A Tribute to Milan Kundera

Immortality by Milan Kundera

My battered copy of this novel

The novel I am going to discuss in this short post is Immortality  by Milan Kunders, Faber and Faber, London, 1992, translated by Peter Kussi.

This is an extraordinary book to say the least. If the reader is expecting the usual plot structure over a fixed period of time then s/he will be disappointed.  I don’t know quite how I would describe this novel, but it most certainly is postmodern plus a unique Kundera-esque take on fiction.

Kundera, born 1929, is the Czech Republic's most recognized living writer. However, he has lived in exile in France since 1975 and has become a naturalized citizen in 1981. Somewhat like Ireland’s own Nobel Laureate, Samuel Beckett, Kundera sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores. The book that we are discussing here, with its imposing abstract and heavy title, Immortality, while it may on occasion discuss some heavy philosophical issues, is very much written with a light comic touch.

It juxtaposes a modern love triangle in Paris (two sisters Agnes and Laura love the same man) with the affairs of Goethe. Further, into this historical mixture, Kundera introduces a whole range of witty, occasionally melancholy, though often wise, diversions into philosophy and wonderfully imaginative speculation.  At one stage in this novel, Goethe meets Hemingway in heaven where they debate the meaning and value of literary immortality.

This novel explores the great themes of existence: mortality, life and death, the afterlife, immortality, but all with a “lightness of being”, or a “lightness of humour” which saves this novel from being depressively heavy or heavily depressive.  Kundera also uses an unusual technique of allowing us into the writer’s brain or thought processes as he literally composes this novel.  Indeed, this unconventual story springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind, whom he tells us, he is going to call Agnes: “At the time, that gesture aroused in me immense, inexplicable nostalgia and this nostalgia gave birth to the woman I call Agnes.” (p.7)

The reader is invited into several levels of the author’s creative powers: (i) on the level of getting his initial ideas, (ii) on the level of composing and writing, (iii) on the level of story and (iv) on the level of sheer imagination or fancy, (iv) on the existential level of being and (v) on the level of the comedy that life really is in its existential dimensions.  Again, it is the lightness of the writing that keeps us reading. 

Very early in the novel we are invited into Agnes’s mind where we encounter her self-doubt, or, indeed, doubt about the existence of a substantial reality called her “self” in the first place (see p. 14)   This topic is profoundly contemporary and is found frequently in some positivistic scientific circles.

Immortality is a thinking reader’s novel, rather like those of the Russian school or those of Aldous Huxley in parts as it raises philosophical questions and inspires us by those, as well as by the frequent throw-away pieces of wisdom like the following on poetry: “The purpose of poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.” (p. 28) Such profundity arrests the reader in his pursuit of a storyline – contorted and convoluted as it is, as it knits past and present into one.

And so, many themes interweave, but never clash as the author weaves a tapestry of persons, actions, times and things into one existential experience.  At the same time as the author brings in the theme of the existence of God whom he calls the “watcher,” he also talks of the world of the paparazzi and the philosophical question of whether a face can be a self – all in the space of two pages (pp. 34-35).  Creativity or the creative arts as the ultimate human image of immortality occurs throughout this book, as we witness what Kundera describes as the “walking towards immortality” in the posterity of Shakespeare’s poems and plays, followed by Goethe and Hemingway discussing this theme at length from their perches in heaven.  And all the while Kundera discusses how he is going to construct the novel as he proceeds.  If the reader is not into postmodernism and more and yearns for a definite plot line, well quite simply this is not the novel for you.

This is a book worth reading for its humour, for its lightness in the writing, for its wit and wisdom, for its unusual juxtapositions, for its mind-blowing imagination, for its Joycean and Beckettian take on life that can talk about minds and women’s backsides in the one sentence: “But it is precisely in this contradiction that I find the crux of the human condition: our heads are full of dreams but our behinds drag us down like an anchor.” (pp. 269-270).  One is reminded here of the opening scene of Beckett’s Murphy or Joyce’s Molly’s soliloquy in Ulysses.  In short, Immortality is a wonderfully mind-blowing read.