I fell deeply in love with this novel.
Kundera crafted a delectable seven-course literary masterpiece. The amount of control he has over the narrative – every dialogue, character, gesture, structure – is astounding. And with this control comes the most self-aware, perfectly orchestrated novel I’ve read in a long time. Like a Brechtian play, the ropes and pulleys are laid out: our heroine is not only fictional, but borne of a gesture the author glanced from another. Weaved into the story are the author’s muses, the story but a vehicle and device.
Yet, you cannot help being drawn in.
I especially related to Agnes, our protagonist. Her easy irritation at noise, bodies, negativity, modern chaos. Her need to disappear, to be alone, to not be inconvenienced outside of her own control.
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
For posterity: some sections and quotes from the book I held my breath through.
On Imagology.
Are you objecting that advertising and propaganda cannot be compared, because one serves commerce and the other ideology? […] Some one hundred years ago in Russia, persecuted Marxists began to secretly gather in small circles in order to study Marx’s manifesto; they simplified the contents of this simple ideology in order to disseminate it to other circles, whose members, simplifying it further and further, this simplification of the simple kept passing it on and on, so that Marxism became known and powerful on the whole planet all that was left of it was a collection of six or seven slogans, so poorly linked that it can hardly be called an ideology. And precisely because the remnants of Marx no longer form any logical systems of ideas, but only a series of suggestive images and slogans (of smiling worker with a hammer, black, white and yellow men and so on), we can rightfully talk of gradual, general, planetary transformation of ideology into imagology.
Ideology was like a set of enormous wheels at the back of the stage, turning and setting in motion wars revolutions, reforms. The wheels of imagology turn without having any effect upon history. Ideologies fought with one another and each of them was capable of filling a whole epoch with its thinking. Imagology organizes peaceful alternation of its systems in lively seasonal rhythms. […] Ideology belonged to history, while the reign of imagology begins where history ends.
On human rights.
Human rights once again found their place in the vocabulary of our times; I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day ‘the fight for human rights’ or ‘violation of human rights’. But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become the men’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street in the middle of the night.
On Rationality.
In all languages derived from Latin, the word “reason” (ratio, raison, ragione) has a double meaning: first, it designates the ability to think, and only second, the cause. Therefore reason in the sense of a cause is always understood as something rational. A reason the rationality of which is not transparent would seem to be incapable of causing an effect. But in German, a reason in the sense of a cause is called Grund, a word having nothing to do with the Latin ratio and originally meaning “soil” and later “basis”. […] Such a Grund is inscribed deep in all of us, it is the ever-present cause of our actions, it is the soil from which our fate grows.
On Novels.
The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, they have to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted [or] retold.
On Being.
A special, unforgettable moment: She was forgetting her self, losing her self, she was without a self; and that was happiness.
What is unbearable in life is not being but being one’s self.
Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
Q 