Milan Kundera

Ezra Klein: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being is something like 65% of the greatest book ever written and 35% of something you wrote for a freshman philosophy class and are now embarrassed of." And yet, in my view The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is like this but even more so. What's more, I think the whole kitsch business from Lightness of Being has been given new relevance by the Bush years, Fox News, etc. -- freedom fries, freedom isn't free, etc.

Comments

I've always just thought of ULB as nothing but Czechs n Sex, and found it enjoyable at that. If you try to think of it as serious philosophy it does become pretty silly pretty quickly.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | July 16, 2007 9:06 AM

Kundera is strange like that -- all of his stuff reads like a combination of the most insightful things you've ever heard and near poetry of expression with dumb ass cliches and bass-ackwards goofball philosophy. I guess its part of his charm, but its not something you normally run into when not reading Robert Anton Wilson or some other joker from that era.

Posted by IP Guy | July 16, 2007 9:06 AM

The second half of the 20th century belonged to continental Europe, novel-wise. Grass, Kundera, Calvino, Eco, Antunes, and (above all) Saramago... it's no contest.

Posted by Freddie | July 16, 2007 12:44 PM

I think it is personal experience rather than professional jealousy that leads the great Czeck writer Ivan Klima to have the following opinion of Milan Kundera:

Mr. Klima comments that many Czechs have an "allergy" to Mr. Kundera, who was "an indulged and rewarded child of the Communist regime until 1968," and who then went on to achieve his "world popularity" abroad while intellectuals in Czechoslovakia suffered political persecution. Mr. Klima explains that "Kundera's picture, his critics would tell you, is the sort of picture which you would see from a very capable foreign newspaperman who'd spent a few days in our country."

Posted by ndm | July 16, 2007 2:53 PM