Immortality (Perennial Classics) | Milan Kundera | Classic Kundera. Maybe his best.

Immortality (Perennial Classics) | Milan Kundera | Oh I love this book.

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Immortality (Peren...

	Immortality (Perennial Classics) Milan Kundera Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 66 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence.

Classic Kundera. Maybe his best.

Kundera is surprisingly easy to read, provided that you don't try to understand the whole novel at once. Indeed, this work is like a landscape, divided into simple yet profound statements and passages which combine to form a heterogenous and complex plot.

Kundera was trained as a musician and this work is best perceived as variations on a theme: in each variation the theme emerges in a somewhat different form. Kundera clearly explains his thoughts, as is traditionally his style, and uses the inter-weaved plots to illustrate them.

In the classic tradition of Proust ("In search of lost time") and other important writers, this novel captures the essential question: the meaning of death, memory, time and immortality. This book provides questions but does not give any immediate answers.

It is worth looking for an analysis of this work (I am aware of one, written by Francois Ricard).

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Oh I love this book.

I picked up Unbearable Lightness at the library and thought I ought to read it because it seemed like I should. And I did. And I was right. So I thought, hm, I'm going to read everything Milan Kundera ever wrote.

So I picked up Immortality at the library and ofcourse, I love it. People ask me what it's about and I'm like, I dunno, everything I think.

But you know what I do? When I got to Barnes and Noble in the mall you know how there is a table set-up and a sign on it called SUMMER READING? Well, I go over to the K section and pick up all of Milan's books and go back to the table and put them on top. Now, as you see, I'm not a book buyer, I'm a borrower, so I go into B&N strictly for this task. And when I go back to do it again, they are gone. So, do you think people are buying them? Or are they put back by some pesky salesperson who has strict guidelines about what people should be reading in the summer? I really don't know. Next time I do it I'm going to mark page 22 of Immortality with a little pen mark to see.

Anyhow, here is the gist of Kundera, in his own writing, "A novel shouldn't be like a bicycle race, but a feast of many courses."

Enjoy this feed-fest, it's a true wonder. I'm so happy I found Milan Kundera on this go round and that I am reading him while he is still alive (clap, clap, clap). It's such a bummer to read everything ever written by an author, to fall deeply in love and then find out he or she is dead :(.

Back to my summer reading...

"He discovered with happy surprise that Laura merged with the music; the only woman in his life whom he found to resemble the sea; who was the sea.."

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A feast of many courses

Milan Kundera is one of the most important writers in post war Europe. Each of his novels is playful, philosophical, digressive in a style reminiscent of Sterne and tries to make sense of the difficulties of human life in a playful and erotic manner. Immortality ranks as one of his best novels and perfectly fulfils Kundera's definition of a novel as a feast of many courses - a banquet for the brain to be savoured in many sittings, not a race to the denoument at the end.

Only some minor flaws. Kundera is an exemplary novelist of ideas. Themes considered in Immortality include the notion of 'Imagology' - the musings on the role of the image - in advertising, politics, the image of Lenin proliferating and dominating the ideology of Communism is perfectly attuned to our modern times, bombarded as we are by the sinews of consumerism. However some of the ideas here come across as a little strained. The notion that Bettina - with her attachment to Goethe to pursue immortal love with the great man - subsumed his literary reputation makes for playful, intelligent writing, but it is true? Nah. Goethe's reputation remains, I had to look up Bettina on wikipedia. The whole thesis is like a beautiful flower of many beautifully shaped petals that crushes instantly in the hand as it is so insubstantial.

Also, am I alone in tinging a strain of fretful, excited sexual deviance in Kundera's work, not just this novel, but in his books as a whole? Through out Kundera's work images of female humiliation occur such as the opera singers in 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' being trained with pencils up their rectums, girls having their skirts hoisted up in public, girls standing bare breasted and shamed in public, musings on 'Miss Elsa' - the heroine of an obscure Arthur Scknitzler novella who is forced to show herself nude to repeal her father's debts. Images like this clearly swirl throughout Kundera's mind on hot writing afternoons so that he comes on like Philip Larkin in his sweating, fervid 'Willow Gables' pornographic mode, getting a fretful thrill from imagining women degraded. Perhaps Kundera's sexual excesses might have been tempered by a few cold showers? Or maybe that would ruin something vital in the essence of the work? Worth a ponder.

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But is it a novel?

This novel neither walks like a novel nor talks like one but its author obviously intends for us to consider it as such. Immortality is partly non-fiction or perhaps historical fiction with allusions to Rubens, Goethe and Hemingway. A great deal of musing is going on here as the author paints in sweeping, elegant, philosophical brush strokes. But turn-about is fair play and this style of literary paella somehow still largely works for me. That is, I respect authors who push the genre and try to take it to a new place. Otherwise, how would the novel evolve as a genre? While one may be transported in the parts of the novel which are clearly intended to be traditional fiction, the artifice of the historical flashbacks and the philosophy do intrude into the transporting flow of the fictional stream of the storyline. However, the philosophy is so wise and the allusions are so skillfully woven with relevant implications for the storyline that, once again, Kundera manages to pull of this effect, much to his credit. This novel is engaging, easy to read and thought-provoking. So no matter how one may characterize this quasi-novel, it simply works for me and I plan to read another, which is always a fairly reliable test as to whether you really believe a book is a good read. This middle-brow, literary novel has legs.

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Graceful Philosphy, Mild Plot.

I picked up "Immortality", which had been resting on my shelf for quite some time, with good expectations. Having read "Farewell Waltz" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," I knew what to expect from Milan Kundera in terms of style, and "Immortality" brought plenty of what was expected. With that said, I found "Immortality" a mediocre read; despite the elegance of the author's unique voice (one of my favorite aspects of Kundera's writing), I felt that, at times, he was too indulgent; his lengthy meditations on "life" after death, which comprised the middle sections of the book were potent at their introduction, but soon became stale. He simply blew the same note too often.

That being said, Kundera was not without his beautiful phrases; I was not enthused about Goethe's plot, so it was these singular images that kept me reading.

It is true, I may be biased by my age (22), but I felt the author's unweaving of Ruben's plot tedious. Sex and aging are universal themes; many have added their take, and Kundera's was not significantly different from the norm.

Having finished "Immortality" several hours ago, the maelstrom of themes and plots are still bubbling around in my head. Maybe it will be different when they settle down. Still, I do not think my rating will reach above 3.5, or below 2.5 (more likely the latter), nor will the opinions given in this review change much. Perhaps my expectations for this novel were too high, after all, an author cannot deliver hits every time around. And though "Immortality" is not an out-an-out flop, its lyrical gems and philosophical ingenuity cannot balance its self-indulgence and uneven plots. Sadly, I must call it a miss. Recommended only to die-hard Kundera fans.

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