Take a photo of a barcode or cover
After reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being some years ago and being awed by its mastery of the various literary techniques, I expected something rawer, more stripped back from Kundera's debut novel, The Joke. And yet. Even in his earliest form, Kundera is so clearly a natural talent. In The Joke, sentences and chapters flow like tributaries into the wide open ocean of his central idea, that you cannot step into the same river twice, to paraphrase Heraclitus. Unexpectedly, the postmodernism of his later work is already well on its way to becoming fully realized. He radically shifts perspectives from one chapter to the next, articulately putting into words how two people can have such radically different and equally valid interpretations of the same event.
Most affecting to me is Lucie's relationship with Ludvik when he is a young soldier; although she originally rebukes his advances, their relationship eventually blooms into a romance of undeniable power, at least from his perspective. When we finally hear her side of the story many years later, it is a shock to learn that she considered him a nuisance at best and a rapist at worst. Which version is the correct one? Or are they both exaggerations, just in divergent directions? We all rewrite history to make sense of the past, and this notion is especially moving as it relates to intimate relationships due to the fact that only two people can have a complete recollection of this shared experience. As it retreats further and further into the past, this shared memory between Ludvik and Lucie splinters and eventually breaks into two pieces, never to be whole again.
"It must have been Lucie's singular slowness that fascinated me, a slowness radiating a resigned consciousness that there was nowhere to hurry to and that it was useless to reach impatiently toward anything... She said that she worked in a factory and lived in a dormitory, that she had to be in by eleven, that she went to the movies a lot because she didn't like going to dances. I told her I'd be glad to go to the movies with her anytime she was free. She said she'd rather go alone. I asked her if it was because she felt sad. She said it was. I told I wasn't particularly cheerful either."
Most affecting to me is Lucie's relationship with Ludvik when he is a young soldier; although she originally rebukes his advances, their relationship eventually blooms into a romance of undeniable power, at least from his perspective. When we finally hear her side of the story many years later, it is a shock to learn that she considered him a nuisance at best and a rapist at worst. Which version is the correct one? Or are they both exaggerations, just in divergent directions? We all rewrite history to make sense of the past, and this notion is especially moving as it relates to intimate relationships due to the fact that only two people can have a complete recollection of this shared experience. As it retreats further and further into the past, this shared memory between Ludvik and Lucie splinters and eventually breaks into two pieces, never to be whole again.
"It must have been Lucie's singular slowness that fascinated me, a slowness radiating a resigned consciousness that there was nowhere to hurry to and that it was useless to reach impatiently toward anything... She said that she worked in a factory and lived in a dormitory, that she had to be in by eleven, that she went to the movies a lot because she didn't like going to dances. I told her I'd be glad to go to the movies with her anytime she was free. She said she'd rather go alone. I asked her if it was because she felt sad. She said it was. I told I wasn't particularly cheerful either."