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3.89 AVERAGE
3.89 AVERAGE
dark
reflective
slow-paced
Mon livre préféré de Kundera. Son premier, dans lequel il y a déjà tout l'esprit de Kundera, une ambiance particulière qui frise souvent l'absurde, et il me semble un surplus d'humanité. Les personnages me semblent plus vrais que dans ses romans ultérieurs. Kundera dit de ce livre qu'il s'agit d'une simple histoire d'amour. Le récit est en tout cas particulièrement poignant et est resté marqué dans ma mémoire.
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
what’s your personal mythology and what will you do when it crumbles?
emotional
informative
reflective
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
No
Ah! Kundera could write his shopping list in a napkin and I'd still feel amazed and overwhelmed at how beautiful his writing is and probably have it framed and put it on the wall. He touches all the soft spots in my brain, and I can't help but ask for more.
The Joke is about those tiny pieces of things that shape what you are as a person now. Everything that ever happened to you and how that affects your overall being and how sometimes you carry those pieces inside you, even after all these years, because you can't let go, or perhaps you're too afraid to let go, because they shaped you in such a way that, without it, you're not much of a person. Even if those tiny bits happened to be a mere joke.
This book was Kundera's first novel and you can feel the tiny bits of relationships being treated in such a way that it almost looks like this was a beta version of what later became The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but don't mind me, I read that one first so I'm biased.
The Joke is about those tiny pieces of things that shape what you are as a person now. Everything that ever happened to you and how that affects your overall being and how sometimes you carry those pieces inside you, even after all these years, because you can't let go, or perhaps you're too afraid to let go, because they shaped you in such a way that, without it, you're not much of a person. Even if those tiny bits happened to be a mere joke.
"(...) and I wondered, even if it were possible, even if I could erase these few wasted days from my life, what good would it do when the whole story of my life was conceived by error: the accident, the absurdity of the bad joke on the postcard? And to my horror I realized that things conceived by error were every bit as real as things conceived by reason and necessity."
This book was Kundera's first novel and you can feel the tiny bits of relationships being treated in such a way that it almost looks like this was a beta version of what later became The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but don't mind me, I read that one first so I'm biased.
4.6
“Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke
“Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke
De grap, de debuutroman van Milan Kundera uit 1967, is subliem. Op een wat langere passage over Moravische volksmuziek na - iemand met meer muzikaliteit smult hier misschien wel van - heb ik dit boek verslonden.
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes