Word: kundera
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...IMMORTALITY by Milan Kundera...
BOOKS Milan Kundera's intimations of Immortality...
...decidedly does not. Immortality is every bit as gripping and exhilarating as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), the two novels that made Kundera, an exiled Czech who has lived in Paris since 1975, famous in the West. Like its predecessors, Immortality swings easily, almost imperceptibly, from narrative to rumination and back again, collapsing the distinction between action and concepts. Kundera's characters must cope with their emotions and with the stresses of daily life in contemporary Paris; but they also embody, sometimes consciously and sometimes by example, a number of nagging...
...central problem, which Kundera treats both seriously and playfully, is the concept of individuality. Billions of people have walked the earth, but the number of ideas, physiognomies and physical mannerisms on which they could draw has in theory been much smaller. Therefore, interpreting the inner truth of people on the basis of how they look or act is suspect: "A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument...
...story about contemporary neuroses, Kundera has fabricated a context in which everything, literally, can be claimed to matter. What is more, the author indulges this obsessiveness without ever droning or turning out a dull page. In its inventiveness and its dazzling display of what written words can convey, Immortality gives fiction back its good name...