Bottom rung
Christopher Hawtree
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera (Faber & Faber £9.50) Granta Edited by William Buford (Penguin £3.95)
ehind this most off-putting of titles there is a novel that, problematic and even irritating as its elliptical structure 'night momentarily be, exerts a cunous fascination. Fitted together out of sequ- ence by an ingenious, self-conscious writer Whose sense of humour saves him from the Passé indulgences of modernism, The Un- bearable Lightness of Being contains char- acters of considerably more interest than have previously appeared in Kundera 's fiction. At first, it seems that they will homespun submerged beneath a bale of BOmespun philosophy that, using people as Ciphers to play out an elaborate game, recalls the worst excesses of the French structuralists. The opening pages turn around the contrast between things as they appear at the time and from a later
n Pers
h„-recrive. 'There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only °nee in history and a Robespierre who ehternally returns, chopping off French "cis.' This sense of the past, of continuity 2 heaviness fleeting— is seen as a positive foil to the .,. sensations and frivolity — lightness b which form contemporary existence. It is attet.weeo these twin poles of behaviour and itude that the drama of the novel in its Private and public sides is acted out. Such on: Idea surfaced five years ago in The Book h1sLaughter and Forgetting. 'In times when and orY still moved slowly, events were few far between and easily committed to nlerriory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, his-
tory moves at a brisk clip. A historical
event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banal- ity of private life.'
Milan Kundera's recurrent posing of the dilemmas surrounding private faces in pub- lic places is discussed in an interview with Ian McEwan printed in the latest issue of Granta. Too much exposition can be a dangerous thing, the characters becoming subsidiary to ideas and as a result mere pieces in the pattern of analogue and allusion. For all the exuberance of its comic situation, The Farewell Party is little more than a game that involves various types coping with a quandary, and the stories in Laughable Loves rehearse similar themes and settings, in particular the sex- ual one with which Mr Kundera appears to be obsessed, without creating any charac- ters that remain in the mind. Even The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which as one reads it appears a dizzyingly intelligent comedy, lingers more as brilliant sleight of hand. One often has the impression that when faced by an obvious battery of ideas many reviewers, for fear of looking stupid, automatically reach out for such phrases as 'intellectual treat' and those clumps of three commendatory adjectives which are not any substitute for real thinking.
Although the opening scenes appear a long-winded way of suggesting the sense of dislocation which has more than ever characterised Czech life since 1968, the novel gradually, absorbingly, takes shape as the characters are summoned from the author's mind. '1 have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly.' A pattern emerges, and around his familiar subjects of infidelity, sexual agony, politic- al upheaval and vicious persecution, Mr Kundera builds a structure which, seemingly random but in fact carefully ordered, turns on itself to become a self-referential whole that manages not to alienate the reader. However wary one might have been of such authorial intru- sions and homilies, it is soon impossible to imagine the novel without them. If the story were to be cast in a linear form, it could easily seem just another saga of misfortune and hardship at the hands of callous authority — Mr Kundera has been at some pains to reject the easy tag of
'dissident novelist'. Its structure is not the gratuitous one of, say, Eyeless in Gaza. We are told a third of the way through that by the end Tomas, a doctor, and his
second wife, Tereza, will have died in a car-crash after an evening away from their work on a collective farm. In a letter from
the long-lost son by Tomas's first, brief marriage, the news reaches Tomas's for- mer mistress, an artist called Sabina, whose exile has taken her from Geneva to
marriage from Franz who has at last left his wife. This suggests something of the com- plex relations between the four main char- acters which were heightened by the Rus- sian invasion and reluctant escape; the mental processes — the contradictions and puzzles — that cause them to behave as they do, apart from any public considerations, are made endlessly interesting; three read- ings do not yield all that one senses is in it. (The blurb-writer has gone onto automatic pilot and said it 'embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence'.) Even the dreams — so often the death-blow for fiction — that torment Tereza add convin- cingly to the whole. From such extraordin- ary sentences as 'toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies' to disquisitions on Beethoven, the book could have easily become a hideously pseudish con-trick, but every- thing does take its place. Equally, the death of their dog Karenin (in fact a bitch) could have had all the mawkishness of sentimental fiction or Elvis Presley's 'Old Shep'. It is possible to weep here without shame.
Throughout the novel, all feelings are heightened by the reader's being allowed without difficulty to view them from so many angles. Impelled, as we know, to follow Tereza back to occupied Prague from Zurich, Tomas finds that a light article he had published in that heady period before the invasion has resurfaced with all the consequences, at the hands of humourless government, that befell the writer of the frivolous postcard in The Joke. As the translator punningly has it, Tomas 'had descended voluntarily to the lowest rung of the social ladder', which in his case means becoming a window- cleaner. The long section to which the novel has, one realises, been moving re- volves around the paradox that although such a life has been forced on them it can be enjoyable. 'It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happi- ness, not boredom. As long as people lived in the country, in nature, surrounded by domestic animals, in the bosom of regular- ly recurring seasons, they retained a glim- mer of that paradisiac idyll.' The farm chairman who dotes on his pet pig, Mefis- to, could in his way have lived at Blandings Castle. Too complex a work to take simple refuge in pastoral idyll, The Unbearable Lightness of Being none the less shows that such a life is weightier than that which leads Franz to join a junket to protest at the Cambodian border where, ironically enough, he meets his own death. More than ever before, I am impatient to see what Milan Kundera will write next. Mean- while Michael Heim, whose elegant trans- lations have a life of their own despite an occasional Americanism Crest room' de- mands a category of Non-U all to itself), should be urged to prepare Life is Else- where which cannot be found in London either in English or French. Sadly, this volume has been produced somewhat per- Paris (and eventually America) to escape functorily. While Faber has recently taken on a pop singer to edit a series of such books as a study of Herman's Hermits, Penguin has more interestingly revived the idea of a literary magazine, which it likens to New Writing. 'I don't share your enthusiam for dirt,' writes one reader in a letter, printed here, to cancel his subscription. Such views notwithstanding, a member of the editorial board, Malcolm Bradbury, provides an encomium for the cover in which he urges the claims of the magazine as a true reflection of current writing. As always, it contains an energetic number of interesting items, such as Leonard Michael's account of a doomed attempt to film his first novel. What made John Lehmann's quarterly remarkable, though, was the variety of new authors that it printed rather than the well-known on whom Granta has largely relied so far. One detects a hint of passing fashion. How wearisome it is to find Salman Rushdie sounding off once again about English imperialism in an article reprinted from a Sunday newspaper. (It hardly needs to be said that David Lean's version of A Passage to India will be a disaster.) If the preponderance of South American writing reflects contemporary taste that in years to come could seem eccentric or bogus, this issue's 100-page Kundera section will be a useful record of a welcome enthusiasm in London publishing houses that properly began ten years ago with the stories printed in, of all places, Esquire.
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