The 941 Book CL-B: Milan Kundera’s Immortality
June 11th, 2009 by Cooper Levey-Baker in Arts, Books, Editor's Desk
Longtime readers of The 941 Book CL-B — all three of you, ha! — know that I’ve got a thing for Milan Kundera: Back in March, I wrote about the love I developed for his recent book-length essay, The Curtain. Here’s how I then characterized the man’s style, in both The Curtain and his numerous novels: “The author is always playful, forever probing and entirely allergic to claptrap, be it political, sentimental or aesthetic.”
Well, my description holds up pretty well. I recently tackled Kundera’s seventh novel, Immortality, the book that followed up his world-historical masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Immortality is Kundera’s most essayistic and digressive work of fiction — which, for him is saying a lot. Kundera has always spent large chunks of pages abandoning the plot to muse about politics, humor, art, love, sex and history, but the pattern is here taken to new heights: My guess is that Immortality is at most maybe half actual story.
Which is a problem.
I have no doubt that Kundera is a genius; he writes convincingly about the history of European literature, the mores of various ages, how sentimentality is connected to our self-image and countless other topics. Here he is on the age of celebrity:
The camera is seemingly interested only in famous people, but it is enough for a jet to crash near you, your shirt goes up in flames and in an instant you too have become famous and are included in the universal orgy, which has nothing to do with delight but merely serves solemn notice to all that they have nowhere to hide and that everyone is at the mercy of everyone else.
But Kundera stumbles this time out in his effort to create memorable characters. Agnès, the book’s protagonist, remains vague throughout, and is more of a platform for Kundera’s digressions than an actual person we can imagine and feel for. Kundera never just writes stories with a coherent, chronological beginning, middle and end, but in other works he has always balanced tradition with experimentation. Immortality simply doesn’t sustain that tension as smoothly as our hero’s other works.
Upcoming entries in The 941 Book CL-B:
- Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy
- Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- What will land on this list next? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo? Sophocles? James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name? Jorge Luis Borges’ Collected Fictions? Harold Pinter’s Betrayal? Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove? You won’t know unless you tune in, so to speak, next time.
July 10th, 2009 at 10:20 am
[...] in my ongoing 941 Book CL-B, and the reason is simple: Dude’s name is Jacques Derrida. After finishing off Milan Kundera’s Immortality, I had committed to next reading my second book by the abstruse philosopher, Margins of [...]