Laughable Loves was the first that came to mind, not because it was his best but simply due it to it being positioned in a bookshelf close to where I sit in the living room.
Our friend's French twang seemed appropriate because Kundera had fled to France in 1975 to escape the stifling intellectual suffocation he had experienced in his native Czechoslovakia. Seven years earlier he was the driving force behind a conference in Prague attended by such literary luminaries as Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez and Carlos Fuentes, eager to express their solidarity with Czech writers whose ink was being forced into a drought by the dullards of the country's Communist Party. Party bureaucrats are forever the type once described by James Boren in a poem - they sit holding a pencil with an eraser on each end of it. Creativity to them is an incentive for their own creations - the camps.
Kundera at the time was attempting to launch a movement that would:
Our friend's French twang seemed appropriate because Kundera had fled to France in 1975 to escape the stifling intellectual suffocation he had experienced in his native Czechoslovakia. Seven years earlier he was the driving force behind a conference in Prague attended by such literary luminaries as Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez and Carlos Fuentes, eager to express their solidarity with Czech writers whose ink was being forced into a drought by the dullards of the country's Communist Party. Party bureaucrats are forever the type once described by James Boren in a poem - they sit holding a pencil with an eraser on each end of it. Creativity to them is an incentive for their own creations - the camps.
Kundera at the time was attempting to launch a movement that would:
create a socialism without an omnipotent secret police; with freedom of the spoken and written word; of a public opinion of which notice is taken and on which policy is based; with a modern culture freely developing and with citizens who have lost their fear.
I have always liked Kundera since he was first recommended by the late Henry McDonald who had attributed the phrase 'organised lying' to him. My one surprise was not to have come across his work in prison where little escaped the roving eye of the bookworm. My favourite work of his remains The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, a title I borrowed from on one occasion to express my feelings on leaving a home of a man whose life had been snatched away in a callous knife attack.
A few years back I was surprised to read that Danny Morrison considered Kundera overrated. For decades I have not vaguely valued the opinion of Morrison, yet intellectual honesty compels me to acknowledge that his appreciation of literature is considerable. Which made it that bit more difficult to work out what he found objectionable in Kundera. The Czech writer had always pushed against the barriers of censorship whereas Morrison spent his time building them. Still, I have never felt that was the reason. Perhaps we shall never know. He had likewise been dismissive of Stig Larson, another author from whose writing I derived immense pleasure. Kundera would have had little problem with that, recognising that it is a dangeous world that fails to accommodate different tastes.
My copy of Laughable Loves, a collection of seven stories is a very old one. It features an introduction by Philip Roth, who writes ‘what’s laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy.’ In all there are seven stories, The Hitchhiking Game, Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead, Nobody Will Laugh, The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire, Symposium, Dr Havel After Twenty Years and Eduard and God.
Seven stories but not seven sins. In a society where the sin of thoughtcrime might have deadly consequences, the theme of this collection has one sin at its core - lust. Kundera visits relationships with an eye that keeps its distance without compromising its vision. The writing is philosophical and wry.
In Nobody Will Laugh Kundera writes:
I live like an eccentric who thinks that he lives unobserved behind a high wall, while all time one detail escapes him: the wall is made of transparent glass.
A metaphor for the state resembling a panopticon, so central to the thinking of Bentham and Foucault. The all-seeing totalitarian state peering deep into the bowels of society.
When shortly after the revolution the front lines begin to melt away and the revolutionaries are left, just like those they usurped and replaced:
No wonder former adherents of the revolution feel cheated and are quick to seek substitute fronts. Thanks to religion they can stand again in all their glory on the correct side and retain that so habitual and precious sense of their own superiority.
With that, the reader is reminded of ‘how carelessly and from what bad masonry does a man build his excuses.' Revolutionaries probably more so than others, given their need to explain the gap between what they promised and what they delivered. Upon completing this collection it seemed so easy to place Milan Kundera in the cynic category as described by Michael Ignatieff - someone with a healthy awareness of the gulf between what people practice and what they preach.
Milan Kundera, 1975, Laughable Loves. Penguin. ISBN 0140040447.
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