The Joke - Milan Kundera

Last month I (coincidentally) read a spate of successful authors' first books - Agatha Christie's, Katherine Mansfield's, A.A. Milne's - which is always an interesting exercise, and the fourth 'first book' I read was The Joke (1967) by Milan Kundera, given to me by my friend Lucy.  It could have worked for Reading Presently next year, but it also covered a tricky 1960s gap in A Century of Books.  Usually, with translated books, I am keen to mention the translator - but a fascinating Author's Note at the end of The Joke explains that this fifth translation of the novel (from Czech) is really a combination of translations by David Hamblyn, Oliver Stallybrass, Michael Heim, and Kundera himself.  In case you still think Kundera might be a bit of a slacker, he is also responsible for the cover art.

The Joke is broadly about the way in which someone can (or cannot) be an individual within the Communist regime of 1950s Czechoslovakia, and the impact one decision can make on the rest of a person's life.  Although possibly not the only 'joke' in the novel (the Wikipedia entry manfully identifies three), the pivotal moment of the novel comes early on.  Ludvik is a university professor and member of the Communist party - his somewhat humourless female friend is away on a training course, and they are corresponding...

From the training course (it took place at one of the castles of central Bohemia) she sent me a letter that was pure Marketa: full of earnest enthusiasm for everything around her; she liked everything: the early-morning calisthenics, the talks, the discussions, even the songs they sang; she praised the "healthy atmosphere" that reigned there; and diligently she added a few words to the effect that the revolution in the West would not be long in coming.
 
As far as that goes, I quite agreed with what she said; I too believed in the imminence of a revolution in Western Europe; there was only one thing I could not accept: that she should be so happy when I was missing her so much. So I bought a postcard and (to hurt, shock, and confuse her) wrote: Optimism is the opium of the people!  A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity!  Long live Trotsky!  Ludvik.

It turns out the Communist party don't appreciate a giggle, and Ludvik is ousted from his job, exiled from the party, and sent off to do two years at a military camp.  Whilst there he meets, and falls in love with, a mysterious woman named Lucie.  At the end of the novel, various different strands (including a few that I haven't addressed - like Kostka whose Christian faith is taking him away from Communism) coalesce and overlap at an old-fashioned parade, and the multiple viewpoints Kundera has used for different sections all come together and collide, taking short chapters each without indicating whose voice is speaking.

Although Kundera rather overloads The Joke with different perspectives and competing storylines, it is only really Ludvik's story which stands out; the rest feels like it is stuck on to the sides of his engaging point of view and intriguing experiences.  His reflections upon political doctrine, personal affections, and the curious unpredictability of cause-and-effect are all compelling - let's face it, any novel which can get me even mildly interested in politics has achieved more than the public press has in the past 27 years.

But, although you can see the seeds of his later experimentalism, The Joke is a much more straightforward novel than the one which made me a fan, Immortality.  That is hardly surprising for a first novel, and this has that curious combination of putting-too-much-in with a lack of novelistic ambition.  If I hadn't read a couple of his later novels, I wouldn't have noticed the deficit - this is still a very good novel, and probably more to the taste of a lot of people than his postmodern work - but I have, so I do.  I was intrigued by one or two hints of his future work, including this (from a man trying to spot his disguised son in the parade):

My son.  The person nearest to me.  I stand in front of him, and I don't even know whether it is he or not.  What, then, do I know if I don't know even that?  Of what am I sure in this world if I don't have even that certainty?

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the catalyst for Identity. I think if I'd read The Joke first, I'd have been impressed but probably not actively sought out more Kundera.  As it is, I really appreciated being able to see where he started as a novelist - and how he progressed from there.

Are there any authors whose first novels, read after later ones, have really surprised you?

Identity

When I reviewed (and reviewed enthusiastically) Immortality by Milan Kundera earlier in the year, I suggested that I wouldn't read another for a while. Much as I admired and liked the novel (if a novel it can be called), I was left a little exhausted, and fancied a five year break before I returned to Kundera...

...but then I discovered that he wrote short books too! And you know how I love a short book. Identity has enormous font and wide margins too... But, before you think me a complete imbecile, this is the jacket blurb which persuaded me:

Sometimes - perhaps only for an instant - we fail to recognise a companion. When this happens to lovers, the effect is acute: for a moment the identity of the loved one ceases to exist, and we come to doubt our own.

Doesn't that sound an intriguing starting point for a novel?

Identity isn't as postmodern as Immortality (those titles are so similar, I'm bound to get them mixed up at some point in this blog post... hopefully we're on the same page so far). While Immortality really seemed to reinvent the novel structure, Kundera sticks more closely to a conventional form with Identity, despite being published eight years later (1998, compared to Immortality's 1990). There is the odd dabble in unusual images and abstract thought (cue quotation...)

Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, friends.

...but, in amongst Kundera's very individual - and to my mind, very good - writing style, there is a surprisingly traditional romance. But very nuanced, and very subtle.

He reflected that she was his sole emotional link to the world. People talk to him about prisoners, about the persecuted, about the hungry? He knows the only was he feels personally, painfully touched by their misfortune: he imagines Chantal in their place. People tell him about women raped in some civil war? He sees Chantal there, raped. She and she alone releases him from his apathy. Only through her can he feel compassion.

I think that's quite a brilliant way to describe the closeness of a relationship, romantic or otherwise. Chantal and Jean-Marc are the couple in question - and it is Chantal whom Jean-Marc fails to recognise (or, rather, he thinks somebody else is her, until he gets closer to them). She, in turn, thinks that men have stopped finding her attractive - which shakes the identity she has formed for herself. And so it is with a mixture of pleasure and displeasure that she receives a letter saying that someone is watching her. These letters grow more complimentary, and instead of throwing them away, she keeps the letters in her underwear drawer - and starts trying to work out who is sending them.

Such is the plot - but Kundera weaves far more around this simple premise. All sorts of interesting musings about a myriad of topics, and (like Immortality) exceptional insight into the interaction of people, with all the subtlety and complexity of real emotions. How he does it is beyond me...

And then the narrative does get a bit more postmodern, dabbling between fantasy and reality without telling you quite where the line is. It feels just a little bit thrown in, and I'd have liked it to be a bit more developed, but it's also an interesting touch... and obviously done because Kundera can't help himself, rather than for any big effect.

Second Kundera, and I'm still very impressed - I still admire him more than I love him (and isn't there sometimes a big difference!) but that isn't to say reading him is a struggle, because it isn't. Just - as, indeed, I finished my last Kundera review - not one to curl up with in front of the fire. And no, that delightfully bizarre cover never makes sense.

Immortality

A little while ago I mentioned that I was reading Immortality by Milan Kundera for my book group. I can't remember what stage we were at then, whether the mutiny had taken place... well, tomorrow we're meeting to discuss Immortality and/or An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, since people were either unable or unwilling to read one or other of these... so, a compromise, we've done both and can read either! If you're not confused by now, then you're doing better than me. ANYWAY, I have read Immortality - finished this morning - and I hardly know how to respond. It is completely different from anything else I have ever read. That's a bit of a cliche, I daresay, but for this book it's true - because Kundera has more or less reinvented the novel. (This is the only Kundera book I've read - he might have done this before Immortality, maybe I'll wait for Claire to pop by, because I know she's a big Kundera fan.)

It's very postmodern, that's the first thing to say. In that, we get bits of narrative from Kundera's perspective - he mentions his own previous novels, he tells us what he's going to write in later chapters. The novel (I'm going to use the word, even though it's not really a novel... or is it?) opens with him seeing a woman making a gesture - he then names her Agnes and invents a story around her, around that gesture. And then weaves it into a literary, historical intertextuality that darts all over the place, including Rubens, Goethe, Hemingway, Beethoven... So many lives intersect and reflect on each other - the real, the fictional, the metafictional. And yet it isn't formless or baggy - there is a definite feeling of wholeness, a structure - just a very unorthodox one. I haven't read any reviews of Immortality, but I expect all of them mention this excerpt at some point, from the point of view of Milan Kundera-within-the-novel (who may or may not be the same as Milan Kundera the author, let's face it):

I regret that almost all novels ever written are much too obedient to the rules of unity of action. What I mean to say is that at their core is one single chain of causality related acts and events. These novels are like a narrow street along which someone drives his characters with a whip. Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded it is concentrated. The novel is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw.

I don't blame you if you're rolling your eyes, and reaching out for the nearest Agatha Christie novel - but please don't be put off straight away. I don't know why postmodern stuff is so often annoying (it's less the 'shock of the new' as the irksome nature of those who want to cause that shock) but, with Kundera, it isn't annoying at all. He completely disrupts the novel form, and throws the reading experience into a whole new category, but it isn't self-indulgent. His writing is so good, he is so very, very perceptive, that it works. It's as I wrote after the first few pages - he notices things about human behaviour, or perceptions of the self, and finds beautiful or unusual images to demonstrate this. Nothing is overwritten, and nothing is carelessly written. There's nothing worse than an author thinking they're being profound, when they are actually writing truisms - I believe Kundera doesn't fall into this trap. (The only trap he does fall into is being rather too obsessed with sex). But, of course, I haven't read any philosophers, so...

Now I look at it, the excerpt I wanted to quote isn't the most original thought in the book - that's because the most original ones are connected to the tiny things individuals do, his perceptions being mostly filmic - like visual leitmotifs running through the book, through different characters and periods. But here's a bit, to give you a small idea:

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.

This isn't my normal reading territory at all, and early feedback from my book group suggests some definite disdain for Kundera - but I am fascinated, admiring, and rather captivated... at the same time, it will be a while before I read another book by this author. I'm rather bowled over, and need to keep him to dip into now and then. But Immortality is an amazing achievement - just not one to curl up with in front of the fire.