Monday, 28 November 2016

Immortality - Milan Kundera


Very slowly, and not particularly steadily, but I will try to catch-up on missed entries. A couple of months ago a colleague of mine dumped a few unwanted books on my desk – in there I found some greats reads (Peter Carey’s Bliss, for instance), and some not-so-great ones, like this one (although admittedly, it probably didn’t help that I had to read it intermittently during a time of sleepless nights and when my in-laws were around).

As I was reading Immortality I actually started wondering whether Kundera used a ghost-writer for The Unbearable Lightness of Being or whether he simply took himself too seriously after writing that book. Sure, Immortality does have some nice ideas (the first appearance of Agnes, the tyre-slashing, and the first few pages about Goethe – before these start to become rather boring), but I really could have done without hundreds of pages of pseudo-philosophical quibbles. 

And if you want pseudo-philosophical quibbles, the trajectory of the physical copy of the book I read actually represents the circle of life: someone probably once loved it, then my colleague picked it up, and dropped it on my desk after reading it, and after I finished it myself I brought it to the book exchange shelf of an urban farm next to my flat, where I am afraid it will sit for a rather long time (if not for ever). 

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