Short description
Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy towards his central question: how does a person, any person, live today? In constructing his answer, he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation - and of their antidotes: laughter and forgetting.
Long description
Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy towards his central question: how does a person, any person, live today? In constructing his answer, he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation - and of their antidotes: laughter and forgettin
Review
Kundera's forte is a sort of gently sad, sexy comedy in which his characters know they shouldn't. . . but do anyway. According to one of the apothegms in this book of allegorical sketches, "The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past"; and that's a key to Kundera's work. Governments - like Kundera's own Czechoslovakia, which took back his citizenship after French publication of this book a year ago - are seen in clumsy attempts at rewriting history. And people behave pretty much that way too, especially when it comes to sex - which in Kundera's scheme usually ends up in one or both of two categories: hysterically laughable or too sad for words. A widowed waitress, desiring the return of her love letters and diaries left behind in Czechoslovakia after she fled, submits to the crude attentions of a younger man who promises to make the trip to fetch them out - but of course he doesn't. Poets get together to confess powerlessness before women. A group-sex party is too absurd for certain participants to hold back the guffaws. And, at his best, when lightly allegorical, Kundera gently nudges us over to his way of looking at things. But when he leaves out the representational level altogether, he's much less successful - as when, here, he belabors a concept of the "border" that separates us from our political and social and sexual true states. Intriguing yet uneven work, then, from a writer (The Joke, The Farewell Party) whose moody humor only sometimes builds up enough steam to move this quilt-like book along. (Kirkus Reviews)