Heaviness and Light

Milan Kundera, you beautiful bastard, this is exactly the book that Blindness thought it was gonna be before it sank under Saramago's thuddingly heavy Hammer of Laborious Obviousness. Because dudes! Kundera is right up front with how he's interested in wedding a philosophical inquiry to a character-based narrative! Early on (to my boundless delight) Kundera breaks from the action to note that Tomas was born not from a mother, but from the idea of a man staring out a window into a courtyard with two possible life paths ahead of him. There's something really lovely and refreshing about acknowledging the construct of the fiction at play (some would call this "lampshade hanging"), and I think it's at least partially responsible for the piece's levity and readability.

More importantly as a distinction from Blindness (and after this I'll leave Saramago behind because I know other people like it, and Unbearable Lightness of Being is just operating on a much higher plane and deserves to be discussed on its own), Kundera's philosophical inquiry is just that: an inquiry. He's toying with contradictions (building the book around the conflicting desires for heaviness and light, or the dichotomy of the body and mind, and so forth) and proffering ideas as to how to look at the world, but it's all done with a sense of wonder and curiosity. Contrast that with Saramago's leaden parable in which a civilization goes blind and Just Happens to behave in a way that ploddingly illustrates his "Dudes can be pretty bad to other dudes" theme.

But I said I was done with Saramago, and I am. Unbearable Lightness of Being is really quite joyful and wide-ranging, skipping from Nietzsche's philosophy to an exploration of romance and eroticism to the agony of infidelity to a sharp, personal sketch of life under Soviet rule, with detours exploring the absurd pageantry of political activism and the purity of the love a master bears its pet. It's emotionally barbed, deeply humane, and wildly affectionate. I loved it, guys.

Next up: a book of interviews with Uwe Boll? I WISH! But seriously, it's probably gonna be a history of Disney. Suck it, literati!