I’m sad to read about the death of Milan Kundera, whose novels have been a key part of my adult life. Reflecting on his impact on my personal and professional life, I wrote down a few very rough and vague thoughts about him and his work.
If life is a rehearsal, Milan Kundera certainly made sure his performance would be remembered – dress rehearsal or otherwise. His work was hugely influential; there’s no doubt about that, even if perhaps his stage voice has softened to a whisper over the past generation or so. Kundera was influenced by some great figures of literature himself, including the wonderfully absurd and dark work of Franz Kafka. In turn, Kundera has influenced many other great figures including Haruki Murakami. Kundera’s legacy is wide-reaching and his work is multifaceted. Profound. Peaceful. Philosophical. Problematic. Timeless in feel, yet dated in attitude.
Much more humbly than those above, Kundera also influenced me. I’m not a creative writer but the historical fields I’m interested in have been shaped profoundly by the personal, complicated love I have for his literature. I first fell in love with Kundera years ago when I first picked up The Unbearable Lightness of Being – “There is no perfection only life”.
How indeed can we strive for perfection when we only get one chance to fail at life? For many, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is their favourite novel of Kundera’s. It is certainly the most famous. For me it was the start of a journey with the author, and the start of a new way of reading. Reading it at a young age, I felt for the first time that I was not just reading a book – I was having a conversation with the writer who had invited me to reflect on a world he had created, to share in its joys and fears. I was gripped by the ideas that Kundera threw at you just as much as I adored and hated the characters he wrote. This was not just a story but a shared dream, a rêve à deux.
When I finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being, when the story of Tomas and Tereza came to an end, I remember being deeply angry. I was angry not just at the pain of the ending. I was furious that the world I had been invited to had ended. At the last page came the realization there was no more story. He had just stopped writing the book. How dare he finished the world that he had created, the imagination that we had shared.
Desperate for more since, I read everything Kundera ever published in English. From his novels to his essays, I devoured it all.
Many of the ideas and stories made me fall in love more with his work. Some shaped my views of historical events – sometimes it was because the book provided a lived insight into a particular period (The Joke) or because his philosophical explorations raised bigger questions about history, in particular the importance of forgetting (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). As young student of history, often fixated more on what happened in the past than anything else, this discussion piqued my interest in memory studies, in questions about what societies should choose to remember, what they should be allowed to forget and what are the dangers of erasing too little or too much of ourselves.
‘We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory’. We need space to move on, he cautioned. Yet, as he reminds us, it is the past that makes us who we are. The destruction of ourselves often starts with the destruction of our memory:
‘You begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster’.
Some stories however made me fall out of love with Kundera, and made me question what exactly was shared. The further into Kundera’s works I delved, the more disappointed I often felt. The sort of disappointment and sense of betrayal that can only be felt towards a loved one. Some stories of his are just deeply problematic – Farewell Waltz, for example, with its voyeuristic misogyny and callous treatment of the female characters portrayed less a philosophical mind than it betrayed a juvenile, out-of-touch one. Reading his earliest works provided me a much broader perspective on his writing but not a positive one. Reading his earliest words changed how I could feel about his later ones.
‘The novelist is the sole master of his work; he is his work’, as he wrote in the New Yorker.
“Perhaps but if so”, I wanted to ask him, “how can you be this work? How could you do this to me? I don’t care if it was sixteen years before I was born.”
I struggled for a long time afterwards trying to balance my love for so much of Kundera and my disdain for some of his views – how could I enjoy his later writing so much when I found his earliest stuff so problematic? What did that say about me? How much could I believe that those views had changed?
A few years later, over a drink with a colleague, I spoke about my difficult relationship with Kundera and they suggested I read the one novel of his that I had left: a story about a young poet who struggles with an overbearing and jealous mother and who cannot find their place in a revolution they want to claim. Throughout the story, Kundera ponders on the limitations novelists place on their own creations. Novelists are restricted to the perspectives of the characters they create. We can never read every thought from every character but every character is just as real or imagined as the main ones. Writers use characters as ‘observatories’ to explore the story but they are restricted, defined, and limited. They shine a light on one part of the world, but leave the rest in the dark. In reality, we too are mere observers focusing on narrow moments in the present, incapable of perceiving the worlds of others, of fully understanding. And just like in the novel, in the real world Life is Elsewhere. Life is Elsewhere is a bittersweet novel. There’s no other word for it. But it is a beautiful one. As beautiful as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And just as problematic as others.
Kundera’s work will continue to inspire me and many others by showing us a mirror of our best and worse selves. I will always love and admire Kundera’s work and I will continue to seek to share that love with others but I will always have to be upfront about how complicated my relationship with it is. Perhaps he had it right:
‘The novelist is the sole master of his work; he is his work’.
Kundera certainly was. And his work was life. Beautiful. Flawed. Insightful. Jejune. Imperfect. And after all, as he taught us ‘there is no perfection only life.’
Dr Kristopher Lovell 