Like Balzac, Milan Kundera was on my reading bucket list. A number of friends talked highly of him, and some of my respected writers quoted him. So I chose to read his Immortality, a New York Times best-selling novel.
Unfortunately I was very disappointed.
Kundera doesn’t believe in the conventional form of the novel. He declares, “Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel.” So Immortality has little plot. Instead Kundera uses the book to ponder some philosophical, social and behavioural topics, while criticizing and satirizing a slew of people and issues. He is as belligerent, vain and sexist as Jordan B. Peterson. But whereas Peterson offers some research-based and reasonable material, Kundera offers his own fragmented imagination with a flat story. He is egocentric, sarcastic, and didactic throughout.
The book consists of seven parts. The first one, “The Face”, introduces four characters, Agnes, her husband Paul, their daughter Brigite and Agnes’s sister, Laura. These four weave in and out of the so-called story. Kundera tries to prove that we identify with our face. If a person were able to change their face, they wouldn’t be the same person.
The second part, called “Immortality” is about Goethe and Bettina, a young woman enamored by Goethe. Bettina wrote copious love-letters to Goethe, and Kundera argues that those published love-letters immortalized Goethe more than his own body of work.
The third part, “Fighting” is about Agnes and Laura’s fighting. Laura, a neurotic woman is dating a much younger man, and when he tries to distance himself from her, Laura gets depressed and threatens her sister and brother-in-law with suicide. Kundera posits that she does that to immortalize herself. Because if a loved one commits suicide, you never forget them.
Fourth comes “Homo Sentimentalis” in which Goethe and Ernest Hemingway chat in the other world, and debate whether their fame is due to their talent and writing or due to what biographers and others said posthumously about them. Kundera also satirizes Romain Rolland, the winner of 1915 Nobel Prize in literature, for certain opinions the latter expressed.
In the fifth section, “Chance”, Agnes makes an appearance and Kundera tries to prove that in life chance plays a big role. Agnes’s story is intertwined with Kundera self-inserting himself and chatting with Professor Richard Avenarius, a German philosopher of 19th century. They discuss writing, symbols, politics, love and chance. Kundera teaches the reader “…if we love someone, he cannot be compared. The beloved is incomparable.” On the very next page he contradicts himself by saying, “Maternal love is greater than conjugal love…”
Part six, “The Dial”, is about a new character, Rubens, who lives his life sleeping with every woman he comes in contact with, but doesn’t remember anything about any of them. Not even their names. There’s a real obsession in the whole book with men touching women’s breasts, to a degree that it turns the reader off sex altogether.
Part seven, “Celebration”, returns to Paul and Laura, again with Kundera self-inserting.
The book contains some disparate philosophical discussions among various characters. But overall Kundera sounds like a rebel without a cause, making derisive comments about everyone and everything, gesticulating just to be contrary, and to prove he’s right.
“Forget for a moment that you’re an American and exercise your brain.”
“…disciplined Swiss drivers obeyed the rules, whereas the French, shaking their heads in short horizontal motions, expressed their indignation at those who would deprive people of their right to speed and turned highway travel into an orgiastic celebration of human rights.”
“Once women start to fight they don’t stop.”
“It has been extremely lucky that up to now wars have been fought only by men. If they had been fought by women, they would have been so consistently cruel that today there wouldn’t be a single human being left on the planet.”
I persevered until the painful end to see if there was a point to the book. Alas, there was none to be found.
Alternate Perspective 