Kundera

Ignorance by Milan Kundera – #NovNov Day 21

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For those keeping track, I didn’t blog yesterday but I DID finish a book. I didn’t write about it because it’s a future British Library Women Writers title and I’m not sure I’m meant to mention it here yet.

ANYWAY onto Day 21, and what I think is my seventh Kundera novel(la) – Ignorance, published in French in 2002 and translated by Linda Asher. I love Kundera’s writing and unique approach to the novel, especially when I’m in the right frame of mind to embrace his zig-zaggy, philosophical, quirky style.

The book opens with Irena speaking to her friend Sylvie. Irena’s long-term relationship with Gustaf (albeit as his mistress) has just ended, and she is being quizzed on why she is staying France. Sylvie moved from Prague years earlier, and now considers Paris her home – wiping out her Czech past, in many ways. This is the jumping off point for Kundera to think about the concept of nostalgia – how it is phrased in different languages, how we both remember and forget our pasts, what the idea of returning does to a person. Sylvie has a recurring dream that she is living again in Prague – but the dream is haunting, claustrophobic, and unwelcome.

These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite, experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. No, this was not daydreaming, lengthy and conscious, willed; it was something else entirely: visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly. She would be talking to her boss and all at once, like a flash of lightning, she’d see a path through a field. She would be jostled on the Metro and suddenly, a narrow lane in some leafy Prague neighborhood would rise
up before her for a split second. All day long these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia.

The same moviemaker of the subconscious who, by day, was sending her bits of the home landscape as images of happiness, by night would set up terrifying returns to that same land. The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.

Ultimately, Sylvie does make a visit back to Prague. Along the way, the narrative passes like a baton among different people in the book – to Gustaf (which takes us to the past of their relationship), and particularly to Josef. Josef is a man from Sylvie’s past, whom she bumps into in Prague airport. Like her, he has been living abroad – in Denmark. He hasn’t been back for more than a decade, and both of them are being reintroduced to families, friends and places that seem both unchanged and, simultaneously, to have weathered an enormous amount of change. More or less everything I know about the Czech Republic’s history (under its various names) comes from other Kundera novels I’ve read – and it is woven in here too, with all the turmoil the country faced over the 20th century. And particularly the impact of Communism on its émigrés Sylvie and Josef.

Like most of Kundera’s novels, the plot is a simple thread through the centre of the book – but what makes the book so wonderful are the tangents, the reflections, the aleatory connections between fictional characters and moments in time. The two main elements that Kundera returns to are The Odyssey and the German composer Arnold Schoenberg. Sure, why not! My first Kundera novel was Immortality, which includes Goethe, Hemingway, Marx, Napoleon, Beethoven etc, so I was well prepared. Not as characters, you understand, but as sidenotes by the narrator – telling a story that only meets tangentially with the main plot, but those meetings illuminate the story and make it so much more.

Here, for instance, is a moment about The Odyssey that – without Kundera drawing the comparison overtly – tells us much more about Sylvie:

During the twenty years of Odysseus’ absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.

We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigres gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena or Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory’s activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.

My Novellas in November project is going so well. I keep writing very positive reviews, and they are genuinely effusive – so far, it has brought many brilliant books off my shelves. This is right up there with the best Kundera books I’ve read, and that makes it one of the best books I’ve read this year.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

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I love Milan Kundera, and I haven’t read one of his books for a while – so it was nice to revisit his writing on my recent holiday. I’ve still not read his most famous novel (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), but have read Immortality, Identity, The Joke, and The Festival of Insignificance – which is both the order I read them in and how much I liked them. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is one of the best Kundera novels I’ve read – in a translation by Aaron Asher. And translations really matter with Kundera – he is notoriously choosy, but approved of this one. Which, interestingly enough, was translated from the French translations of the original Czech. An earlier English translation – in 1980, directly from the Czech – obviously didn’t quite cut it.

That sort of patchwork is quite appropriate for a book like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which I hesitate to call a novel or a collection of short stories – it is something in between. It is, indeed, a book of laughter and forgetting – themes which haunt the book like characters, offering the only unity available. And why (Kundera seems to ask) should not themes be a book’s unifying thread, rather than characters, time, and place?

Structurally, the book is divided into seven sections. To emphasis the iteration of thoughts and cross-connections, two are called ‘Lost Letters’ and two are called ‘The Angels’. It’s probably best (if you want a full summary) to head over to the Wikipedia page, rather than me paraphrasing what they say. But each section looks at a slice of life in various Czech people’s lives – from a man travelling and being followed by suspicious government agents, while thinking of his past love, to a fanciful scene in which schoolgirls fly away with angels. Most are connected with sex or politics, or both – which are often the two keynotes of Kundera’s created worlds.

But sections are not simple, discrete tales. Within each, Kundera shifts from image to image, thought to thought – in the first, for instance, he includes a description of a 1948 photograph of Vladimir Clementis and Klement Gottwald, from which Clementis was erased when he was no longer acceptable to the politicians’ propaganda. This is one of the senses of forgetting in the book. He also includes himself – or, at least, an author called Milan Kundera – and each section incorporates tangents, anecdotes, fables, parables. There is a section held together by the concept of litost – a Czech word without direct translation, which Kundera describes as ‘a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery’. The book is all a patchwork that requires astonishing deftness, and Kundera is astonishingly deft.

He is very good on the significance of gesture, or of stereotyped movements and how they can be interpreted – it is, after all, the wave of an arm that kicks off the stream of connected images at the beginning of Immortality. Here he is on one of the varieties of laughter in the book:

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of bad films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running, and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theatres: “We’re happy, we’re glad to be in the world, we’re in agreement with being!” It’s a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter ‘beyond joking’.

All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on their billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.

Kundera has a level of control, and imagination, that makes these patchworks succeed. Indeed, his novels that try to follow a traditional narrative structure are the least successful, to my mind. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is such a triumph because he seems to throw out all the rules, and start from scratch with what a book can be. The characters and their paths, as they appear, are still vivid and vital – and there is a pain and hope throughout that can only come one whose homeland has been political hell. And there is, indeed, much humour – sometimes cynical, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes almost naively joyful.

It’s a brilliant mixture that I (at least) have to be in the right mood for, or it doesn’t click. Luckily I was in exactly the right mood when I picked up The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – and I very much recommend you give him a try.

The Joke – Milan Kundera

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Last month I (coincidentally) read a spate of successful authors’ first books – Agatha Christie’s, Katherine Mansfield’s, A.A. Milne’s – which is always an interesting exercise, and the fourth ‘first book’ I read was The Joke (1967) by Milan Kundera, given to me by my friend Lucy.  It could have worked for Reading Presently next year, but it also covered a tricky 1960s gap in A Century of Books.  Usually, with translated books, I am keen to mention the translator – but a fascinating Author’s Note at the end of The Joke explains that this fifth translation of the novel (from Czech) is really a combination of translations by David Hamblyn, Oliver Stallybrass, Michael Heim, and Kundera himself.  In case you still think Kundera might be a bit of a slacker, he is also responsible for the cover art.

The Joke is broadly about the way in which someone can (or cannot) be an individual within the Communist regime of 1950s Czechoslovakia, and the impact one decision can make on the rest of a person’s life.  Although possibly not the only ‘joke’ in the novel (the Wikipedia entry manfully identifies three), the pivotal moment of the novel comes early on.  Ludvik is a university professor and member of the Communist party – his somewhat humourless female friend is away on a training course, and they are corresponding…

From the training course (it took place at one of the castles of central Bohemia) she sent me a letter that was pure Marketa: full of earnest enthusiasm for everything around her; she liked everything: the early-morning calisthenics, the talks, the discussions, even the songs they sang; she praised the “healthy atmosphere” that reigned there; and diligently she added a few words to the effect that the revolution in the West would not be long in coming.
 
As far as that goes, I quite agreed with what she said; I too believed in the imminence of a revolution in Western Europe; there was only one thing I could not accept: that she should be so happy when I was missing her so much. So I bought a postcard and (to hurt, shock, and confuse her) wrote: Optimism is the opium of the people!  A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity!  Long live Trotsky!  Ludvik.
It turns out the Communist party don’t appreciate a giggle, and Ludvik is ousted from his job, exiled from the party, and sent off to do two years at a military camp.  Whilst there he meets, and falls in love with, a mysterious woman named Lucie.  At the end of the novel, various different strands (including a few that I haven’t addressed – like Kostka whose Christian faith is taking him away from Communism) coalesce and overlap at an old-fashioned parade, and the multiple viewpoints Kundera has used for different sections all come together and collide, taking short chapters each without indicating whose voice is speaking.

Although Kundera rather overloads The Joke with different perspectives and competing storylines, it is only really Ludvik’s story which stands out; the rest feels like it is stuck on to the sides of his engaging point of view and intriguing experiences.  His reflections upon political doctrine, personal affections, and the curious unpredictability of cause-and-effect are all compelling – let’s face it, any novel which can get me even mildly interested in politics has achieved more than the public press has in the past 27 years.

But, although you can see the seeds of his later experimentalism, The Joke is a much more straightforward novel than the one which made me a fan, Immortality.  That is hardly surprising for a first novel, and this has that curious combination of putting-too-much-in with a lack of novelistic ambition.  If I hadn’t read a couple of his later novels, I wouldn’t have noticed the deficit – this is still a very good novel, and probably more to the taste of a lot of people than his postmodern work – but I have, so I do.  I was intrigued by one or two hints of his future work, including this (from a man trying to spot his disguised son in the parade):

My son.  The person nearest to me.  I stand in front of him, and I don’t even know whether it is he or not.  What, then, do I know if I don’t know even that?  Of what am I sure in this world if I don’t have even that certainty?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the catalyst for Identity. I think if I’d read The Joke first, I’d have been impressed but probably not actively sought out more Kundera.  As it is, I really appreciated being able to see where he started as a novelist – and how he progressed from there.

Are there any authors whose first novels, read after later ones, have really surprised you?

Identity

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When I reviewed (and reviewed enthusiastically) Immortality by Milan Kundera earlier in the year, I suggested that I wouldn’t read another for a while. Much as I admired and liked the novel (if a novel it can be called), I was left a little exhausted, and fancied a five year break before I returned to Kundera…

…but then I discovered that he wrote short books too! And you know how I love a short book. Identity has enormous font and wide margins too… But, before you think me a complete imbecile, this is the jacket blurb which persuaded me:
Sometimes – perhaps only for an instant – we fail to recognise a companion. When this happens to lovers, the effect is acute: for a moment the identity of the loved one ceases to exist, and we come to doubt our own.Doesn’t that sound an intriguing starting point for a novel?

Identity isn’t as postmodern as Immortality (those titles are so similar, I’m bound to get them mixed up at some point in this blog post… hopefully we’re on the same page so far). While Immortality really seemed to reinvent the novel structure, Kundera sticks more closely to a conventional form with Identity, despite being published eight years later (1998, compared to Immortality’s 1990). There is the odd dabble in unusual images and abstract thought (cue quotation…)

Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, friends.
…but, in amongst Kundera’s very individual – and to my mind, very good – writing style, there is a surprisingly traditional romance. But very nuanced, and very subtle.

He reflected that she was his sole emotional link to the world. People talk to him about prisoners, about the persecuted, about the hungry? He knows the only was he feels personally, painfully touched by their misfortune: he imagines Chantal in their place. People tell him about women raped in some civil war? He sees Chantal there, raped. She and she alone releases him from his apathy. Only through her can he feel compassion.
I think that’s quite a brilliant way to describe the closeness of a relationship, romantic or otherwise. Chantal and Jean-Marc are the couple in question – and it is Chantal whom Jean-Marc fails to recognise (or, rather, he thinks somebody else is her, until he gets closer to them). She, in turn, thinks that men have stopped finding her attractive – which shakes the identity she has formed for herself. And so it is with a mixture of pleasure and displeasure that she receives a letter saying that someone is watching her. These letters grow more complimentary, and instead of throwing them away, she keeps the letters in her underwear drawer – and starts trying to work out who is sending them.

Such is the plot – but Kundera weaves far more around this simple premise. All sorts of interesting musings about a myriad of topics, and (like Immortality) exceptional insight into the interaction of people, with all the subtlety and complexity of real emotions. How he does it is beyond me…

And then the narrative does get a bit more postmodern, dabbling between fantasy and reality without telling you quite where the line is. It feels just a little bit thrown in, and I’d have liked it to be a bit more developed, but it’s also an interesting touch… and obviously done because Kundera can’t help himself, rather than for any big effect.

Second Kundera, and I’m still very impressed – I still admire him more than I love him (and isn’t there sometimes a big difference!) but that isn’t to say reading him is a struggle, because it isn’t. Just – as, indeed, I finished my last Kundera review – not one to curl up with in front of the fire. And no, that delightfully bizarre cover never makes sense.

Immortality

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A little while ago I mentioned that I was reading Immortality by Milan Kundera for my book group. I can’t remember what stage we were at then, whether the mutiny had taken place… well, tomorrow we’re meeting to discuss Immortality and/or An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, since people were either unable or unwilling to read one or other of these… so, a compromise, we’ve done both and can read either! If you’re not confused by now, then you’re doing better than me. ANYWAY, I have read Immortality – finished this morning – and I hardly know how to respond. It is completely different from anything else I have ever read. That’s a bit of a cliche, I daresay, but for this book it’s true – because Kundera has more or less reinvented the novel. (This is the only Kundera book I’ve read – he might have done this before Immortality, maybe I’ll wait for Claire to pop by, because I know she’s a big Kundera fan.)

It’s very postmodern, that’s the first thing to say. In that, we get bits of narrative from Kundera’s perspective – he mentions his own previous novels, he tells us what he’s going to write in later chapters. The novel (I’m going to use the word, even though it’s not really a novel… or is it?) opens with him seeing a woman making a gesture – he then names her Agnes and invents a story around her, around that gesture. And then weaves it into a literary, historical intertextuality that darts all over the place, including Rubens, Goethe, Hemingway, Beethoven… So many lives intersect and reflect on each other – the real, the fictional, the metafictional. And yet it isn’t formless or baggy – there is a definite feeling of wholeness, a structure – just a very unorthodox one. I haven’t read any reviews of Immortality, but I expect all of them mention this excerpt at some point, from the point of view of Milan Kundera-within-the-novel (who may or may not be the same as Milan Kundera the author, let’s face it): I regret that almost all novels ever written are much too obedient to the rules of unity of action. What I mean to say is that at their core is one single chain of causality related acts and events. These novels are like a narrow street along which someone drives his characters with a whip. Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded it is concentrated. The novel is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw. I don’t blame you if you’re rolling your eyes, and reaching out for the nearest Agatha Christie novel – but please don’t be put off straight away. I don’t know why postmodern stuff is so often annoying (it’s less the ‘shock of the new’ as the irksome nature of those who want to cause that shock) but, with Kundera, it isn’t annoying at all. He completely disrupts the novel form, and throws the reading experience into a whole new category, but it isn’t self-indulgent. His writing is so good, he is so very, very perceptive, that it works. It’s as I wrote after the first few pages – he notices things about human behaviour, or perceptions of the self, and finds beautiful or unusual images to demonstrate this. Nothing is overwritten, and nothing is carelessly written. There’s nothing worse than an author thinking they’re being profound, when they are actually writing truisms – I believe Kundera doesn’t fall into this trap. (The only trap he does fall into is being rather too obsessed with sex). But, of course, I haven’t read any philosophers, so…

Now I look at it, the excerpt I wanted to quote isn’t the most original thought in the book – that’s because the most original ones are connected to the tiny things individuals do, his perceptions being mostly filmic – like visual leitmotifs running through the book, through different characters and periods. But here’s a bit, to give you a small idea: I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that’s alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.
This isn’t my normal reading territory at all, and early feedback from my book group suggests some definite disdain for Kundera – but I am fascinated, admiring, and rather captivated… at the same time, it will be a while before I read another book by this author. I’m rather bowled over, and need to keep him to dip into now and then. But Immortality is an amazing achievement – just not one to curl up with in front of the fire.