Clever-clever
Jan. 4th, 2006 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel31 Dec 2005
Immortality - Milan Kundera - Faber and Faber, 1992
* *
I read very little contemporary mainstream fiction, and this book is a fine example of why. Described by a breathless lit-crit on the cover as "an unclassifiable masterpiece", it is the only book I can recall encountering recently that has no blurb explaining what it is about. There is a reason for this. It is not really about anything except itself.
The thing is, I really ought to like this book. Kundera is an unashamed intellectual and the book is pleasingly pan-European in scope (the main characters are French and live in Paris, but there is also much about Goethe and his relationship with Bettina, a young admirer, and other characters come from Switzerland and the Czech republic). This comes as a blessed relief from the parochial concerns of British and American novelists who often seem to forget that culture and history are not just the preserve of the Anglosphere. However, the European setting, and the colour and interest it could have given to the novel, is largely ignored in favour of the character's interior lives. Which would be all right if the characters themselves were engaging and interesting. Sadly they're not.
The main reason for this is that Kundera has been heavily infected with the virus of post-modernism and can't let his characters speak for themselves. The authorial voice is overwhelming, right from the start where the author sees an elderly woman waving coquettishly goodbye to her swimming instructor and thinks of Agnes, the novel's main character. This is the pattern for the whole novel - at the start of each chapter, Kundrea makes an observation which he then applies to one of the characters. The aperçus themselves are quite interesting but would be better developed as essays.
Needless to say, the usual clever-clever tropes of post-modernism are all present: the author is a character in a novel, the author discusses the novel with one of his characters, the author encounters the main character and so on. The result is that like Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, Agnes and all the other characters feel constructed and artificial. It isn't possible to feel any emotional sympathy with them or care particularly about their fates.
All this would be okay if there was some overall theme that was developed from one end of the book to the other. The title of the book suggests that there ought to be one - immortality. However, as far as I can tell this only applies to the second section, where it is somewhat tendentiously asserted that Bettina's relationship with Goethe was about laying claim to the immortality of association with a great man. If the theme is subsequently taken up again in the other sections, I failed to spot the connection.
So there you have it. If you like clever-clever deconstructed novels where a good part of the text is devoted to the inspiration for and the construction of the novel itself, you will like this one. If, like me, you don't, then shudder and turn aside.
Immortality - Milan Kundera - Faber and Faber, 1992
* *
I read very little contemporary mainstream fiction, and this book is a fine example of why. Described by a breathless lit-crit on the cover as "an unclassifiable masterpiece", it is the only book I can recall encountering recently that has no blurb explaining what it is about. There is a reason for this. It is not really about anything except itself.
The thing is, I really ought to like this book. Kundera is an unashamed intellectual and the book is pleasingly pan-European in scope (the main characters are French and live in Paris, but there is also much about Goethe and his relationship with Bettina, a young admirer, and other characters come from Switzerland and the Czech republic). This comes as a blessed relief from the parochial concerns of British and American novelists who often seem to forget that culture and history are not just the preserve of the Anglosphere. However, the European setting, and the colour and interest it could have given to the novel, is largely ignored in favour of the character's interior lives. Which would be all right if the characters themselves were engaging and interesting. Sadly they're not.
The main reason for this is that Kundera has been heavily infected with the virus of post-modernism and can't let his characters speak for themselves. The authorial voice is overwhelming, right from the start where the author sees an elderly woman waving coquettishly goodbye to her swimming instructor and thinks of Agnes, the novel's main character. This is the pattern for the whole novel - at the start of each chapter, Kundrea makes an observation which he then applies to one of the characters. The aperçus themselves are quite interesting but would be better developed as essays.
Needless to say, the usual clever-clever tropes of post-modernism are all present: the author is a character in a novel, the author discusses the novel with one of his characters, the author encounters the main character and so on. The result is that like Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, Agnes and all the other characters feel constructed and artificial. It isn't possible to feel any emotional sympathy with them or care particularly about their fates.
All this would be okay if there was some overall theme that was developed from one end of the book to the other. The title of the book suggests that there ought to be one - immortality. However, as far as I can tell this only applies to the second section, where it is somewhat tendentiously asserted that Bettina's relationship with Goethe was about laying claim to the immortality of association with a great man. If the theme is subsequently taken up again in the other sections, I failed to spot the connection.
So there you have it. If you like clever-clever deconstructed novels where a good part of the text is devoted to the inspiration for and the construction of the novel itself, you will like this one. If, like me, you don't, then shudder and turn aside.