the deceit of memory, freezing of time and postponing future.
It’s baffling for me that eighty pages could hold so much in them. My case standing: why do other writers bother writing, when Kundera can do it so perfectly?
Ratings: 5/5 July 25, 2022_