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Personal relationships are paramount in life. At their best they can confirm the highest ideals we have about human life. Relationships are how we learn about ourselves. How we evolve, both as individuals and communities. How we learn about the world around us. Relationships are the most accessible source of inspiration. They can bring us to our knees; they can move us close to heaven. Personal relationships are our sacred text, our scripture. Every totalitarian state seeks to undermine the power of personal relationships. The party line takes precedence over every other consideration...
Early on, Ludvik is embroiled in a sexual power play with a girl he fancies. He's irritated by her earnest piety towards a Czech national hero - a resistance fighter who was murdered by the Nazis. He writes her a postcard with a facetious remark about this man. Soon, he is on trial. A friend of his adjudicates his case, finds him guilty and he is banished from the Communist party, the university and sent for political re-education. The postcard, in his eyes, was nothing more than a joke. Kundera does a good job of dramatizing the inevitable demoralisation and nihilism that a totalitarian state bleeds out, the fatal rifts in personal relationships it brings about. But…
I tire of Kundera's relentless hostility towards pop culture, motorbikes, leather jackets, youthful posturing. He just sounds like a grumpy old man full of bogus nostalgia for a reality that never existed. In this novel, he gives us what he thinks of as a better alternative: folk culture. Frankly, this element of the novel bored me silly. I also tire of his adolescent macho sexuality. I've defended him in my reviews of his later and much better novels but it's hard here. Ludvik's plan for revenging himself on the friend who tried and sentenced him is to sleep with his wife. The scene when this takes place is excruciating. I think in all his novels there's at least one scene in which a male sexually humiliates a female. Here, he goes way beyond what the plot demands in his exultant abuse of the (wholly innocent) female character. He also provides what sounds like excerpts from a self-help manual on how to seduce women which I found comically crass. Kundera the womaniser, like Kundera the cultural arbiter, is a crushing bore. He's not a good looking man, never was. You can't help wondering if the sexual passages of his novels are some sort of cathartic fantasy in which he's able to play a sexual role, both triumphant and vindictive, he was denied in real life.
I've just read Kundera snitched on someone to the communist regime which resulted in the individual spending 22 years in prison. That seals it for me - Milan Kundera gets my vote as the most unlikeable author out there. It's almost a shame he can also be a genius.
Early on, Ludvik is embroiled in a sexual power play with a girl he fancies. He's irritated by her earnest piety towards a Czech national hero - a resistance fighter who was murdered by the Nazis. He writes her a postcard with a facetious remark about this man. Soon, he is on trial. A friend of his adjudicates his case, finds him guilty and he is banished from the Communist party, the university and sent for political re-education. The postcard, in his eyes, was nothing more than a joke. Kundera does a good job of dramatizing the inevitable demoralisation and nihilism that a totalitarian state bleeds out, the fatal rifts in personal relationships it brings about. But…
I tire of Kundera's relentless hostility towards pop culture, motorbikes, leather jackets, youthful posturing. He just sounds like a grumpy old man full of bogus nostalgia for a reality that never existed. In this novel, he gives us what he thinks of as a better alternative: folk culture. Frankly, this element of the novel bored me silly. I also tire of his adolescent macho sexuality. I've defended him in my reviews of his later and much better novels but it's hard here. Ludvik's plan for revenging himself on the friend who tried and sentenced him is to sleep with his wife. The scene when this takes place is excruciating. I think in all his novels there's at least one scene in which a male sexually humiliates a female. Here, he goes way beyond what the plot demands in his exultant abuse of the (wholly innocent) female character. He also provides what sounds like excerpts from a self-help manual on how to seduce women which I found comically crass. Kundera the womaniser, like Kundera the cultural arbiter, is a crushing bore. He's not a good looking man, never was. You can't help wondering if the sexual passages of his novels are some sort of cathartic fantasy in which he's able to play a sexual role, both triumphant and vindictive, he was denied in real life.
I've just read Kundera snitched on someone to the communist regime which resulted in the individual spending 22 years in prison. That seals it for me - Milan Kundera gets my vote as the most unlikeable author out there. It's almost a shame he can also be a genius.