Reading: "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundera
By no means am I an expert on Milan Kundera; I experienced his writing for the first time only one year ago, when I picked up "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" on a whim. It came on the coattails of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," a transition that made no literal sense, but plenty of emotional sense. The utterly romantic and whimsical tale of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza left me teary-eyed and hopeful. Garcia Marquez is that good at making the impossible seem just the opposite. Kundera, on the other hand, puts it all on the line. Affairs aren't so dreamy in his world, they are cruel and heartwrenching. People don't make love, they fuck. Death isn't glossed over by destiny or fate, it's matter of fact, like life.Funny then, that I list both novels among my favorites. I have trouble explaining it, even now. What I can say is that Garcia Marquez writes of worlds that I dream of inhabiting, where ill-fated lovers pen letters to one another in hard-to-find invisible inks and eat tropical flowers in hopes of satiating their desires. Kundera is less idealistic, but no less fantastic. I can talk of Tomas and Tereza and Sabina and Franz in the same way I talk about Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. But I do not dream of living in their world; I have a sneaking suspicion that I already do.
I approached Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" with the same recognition, and the results have been just as satisfying.
I imagine if I read enough of him, I'll come to look at Kundera as I do Woody Allen. Aren't all of Allen's women essentially the same? Isn't it that little bit of Annie Hall that makes me love them? Whether "comedy" or "drama", isn't it all jazz and neurosis? And isn't it Kundera's insistent exploration of literature/love/politics/religion/sex/writing that make "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" as profound as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"?
Don't we really only torture ourselves with a handful of subjects?
I read something recently in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" that has not left me, and I doubt that it will for some time (truly, it seems to be at the heart of my existential crisis). While telling us about a woman who wants to write a novel, Kundera digresses into a non-fictional account from his own life (something he does often, thus blurring the line between fiction and reality):
"Recently I took a taxi from one end of Paris to the other and got a garrulous driver. He couldn't sleep at night. He had a bad case of insomnia. It all began during the war. He was a sailor. His ship sank. He swam three days and three nights. Finally he was saved. For several months he had wavered between life and death, and though he eventually recovered, he had lost the ability to sleep.
'I live a third more life than you,' he said, smiling.
'And what do you do with the extra third?' I asked.
'I write,' he answered.
I asked him what he wrote.
His life story. The story of a man who swam three days at sea, held his own against death, lost the ability to sleep, but preserved the strength to live.
'Is it for your children? A family chronicle?'
'My kids don't give a damn.' He laughed bitterly. "No, I'm making a book out of it. I think it could do a lot of people a lot of good.'
My talk with the taxi driver gave me sudden insight into the nature of a writer's concerns. The reason we write books is that our kids don't give damn. We turn to the anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her."
Incidentally, I'm going to see the new Woody Allen film tonight. More on this and that soon.
posted by JJN @ 17:43
