By: Milan Kundera
Genre: Literary/Regional Fiction
Size: seven chapters (as always with Kundera)
How to write a review? It’s a question that teases almost every young reader who wants to write about the book they have just finished reading. This question has also confused me, still does after all these years, and I am yet to have a ready and convincing answer. For me, my reviews have been an excuse to write about myself and my life. So, if you read any of my review, you’d come to know more about me and my perspective about different topics, than you’d learn what the book that I read was about. Reviews from the book critics, like those posted by The Guardian or The New York Times, however, are much more professional and sophisticated. I still feel rather let down by my own reviews when I compare mine with theirs. Nevertheless, to my defense, my reviews do land on its requirements: they successfully rekindle the atmosphere of the book I had written about, as well as the mood with which I read it. As John Greene says “Reviews are also memoirs.” And I think that’s where the answer to this testing question lies: in order to know how to write a review, you should know why are you writing it.
The first reviews I wrote (a habit of mine right after I finish a book) were based on the simple pattern laid out by a booktuber on YouTube. I can’t recall the video, but her simple advice was such: talk briefly about the book, then the author; write what you liked about it next, and afterwards what you didn’t like about it; then conclude your review by summing your overall thoughts about the book, and preferably quote a line or a paragraph that touched you, and state your own praise for it. All of the above should be written within one thousand words, the sweet spot for any review, and should, to some successful degree, explain the book and your views about it to the readers. Being an early and giddy reader, I used to decorate the word files of my reviews by having the book cover as watermark and playing with different fonts for different sections. However, as I progressed in my reading journey and I became more aware of my taste and the books I wanted to read, so my take on book reviews changed accordingly. As an active practice, I now limit my reviews to one A4-size page only, with no paragraph breaks. I tweak the margins in accordance to how many words I’ve written, but I remain stubborn that it shouldn’t leak to the next page. I see my reviews as succinct in their current form; not particularly better or sophisticated, but the 'ne-page limit' forces me to be on point and propel me to write rather poetic sentences at times.
As I mentioned earlier, one should write a review based on the audience (the ‘why’ of writing review basically). The audience for my reviews has always been – me. So no wonder my reviews read incomplete and messy compared to review published my NYTimes. And having a clear perspective of who I am writing for, allows me the freedom and creativity to write a review that I myself would like to read a few years from now. I would be lying, however, if I say that I don’t envy professional book reviews or feel a sense of failure thinking that I can’t write one. But then again, whenever I arrive upon a review, I lose all sense of myself and become so engrossed in the writing process that I don’t stop to think about what I should write about. I just let myself write. And perhaps because of this tendency, I don’t really edit my reviews either, except for spelling and obvious grammar mistakes. Ultimately, my advice upon writing a book review, to other readers and to myself, is to know who you are writing for and then experimenting with a format you feel comfortable with. Then, just write your heart out.
I am wondering what should I write about this book. Should I start with Kundera himself? But haven’t I exhausted myself by praising him so frequently that I find no new words or complements to describe him anymore. Or should I start with the plot of the novel, which is quite an interesting one? Or should I talk about the characters, all of whom become ‘the protagonist’ at some point in the novel? Or should I spend all my words, trying to pin down the emotions this novel took me through – from buoyancy to humility to disgust to love to tears to sadness to pain to heartbreak – to peace? Why not all – and why not in that exact same order. This book deserves the many words I’m about to write about it.
I had my famous encounter story with Kundera: I found his books on a shelf in a bookstore at Islamabad, where I had recently gone to start my graduate studies. I was there to purchase a few books with my membership card, which meant 50% off. However, after I was done selecting the books to purchase, my eyes landed upon ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ and ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ and along with their attractive titles, their cover emitted an impactful allure – simple, white, chalky fonts… and when I turned these books around, one by one, the praise on the backside was the last push. The last push, that is, to steal them. So, being a good animal, as our great friend Lawrence suggests, I stayed true to my instincts, and with nervous yet excited stealth, I grabbed both of these books and placed them under my pajamas – one at waist, the other above my ankle – and went to the counter to pay for the books I had selected otherwise to purchase. And no, there weren’t any CCTV cameras. After I was out and on my bike, riding toward my hostel, I was a happy boy. I can still feel that blushing smile on my face. And people say, there is no fate! What losers!
Milan Kundera is one of those few essential writers that every reader should dare to read at least once. I can understand if someone refuses to read Proust because that would take him/her their whole life; or if someone refuses to read Russian literature and the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, because they seem daunting, I can understand that too. Yet the good news is that I’ve read both Proust and Russian literature and I am happy to report that you’d find the influence and the essence of both these pieces of literature at one place – in the Czech writer, Kundera. So, trust me blindly – as one should trust – and just read Kundera. Start with Identity, or Ignorance, or how better, start with The Joke.
Set in 1960s Czech Republic (I know it sounds foreign but this country is in eastern Europe) after the invasion of Soviet Union, Milan Kundera’s debut novel ‘The Joke’ has the obvious topic of communism at its center. As a writer writing his first book, of course one would choose the grandest and most present topic to be the book’s theme, however the execution of such topics require equal, if not more, robustness and relatability. Kundera, my sweetest author, does this excellently. Nowhere have I read felt and lived the communist experience as insightfully as I did in this novel. Not even in the Communist Manifesto by Marx, which is a few provocative sentences combined to be presented in a religious-scripture like document. In ‘The Joke’, communism is how people live and submit their lives to it. It’s the current and prevailing ‘mood’ of the times; either you are a communist or you are a traitor. But as with any good novelist, so with Kundera, he almost ignores communism as the story progresses, as if knowing that he has done early on what people were expecting of him: he has written about communism, and he has written a joke about it as well, which sets in motion the whole story. The story then focuses on the psychology of love (of course! Always so with Kundera); the nostalgia and peace of the old times and folk cultures of past; the modernity and its relentless disregard for the these traditions; and most interestingly, it devotes a whole character to talk about communism with God, about love, about Jesus, about fate, about submission. Kundera – you’ve surprised me again.
The first character we are introduced to is Ludvik: an intellectual, high minded person, excommunicated from the communist party, returning to his home town Prague and immediately finding it disgusting and lifeless. ‘The Joke’ is actually written by him to his lover in a casual yet intended moment of humor and anger, where he mocks the party for its dishonesty and prudence. Later when the joke surfaces, his lover handing it over to the party leaders, he is thrown out of the university, his job, his party membership – basically he is thrown out of his life. Then we meet the mysterious, the lovely, the innocent Lucie: a girl in her late teens, sweet, shy, and scarred. An instrument of fate, really, first for Ludvik and then for my beloved character, Kotska. Now Kotska is one of those pure souls every writer tries to invent at some point in their writing career; Dostoyevsky is prone to do it specially, like Alyosha in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ and Prince Mushkin in ‘The Idiot’ (which I am yet to read). Kundera has his ‘angle’ right in his debut novel and Kotska is his name: an early friend of Ludvik, he is a very pious man and thereby the alter-ego of Ludvik. He says how he’s close to Ludvik on the outside, even obliged to him for his great deeds to help him find better jobs (even though he’s elder), yet on the inside he feels a great distance between them and that has to do with Kotska believing in God and Ludvik waiting for Kotska to grow out of his child-like delusion. Then we have Jaroslov: a man of tradition, of culture, that is to say a man of old times. He is eager to see his son Vladmir to become the next king in their festival of ‘The Ride of the Kings’. Jaroslov loves music, plays it brilliantly, and presents a most poignant case of how Czech music is so ancient that it is basically human kind’s first music. His eagerness to see his son become a king he was in his childhood, however, blinds him to the changing times and how there’s ‘no country for old men’ anymore. There’s also Helena, Pavel Zameneck’s wife, a friend of Ludvik he most hates, and thus he takes Helena has a project of revenge to get his due punishment of Pavel. Helena, like Lucie, acts as an instrument for the fates of these men – I guess women are such way.
Ultimately, being as obscure and telling as I could be in my review, I can sum up my thoughts and feelings about this novel in one simple sentence: I loved this book. From the plot, to characters, to the trajectory of the story, and finally to Kundera’s prose and his meticulous way to reaching a topic with such rich and nuanced thoughts. He is a sad writer, and because of it, a sweet, sweet one as well. He has astonished and baffled me like no other writer, and with this book he revealed to me his tragic experience that must’ve been the foundations of such beautifully crafted novels. As the writer of ‘Little Women’ Louisa May Alcott wrote “I have had a lot of troubles, so I write jolly tales”. Such is the predicament of life: you have to suffer in order to become good at it, to get on top of it.
I give The Joke five stars.
January 31, 2025.