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A review by deardostoevsky
The Joke by Milan Kundera
5.0
"If the mountains were paper and the oceans ink
If the stars were scribes and all the world could think,
Not all their words upon words, in the event,
Could come to the end of my love's testament.
sang Jaroslav with the violin still at his chest and I felt happy inside these songs... where love is still love and pain is pain... and it seemed to me that inside these songs I was at home."
The Joke is Kundera's first novel and it stands for the futile existence of human lives in a world shadowed by false propagandas and ideologies. It deals with so many small trivialities of human lives where some trivialities can endanger entire lives while others simply let you realise that they were not trivialities but important milestones that needed more attention.
As the year draws to an end, there are many mistakes I can recall which shadowed through and toned the mood for the rest of the year, these self-inflicted 'jokes' however remained guileless and only bothered my personal and emotional space. So when I picked up Kundera's debut novel, absolutely unaware about its plot, I could not help but feel a serendipitous synchronicity with it. Here, however, the joke has larger consequences in a world led by a dystopian tour de force of communist takeover, where mistakes are intolerable and have dire consequences. The fact that the outer forces shape your inner demons beautifully and intricately spiralled off in the novel which further intensified its depth.
The human relationships which shape throughout are woven with a soulful texture, dealing with all possible human emotions in a consequential world, with a sublime ending that concludes our nothingness in the most meaningful way one could ever achieve.
If the stars were scribes and all the world could think,
Not all their words upon words, in the event,
Could come to the end of my love's testament.
sang Jaroslav with the violin still at his chest and I felt happy inside these songs... where love is still love and pain is pain... and it seemed to me that inside these songs I was at home."
The Joke is Kundera's first novel and it stands for the futile existence of human lives in a world shadowed by false propagandas and ideologies. It deals with so many small trivialities of human lives where some trivialities can endanger entire lives while others simply let you realise that they were not trivialities but important milestones that needed more attention.
As the year draws to an end, there are many mistakes I can recall which shadowed through and toned the mood for the rest of the year, these self-inflicted 'jokes' however remained guileless and only bothered my personal and emotional space. So when I picked up Kundera's debut novel, absolutely unaware about its plot, I could not help but feel a serendipitous synchronicity with it. Here, however, the joke has larger consequences in a world led by a dystopian tour de force of communist takeover, where mistakes are intolerable and have dire consequences. The fact that the outer forces shape your inner demons beautifully and intricately spiralled off in the novel which further intensified its depth.
The human relationships which shape throughout are woven with a soulful texture, dealing with all possible human emotions in a consequential world, with a sublime ending that concludes our nothingness in the most meaningful way one could ever achieve.