This book is a novel by Milan Kundera, and beyond that, I don't really have a clue where to start in trying to talk about it. I guess I'll start with a semi-relevant anecdote for my own amusement.
So - I've been reading this in short intermittent bursts for about a month but finished it last night (this morning?) in one 130ish-page sitting, sat in a small wind-protected nook behind the big pillars of the front of Manchester Central Library, having been stranded for the night. I'd been at a jazz-and-pizza-type venue with some friends, and was meant to be getting the last train back to Sheffield around 11.30ish, but upon arrival at the station was told it had been cancelled. The only alternative was a train leaving an hour later that instead went to Leeds and getting a connecting bus to Sheffield which would arrive at 3.30am. Too late. I decided to head back to the bar, find my friends, and crash on the wrong side of the Pennines for the night before getting the first train back the morning after. My phone then died. So upon arrival at the venue I'd not long since left, explained the situation to the dubious bouncer, got in, found my friends weren't there - I had no way of finding out where they'd gone. Fortunately, I had this book in my pocket, and so I meandered slowly through the city centre (even finding an unopened can of blackcurrant-flavoured cider on the street! score) casually people-watching, then settled outside the library to drink my floor-cider and read the remainder of this truly excellent novel. While sat there (for what was probably at least two hours) I had three interactions with passers-by: a group of Mancunian revelers (one of whom was drunkenly prancing along the library steps and slipped over right in front of me, at which I couldn't help but laugh - I don't think they knew I was even there until they heard me laughing at his fall, at which the slipper told me to "do one" and his mate said "have a good night dude"); a Spanish guy who worked in a kitchen on his way home from work (he stopped to ask if I had any rolling tobacco, which I didn't, at which he said "okay never mind", sat down next to me and rolled and smoked a pure-weed joint, and we had a conversation about working in kitchens and which cities in Northern England are good for finding jobs and so on); and a guy who sounded like a Londoner (who spotted a wine bottle on the floor near me and thought it was mine and approached to ask if I was finished with it and if not could he have some, at which I explained it was probably empty, being litter that had been there before my arrival, an explanation he still felt compelled to test by picking it up and shaking it, then when realising it was indeed just an empty bottle, threw it at one of the library pillars - terrifying both myself and his friend who assumed it would burst dangerously into shards of broken glass, but fortuitously it bounced at a harmless angle off the stone cylinder and landed spinning whimsically on the pavement nearby). Bizarre interactions with strangers aside, it was actually a very easy place to sit and read - and once I finished the book I re-pocketed it and headed for the station, where I tried (and failed) to get a few hours' sleep before my train.
What does this anecdote have to do with this novel?
I'll tell you.
Firstly, and completely superficially, this novel was the book that I spent the bulk of this anecdote's timespan reading.
Secondly, amusement and memory are key themes of Kundera's novel, though I'll admit that too is something of a tenuous link.
Okay, so I should probably talk a bit about the book itself. But I'm reluctant to. There is simply so much content and meaning and thematic fields I could start unpacking from it only to realise I could never do justice to even a rough summary of what this book is about. The best I could probably do is to simply transcribe the blurb:
"This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance."
What this interior is, I think, is an immensely complex one to disentangle - it's about why we laugh, why we forget, all the different reasons why we may do either and what all that says about tragedy and life and darkness and joy and being comfortable with our own lives at any given moment. This is explored through political commentary (Kundera wrote this in artistic exile from his Czech homeland which was at the time still under Soviet rule) about freedoms and art, razor-sharp social satire about sexuality and shame in patriarchal societies, and portraits of characters that achieve astonishing psychological depth in the short time we spend with them to delve into many of the emotional mechanisms that make us tick, cry, laugh, forget, run away, dominate, submit, pretend to laugh, try to force ourselves to forget, and many other things.
I don't know.
This novel is one of those that starts off slow - but stick with it: as it builds it provokes so much thought, like an exponentially-spiralling crescendo of artistic depth of meaning that can never reach its zenith because the nature of the zenith is, in its purest form, somewhat unknowable, but we feel we are riding the successive seven sections of this superbly-crafted book upward upward upward toward insights and truths that, in truth, I don't think are even actually there - but Kundera executes this spiral in such a way that the reader is able to make dozens of tiny interconnected realisations of their own as they read along. Laughter and forgetting may well just be about absurdity, meaninglessness. And if so, then that lends a tremendous amount of meaning to the blank slates we ourselves bring as observers of them as themes.
I wouldn't recommend this novel to everyone - while it's funny in places and saturated with beautiful metaphor and imagery, it's heavy, it's kind of depressing, character and plot aren't as important to the structure of the book as theme, and I think many people simply wouldn't enjoy it at all because they're not used to doing any of the legwork that excellent literary novelists like Milan Kundera expect of readers who fully engage with their works. But don't be put off. This is the kind of novel you can finish in one sitting alone on a wintry night outside a library in Manchester - a riotous delicate waltzing profundity of a book.
No comments:
Post a Comment