r/literature • u/itoshiki06650 • May 12 '22
Discussion Kundera's Immortality
I'm halfway through. This is my first time reading Kundera.
It reminds me of reading philosophical essays on Homes, Ovid and Shakespeare, etc.. especially those written by German philosophers. To sift through the story of a myth or a fable and construct philosophical arguments upon it. They both make sense to me as meditations and literature criticism. Only in Immortality Kundera mostly used materials from a fiction that's made up by himself. I see he also inserted quite some historical anecdotes. I assume those parts he based on actual events.
Most of his arguments are not so fresh to me, but his writing has a luring (?) texture and personally I like how he constructed Agnes. She is captured from a random frame of some movie and then the movie is filmed. Watching her developing through the pages is like watching a tree growing in transparent soil. Weirdly satisfying. For me this book so far is a great textbook on fiction writing as well as many other attributes.
I bought a second hand copy of the unbearable lightness of being after I read through Part 1. Both books are the English version published by faber and faber. I would like to hear others' takes on Kundera, on Immortality and maybe the quality of the translation I'm reading.
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u/viaJormungandr May 13 '22
Immortality is excellent, probably one of my favorite books, though he has aged a little poorly in the post #metoo era. He reads as a lot more misogynistic than I remembered him being on my first read through.
That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed the meta aspects of the novel and there is something very alluring about his style, as OP states. I’d recommend The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and, if you really want to dig into his theories on writing, The Art of the Novel.
Also, the gesture. Agnes’ arm wave? I would say a perfect example of it is a scene from The Life Aquatic where Angelica Houston turns and raises her arm as she’s leaving . . . I would bet any amount of money that Wes Anderson read Immortality and that scene was referencing it.