هي فعلا رواية متوافر فيها كل مقومات العظمة، وتجليات كونديرا فيها واضحة وبيّنة، لكني لم انسجم معها، أفكارها لقيتها متوترة، متسرعة، شخصياتها مفككة، أقرب لكتاب فلسفي ضلّ طريقه للرواية، وقد يكون كونديرا يقصد دا، وقد أكون محبيتهاش بس.

ثمة روايات مثل هذه، ورواية (حينما بكى نيتشه) تضعك في حالة اسئلة وجودية صعبة كنت لأفضل عدم مواجهتها. لا اعرف ان كانت الرواية هي السبب ام حالتي النفسية ام الاثنين لكني أشعر أن هذا الكتاب يجعل الحياة تبدو أكثر وضوحا، أكثر ثقلاً على كاهلي. ولا يعني هذا ان قراءتها لم تكن ممتعة، بل العكس، خاصة اذا كنت مستعدا لطريقة سرد مختلفة عن المعتاد.

"الطريق خط يربط نقطة بأخرى. الدرب تكريم للمكان. كل جزء من الدرب له معنى ويدعونا للتوقف. اختفت الدروب من روح الانسان. لم يعد يرغب بالسير في الدروب واستخلاص المتعة. لم تعد حياته درباً، بل طريق يقود من نقطة الى أخرى. من زوجة الى ارملة."

تقسم الرواية الى عدد من الفصول، ويبدو لكل فصل منها كيانه المستقل، قصته وشخصياته وفكرته وبنهاية كل فصل يبدو كما لو أن قصة قد خُتمت، لكنها تشكل فعلا كيانا مرتبطا، كما هي قصصنا في الحياة. كونديرا ذاته احد هذه الشخصيات وبما يشبه الارباك الجميل (وليس الارتباك خارج نطاق السيطرة) تتداخل الشخصيات المتخيلة والواقعية على ثلاثة مستويات:
١-الواقع - مستوى وجود كونديرا
٢- المتخيل - مستوى وجود شخصيات الرواية التي يكتبها كونديرا
٣- التاريخ - مستوى استعادة سردية لتاريخ علاقة غوته وبتينا،
كما لو في احد تلك الاعمال الفوتوغرافية ثلاثية الابعاد ذات التداخلات المستحيلة، تتقاطع مصائر كونديرا وشخصيات الواقع مع شخصيات في روايته التي يكتبها. في الفصول المختلفة تستمر قصة/حياة الشخصيات أنييس وزوجها واختها وابنتها ولكن في كل مرة من زاوية مختلفة، لأن الكاميرا (اذا امكنني قول هذا) ليست مهتمة بتسليط الضوء على شخصية رئيسة.

يظهر كونديرا بصوته كراوي منذ الفصل الاول ليخبرنا كيف جاءت فكرة خلق شخصية الرواية آنييس من حركة يد شديدة التأثير لسيدة مسنّة، وتدور فكرة الفصل حول الوجه باعتباره التعبير عن فردية الشخص وعنوانه، وهي فكرة لا تقنع آنييس التي ترى ان الانسان ليس وجهه، أن هذا ما يدفع البعض الى ابتكار عناوينهم الخاصة التي تقول (انا هنا) من خلال صوت مرتفع، أو حركة شديدة الخصوصية.

في الفصل الثاني (الخلود) ينتقل الى سرد علاقة غوته بامرأة شابة هي بتينا تبدو متطفلة على حياته لكنها مصرّة على على الحفاظ على اتصال خيطها به، ويحاول كونديرا ان يشرح لنا كيف ان هذه ليست علاقة حب بل علاقة رغبة بالخلود، بتينا التي ترغب بأن ترتبط بهذا الصاعد الى المجد، وغوته الذي يخشى من خطرها وقدرتها على تحويل خلوده الى "خلود مضحك" من خلال تشويهه بنكتة سمجة تشيع وتشتهر لتطغى وتصير عنوانه.

"يستطيع الانسان وضع حد لحياته، لكنه لا يستطيع وضع حد لخلوده."

في بقية الفصول يعزف كونديرا على هذه الفكرة وعلى تساؤلات اخرى يضع شخصياته في مواجهتها. انه يتحدث عن قدرة الصورة الانطباعية على البقاء طويلا وربما اكثر مما نرغب، عن قدرية الحياة، عن معنى الحب، الحاجة الى الوحدة، ويرسم ببطء ذهاب شخصياته الى تلك اللحظات التي تنكشف فيها البصيرة.

يصف فرانسوا ريكار الرواية في مقال تحليل جميل ملحق بالرواية "مجموعة من القصص المستقلة عمليا التي لا يمكن لتقاطعاتها ان تعود الا للمصادفة.... في كل لحظة يلتقي هذا الدرب بدرب آخر أو بعدة دروب أخرى، تارة يتقاطع معها وأخرى ينفصل عنها في اتجاه غير متوقع."

الرواية كوحدة متكاملة عمل رائع ولكني ربما بلغت قمة دهشتي في الفصل الخامس المعنون ب "المصادفة" وهو الفصل الذي شعرت فيه بعبقرية كونديرا في حبك رواية ليس لها حبكة واضحة. الفصل المعنون (ميناء الساعة) كان الوحيد الذي فشل في الحصول على اهتمامي

كما في معظم رواياته وربما بشكل أوضح هنا، لا يتم سرد الحدث دون التقديم لعرض اسبابه وتفسيراته ومعانيه، وهو ما يجعل محاولة تلخيص ما حدث في الرواية تحايلا لا يفي بحق ما أراد قوله كونديرا.

هر کتابی از کوندرا بخونم اینو مینویسم که فقط میلان کوندرا می‌تونه یه سری افراد بی ربط رو در اتفاقاتی به نظر بی ربط کنار هم ردیف کنه و لابه‌لای اون نظرات خودش راجع به خیلی چیزها مثل ازدواج، رابطه، انسان، میل به جاودانگی و ... رو بیان کنه و ما بشینیم با اشتیاق اون‌ها رو بخونیم اما بعد از پایان نتونیم بگیم داستان این کتاب دقیقا چی بود، چرا؟ چون خود کوندرا میگه: «اصل مطلب در یک رمان فقط از طریق همان رمان قابل انتقال است؛ بنابراین اقتباس ها نمی‌توانند چیزی به جز حواشی را انتقال دهند. اگر هنوز هم کسی پیدا می‌شود که بخواهد از مفاهیم رمان خود محافظت کند باید آن را طوری بنویسد که قابل اقتباس نباشد؛ به عبارت دیگر باید آن را طوری بنویسد که قابل بازگو کردن نباشد.» اما در مجموع داستان با خود کوندرا و دیدن یک حرکت از یک زن شروع میشه، اون زن میشه نقش اصلی داستان، اگنس، بعد پدر، خواهر، همسر و دخترش وارد میشن اما اینها تنها افراد حاضر نیستند و افراد دیگه‌ای از جمله گوته هم نقشی بازی میکنند، و در نهایت رمان با خود کوندرا در مکان شروع خاتمه پیدا می‌کنه. اثری پر از حرف و جذاب.ه

هجده نوزده سالم بود که برای اولین بار از کوندرا خوندم. بار هستی. فکر کنم خوشم اومد و حال کردم. کتاب‌های دیگه‌ش رو خوندم و در عین این که لذت می‌بردم، نمی‌فهمیدم. از استالین حرف می‌زد و اون موقع چیزهای زیادی از تاریخ جهان نمی‌دونستم. تا این که زمان بیشتر گذشت و باز به کتاب‌هاش رجوع کردم. این بار بهتر می‌فهمیدم. این بار بیشتر می‌دیدم که چه شاهکارهایی خلق کرده این آقای کوندرا.
پس از مدت‌ها اومدم سراغ جاودانگی.
داستان از جایی شروع می‌شه که یه پیرزنی دستشو می‌بره بالا و برای یکی دست تکون می‌ده. راوی این حرکت رو می‌بینه و شروع می‌کنه به فکر کردن راجع به حرکات، ژست‌ها و انسان‌ها. بارها در کتاب این جمله نقل می‌شه که حرکات، ایده‌ها کم‌اند و انسان‌ها بسیار. داره از دایره‌وار بودن انسان و رفتارهاش حرف می‌زنه، حرکتی که داریم و در انتها برمی‌گردیم به جایی که بودیم، تکرار تکرار و نبودن چیزهای جدید.
کتاب از ایده‌های زیادی حرف می‌زنه. چیزهایی مثل میل به جاودانگی، انواع جاودانه شدن، بودن در ذهن دیگری، دوست داشته شدن، دوست داشتن، لحظه‌های اروتیک، خاطره و حافظه و یادآوری و از همه مهم‌تر برای من ژست‌ها.

این کتاب باعث جرقه‌ای در من شد. راوی تیزبین کتاب، (کوندرا) چیزهایی رو در رفتار آدما می‌دید که تا به حال بهشون دقت نکرده بودم. ژست‌ها. نحوه‌ی انجام کارها. شیوه گرفتن لیوان در دست. شیوه راه رفتن شیوه غذا خوردن. به خودم اومدم و دیدم ای دل! من هم چقدر از این تصویرها از آدم‌ها دارم. چقدر آدم‌هایی که ازشون دل خوشی ندارم، شاید در یک آن حس خوبی ازشون نگرفتم و وقتی بهشون فکر می‌کنم ژست‌هایی در ذهنم یادآوری می‌شن که زیبا نیستن و چه آدم‌هایی که به نظرم دلربا، جذاب یا دارای کشش میان و باز هم وقتی بهشون فکر می‌کنم سلسله تصاویری از ژست‌هاشون توی ذهنم میاد؛ ژست‌هایی که جذبم کردن، ژست‌هایی که معلوم نیست ریشه‌ی علاقه داشتن یا پس زدن‌شون کجای ناخودآگاهمه ولی کاملا حضور دارن و رفتارها و علایق من رو شکل دادن.

این فکرها رو می‌کردم و برای خودم این فرضیه رو مطرح کردم که اصلا عشق از همین ژست‌ها میاد. اون چیزی که نمی‌دونیم چیه و وقتی کسی رو می‌بینیم ازش خوشمون میاد یا بدمون میاد، شاید همین ژست‌هان. همین که می‌بینیم طرف چطور ایستاده و چطور راه می‌ره و چطور چشم‌هاش تکون می‌خورن و انگشت‌هاش موقع حرف زدن چطور تکون می‌خورن. همه این ژست‌ها شاید یه جایی از ذهن و ناخودآگاه ما رو تحریک می‌کنن و ما از اون آدم خوشمون میاد یا ازش بدمون میاد.
خیلی جالبه. بعد از این کتاب، خیلی به ژست‌ها دقت می‌کنم. با دوستام حرف می‌زنم و ازشون می‌پرسم که ژست‌ها به نظرشون چقدر موجب جذابیت یا عدم جذابی یک فرد می‌شن. البته که دارم درباره شهود اولیه نسبت به یه آدم حرف می‌زنم و یک آدم جنبه‌های دیگری هم برای جذابیت یا عدم جذابیت داره، ولی حس می‌کنم ریشه‌های این ژست‌ها انقدر قوی هستن که هرچقدر هم که ما بخوایم به علل اخلاقی یا معنوی از کسی خوشمون بیاد، باز هم این ژست‌ها هستن که مداخله می‌کنن و حس و شهود لحظه‌ای‌مون رو شکل می‌دن.

کوندرا نیاز به تعریف نداره. چیزی که فهمیدم اینه که باید هرسال حتما ازش بخونم. باید بارها کتاب‌هاش رو بخونم، چون به نظرم دقیق‌ترین نویسنده‌ای است که تا به حال باهاش مواجه شدم. دقیق، مثل یک جراح روح آدم رو باز می‌کنه و سعی می‌کنه رفتارش رو کشف کنه. هزار سوال ایجاد می‌‌کنه و گاهی هم بهشون جواب می‌ده.

یه جا توی کتاب یه تمثیلی از رمان می‌زنه که به نظرم فوق‌العاده‌ست و می‌تونه معرفی کننده تمام رمان‌های خودش باشه. به نظر کوندرا آفت رمان، پی‌رنگ و سلسله اتفاقاته. نه این که خوب نباشن، ولی رمانی که فقط از اتفاقات پر شده باشه به قول خودش مثل این می‌مونه که مخاطب رو انداخته توی یه کوچه تنگ و به ضرب شلاق جلو می‌برش. همه چیز از پیش تعیین شده و حساب شده. اما در نقطه‌ی مقابل این تعبیر، رمان مورد علاقه کوندرا رو داریم که رمانی هست که شبیه یه مهمونی زیبا شبونه است. مهمونی‌ای که آروم توش قدم می‌زنی و از یه سفره بزرگ چیزهای متنوعی رو می‌چشی؛ آهسته و سر فرصت و سراسر لذت.
هیچ استعاره‌ای بهتر از این مهمونی شام، نمی‌تونه توصیف‌کننده رمان‌های کوندرا باشه.

امیدوارم همه از این مهمونی نهایت لذت رو ببرن چون ساعت داره به ۱۲ نزدیک می‌شه! شب‌خوش.‌

Đỉnh đỉnh đỉnh đỉnh đỉnh lắm à nghen

اين كتاب صحت دوباره اى گذاشت بر ذهنيتم از قدرت شناخت آدم ها و جزئيات شخصيت هاشون توسط ميلان كوندرا و تحليل رابطه هاى زن و مردش. توصيف هايى كه براى بعضى صحنه ها بخصوص هم آغوشى ها بكار ميبره انقدر خاصن كه گاهى فكر ميكنم اين حجم از كلمات كليشه نشده رو چرا ما به كار نميبريم؟ و اينكه داستان پر از اين شاخه به اون شاخه پريدنه ولى درآخر يكپارچگى و كامل بودنى بدست مياد كه واقعن خارق العادس. تنها ايرادى كه از مترجم دارم اينه كه اين كتاب بايد يك ويرايش ديگه ميشد، چون پر از اشتباهات تايپيه و بعضى وقتا اعصاب خوردكن ميشه.

n  2023-7-06n:
Fourth trip and a near-immediate re-read seems necessary, as I still don't know what makes this novel "tick"! Kundera himself suggests that he has tried to anticipate his readers' desires to "master" his prose (as well as prevent all attempts to "adapt"/destroy (by turning Immortality into a film) what he has accomplished:

n   The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.’
***
‘I visualize [Mahler] sitting in the hotel room, surrounded by manuscript paper,’ Paul continued, refusing to let himself be interrupted. ‘He was convinced that his whole work would be ruined if the melody were played by a clarinet instead of an oboe during the second movement.’

‘That’s precisely so,’ I said, thinking of my novel.

Paul continued: [...] Everything is worked through, thought through, felt through, nothing has been left to chance, but that enormous perfection overwhelms us, it surpasses the capacity of our memory, our ability to concentrate, so that even the most fanatically attentive listener will grasp no more than one-hundredth of the symphony, and certainly it will be this one-hundredth that Mahler cared about the least.’

His idea, so obviously correct, cheered him up, whereas I was becoming sadder and sadder: if a reader skips a single sentence of my novel he won’t be able to understand it, and yet where in the world will you find a reader who never skips a line? Am I not myself the greatest skipper of lines and pages?

I don’t deny those symphonies their perfection,’ continued Paul. ‘I only deny the importance of that perfection. Those super­ sublime symphonies are nothing but cathedrals of the useless. They are inaccessible to man. They are inhuman. We exaggerated their significance. They made us feel inferior. Europe reduced Europe to fifty works of genius which it never understood. Just think of this outrageous inequality: millions of Europeans signifying nothing, against ^fifty names signifying everything! Class inequality is but an insignificant shortcoming compared to this insulting metaphysical inequality, which turns some into grains of sand while endowing others with the meaning of being!’ n

So, Kundera, in writing a thematically linked, unfilmable (because it lacks both a plot marked by linear/temporal causation as well as features an abundance of—delightful—essayistic digressions) novel, about various aspects of immortality (gestures which outlive their human hosts, the human longing for what cannot be reclaimed from time's passing, great works of literature, painting and music...) is himself attempting to create a work which joins the immortals even though he knows it is a self-delusion (nothing of us lives on, even if our texts do), and even though it seems to him, writing at the beginning of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" in 1993, that the novel itself has left history or has been left behind as history ends, making this novel's "true" title (he says) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, even though he already wrote a book by that name, for here he explores ever-more-deeply our human longing for those very things we cannot have—a legacy, love, a life itself, that somehow outlasts death:

n  And at that moment I understood him at last: if we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy.

I said: ‘You play with the world like a melancholy child who has no little brother.’

Yes, that’s the right metaphor for Avenarius! I’ve been looking for it ever since I’ve known him. At last!n

In that other novel mentioned above, ULB, Kundera says that his characters explore the terrain over those borderlines which he himself will not or cannot cross...I have shown you but two such characters from this novel, Avenarius (who is out of tune with time, and plays with a world which regards not neither him nor his values), and Paul (who surrounds himself/finds himself surrounded by women, and not only welcomes this but prescribes it for all of humanity, so that we shan't exterminate ourselves (etc.) via maleness and its accompanying technologies:

n   By this gesture a woman invites us: come, follow me, and you don’t know where she is inviting you to go and she doesn’t know either, but she invites you in the conviction that it’s worth going where she is inviting you. That’s why I tell you: either woman will become man’s future or mankind will perish, because only woman is capable of nourishing within her an unsubstantiated hope and inviting us to a doubtful future, which we would have long ceased to believe in were it not for women.

All my life I’ve been willing to follow their voice, even though that voice is mad, and whatever else I may be I am not a madman. But nothing is more beautiful than when someone who isn’t mad goes into the unknown, led by a mad voice!’ And once again he solemly repeated a German sentence: ‘Das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan! The eternal feminine draws us on!’n

Though Kundera claims he finds Paul's answer wrong in its temporality (that the point of the gesture, or a work of art, is not to draw us into the future, but to point to our own "now"), I have a hard time believing that Kundera, that coolest, sanest, and most rational of novelists, is not also one of those sane men who celebrates the madmen who explore the unknown—indeed, in ULB again, he claims that novel's only morality is that it must explore regions of human nature or the human condition which other novels have not discovered.

Furthermore, I believe that Kundera finds himself somewhat out of step with time, having written in The Art of the Novel that the (European, at least) novel may be in its "sunset" phase. What does he mean by that, and is it so?
Well, as for the second question, there is no way of telling what era we are in while we are in it; such diagnoses are if anything retrospective in nature, but Kundera anyhow does feel modernity (born with the Enlightenment, but also with Cervantes) is in its death throes, and that though the death might take quite some time, and something else perhaps take its place, that successor has not yet announced its imminent arrival: we live in a time of repetition and rehashing, of perpetual "rediscovery" of what has gone before:n  

When he ["Rubens", an ex-painter and Lothario] was a student, he imagined all the painters in the world moving along the same great road; it was the royal road leading from the Gothic painters to the great Italian masters of the Renaissance, and on to the Dutch painters and to Delacroix, from Delacroix to Manet, from Manet to Monet, from Bonnard (oh, how he loved Bonnard!) to Matisse, from Cézanne to Picasso. The painters did not march along this road like a group of soldiers, no, each went his own way, and yet what each of them discovered served as an inspiration to the others and they all knew that they were blazing a trail into the unknown, a common goal that united them all. And then suddenly the road disappeared. It was like waking up from a beautiful dream; for a while we look for the fading images until finally we realize that dreams cannot be called back. The road had disappeared, but it remained in the souls of painters in the form of an inextinguishable desire ‘to go forward’. But where is ‘forward ’ when there is no longer any road? In which direction is one to look for the lost ‘forward ’? And so the desire to go forward became the painters’ neurosis; each set out in a different direction and yet their tracks criss-crossed each other like a crowd milling around in the same city square. They wanted to differentiate themselves one from the other while each of them kept discovering a different but already discovered discovery. Fortunately, people soon appeared (not artists but businessmen and organizers of exhibitions with their agents and publicists), who imposed order on this disorder and determined which discovery was to be rediscovered in any particular year. This re-establishment of order greatly increased the sales of contemporary paintings. They were bought by the same wealthy people who only ten years before had laughed at Picasso and Dali, thereby earning Rubens’ passionate hatred. Now the wealthy buyers decided that they would be modem and Rubens sighed with relief that he was not a painter.
ttt
He once visited New York’s Museum of Modem Art. On the first floor he saw Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Mir6, Dali and Ernst, and he was happy. The brushstrokes on the canvas expressed wild relish. Reality was being magnificently violated like a woman raped by a faun, or it battled with the painter like a bull with a toreador. But on the next floor, reserved for contemporary paintings, he found himself in a desert: no trace of dashing brushstrokes on canvas; no trace of relish; both bull and toreador had disappeared; the paintings had expelled reality altogether, or else they imitated it with cynical, obtuse literalness. Between the two floors flowed the river Lethe, the river of death and forgetting. He told himself at that time that his renunciation of painting might have had a deeper significance than lack of talent or stubbornness: midnight had struck on the dial of European art.
ttt
If an alchemist of genius were transplanted into the nineteenth century, what would his occupation be? What would become of Christopher Columbus today, when there are a thousand shipping companies? What would Shakespeare write when theatre did not exist, or had ceased to exist?
ttt
These are not rhetorical questions. When a person has talent for an activity which has passed its midnight (or has not yet reached its first hour), what happens to his gift? Does it change?
ttt
Adapt? Would Christopher Columbus become director of a ship­ping line? Would Shakespeare write scripts for Hollywood? Would Picasso produce cartoon shows? Or would all these great talents step aside, retreat, so to speak, to the cloister of history, full of cosmic disappointment that they had been born at the wrong time, outside their own era, outside the dial, the time they’d been created for? Would they abandon their untimely talents as Rimbaud abandoned poetry at the age of nineteen?
ttt
Of course, there is no answer to these questions, neither for me, nor for you, nor for Rubens.

nKundera uses the metaphor of the "Dial": the European cuckoo clock which towers above all our heads has passed or is passing midnight, and our rich pageant/historical project/metanarrative has turned into a pumpkin, deflating our grand gestures and making our grand longings for transcendence (including the novel) much less…grand, perhaps, but more fully human for all that. We can't go on; we go on. And so do Rubens, Paul, Avanarius, and Kundera himself (94 this year! Surely that Unbearably Light Nobel is at hand?!), beyond the dial of linear time:

n   He found himself outside the dial’s time. To find oneself outside the dial’s time does not mean the end nor does it mean death. On the dial of European painting midnight had struck, too, and yet painters continue to paint. To be outside the dial’s time simply means that no longer will anything new or important happen.n

n  2019-12-03n:
This is my third time through this, perhaps Kundera's last "great" novel (in the sense of expansiveness which is lacking in his later novellas, as in Philip Roth's own post-"American Trilogy" work), and, as always, I am not sure I completely got it (or to be completely honest, I am completely sure that I did not quite get it), which is why I will keep coming back to him, circling around his mysterious imagination like the nocturnal moth around the bare lightbulb that closes The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And hey, this also happens to be my hundredth review here on GR, so I will allow the author himself to pour me some of that tasty wine he and several of his characters partake of in the book's final pages as they meet to celebrate the approaching end of this very novel....

I am fascinated by his repeated celebration of and undermining of the centrality of the European novel (specifically that trajectory of it which takes in Cervantes, Sterne, Flaubert, Musil and Kafka) as the previous century draws to its close--what his postmodernist character Paul cynically says about trajectory of European fine art could easily be applied to the novel or to the trajectory of the modern arts plural/in general:

[...] his ideas were getting more and more exaggerated and provocative. He said, "High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong in the same stadium."
"Beethoven and Stalin belong together?" asked the Bear with icy irony.
"Of course, no matter how much that may shock you. War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from each other. When one comes to an end, the other will end also, and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either."(111)

Of course, that would mean that Kundera lumps himself into that fifty years of postwar Nada, and while it is always dangerous to seek the author's voice in that of his characters, in The ULB he intrudes upon the narrative to inform us that each of his characters crosses a border or boundary of some sort which he himself has remained behind, so it is safe to say that the ongoing (ir)relevance of art in post-modern times to the wider "culture" as a whole is something that continues to fascinate, nay, haunt him --which at times tempts me to see his novels as explicit psychogeographies if not psychomachias of MK himself.

Further along these lines, what Paul says much later in the book about Mahler suggests a late-20C weariness with the very notion of "Great" art (even as his narrator's ongoing fascination with Goethe continually suggests otherwise):

Everything is worked through, thought through, felt through, nothing has been left to chance, but that enormous perfection overwhelms us, it surpasses the capacity of our memory, our ability to concentrate, so that even the most fanatically attentive listener will grasp no more than one-hundredth of the symphony, and certainly it will be this one-hundredth that Mahler cared about the least."
His idea, so obviously correct, cheered him up, whereas I was becoming sadder and sadder: if a reader skips a single sentence of my novel he won't be able to understand it, and yet where in the world will you find a reader who never skips a line? Am I not myself the greatest skipper of lines and pages?
"I don't deny those symphonies their perfection," continued Paul. "I only deny the importance of that perfection. Those super-sublime symphonies are nothing but cathedrals of the useless. They are inaccessible to man. They are inhuman. We exaggerated their significance. They made us feel inferior. Europe reduced Europe to fifty works of genius that it never understood. Just think of this outrageous inequality: millions of Europeans signifying nothing, against fifty names signifying everything! Class inequality is but an insignificant shortcoming compared to this insulting metaphysical inequality, which turns some into grains of sand while endowing others with the meaning of being!"(294)

A couple of more final passages to throw at you concern the "eternal trial" we the living subject dead authors/artists to-- perhaps their only real immortality, a part of Kundera wonders:

"I'm not talking about hatred for Hemingway! I'm talking about his work. I'm talking about their work! It was necessary to say out loud at last that reading about Hemingway is a thousand times more amusing and instructive than reading Hemingway. It was necessary to show that Hemingway's work is but a coded form of Hemingway's life and that this life was just as poor and meaningless as all our lives. It was necessary to cut Mahler's symphony into little pieces and use it as background music for toilet-paper ads. It was necessary at last to end the terror of the immortals. To overthrow the arrogant power of the Ninth Symphonies and the Fausts!"(295)

Pair that with this exchange between Hemingway and Goethe as they meet in the land of the Immortals:

"What do you want? You were condemned to immortality for the sin of writing books. You explained it to me yourself."
Goethe shrugged and said with some pride, "Perhaps our books arc immortal, in a certain sense. Perhaps." He paused and then added softly, with great emphasis, "But we aren't."
"Quite the contrary," Hemingway protested bitterly. "Our books will probably soon stop being read. All that will remain of your Faust will be that idiotic opera by Gounod. And maybe also that line about the eternal feminine pulling us somewhere or other..."
"Das Ewt0weibliche zieht uns hinan," recited Goethe.
"Right. But people will never stop prying into your life, down to the smallest details."(213)

Certainly the notion of works of fiction taking the back seat, going forward, to the biography of their authors is a depressing one, and while I do hope that that's not true, I still wonder….

[Continued in comments]

هذا الحوار دار بين البروفيسور أفيناريوس وميلان كونديرا

-أفيناريوس: ماذا تكتب على وجه التحديد؟

+كونديرا: ما أكتبه غير قابل للحكي.

-أفيناريوس: للأسف.

+ كونديرا: لماذا للأسف؟ إنها فرصة في أيامنا هذه التي ينقضّ فيها الناس على كلّ ما يُكتب ليحوّلوه إلى فيلم، إلى دراما تلفزية أو إلى رسوم متحركة. وبما أن الجوهري في الرواية هو ما لا يمكن التعبير عنه إلا بالرواية، لا يبقى في الاقتباس إلا ما هو غير جوهري
على أي شخص لديه ما يكفي من الجنون ليستمرّ في كتابة الروايات، إن هو أراد ضمان حمايتها، أن يكتبها بطريقة تجعل اقتباسها متعذرًا، أو بعبارة أخرى، تجعل حكيها متعذرًا.

لم يوافق أفيناريوس على هذا الرأي فقال-:
- أستطيع أن أحكي لك باستمتاع كبير رواية أليكساندر دوما "الفرسان الثلاثة" متى شئت، ومن بدايتها حتى نهايتها.

+ كونديرا: أنا أحب مثلك أليكساندر دوما، لكنني آسف أن تكون كل الروايات تقريبًا التي كتبت حتى يومنا هذا خاضعة بشكل مفرط لقاعدة وحدة الحدث، أقصد أن أحداثها ووقائعها جميعًا تقوم على تسلسل سببي واحد.
إن هذه الروايات تشبه زقاقًا ضيقًا تطارد فيه الشخصيات ونحن نجلدها.
إن التوتر الدرامي هو اللعنة الحقيقية التي حلّت بالرواية لأنه يحوّل كل شيء، بما في ذلك أبدع الصفحات، وأكثر المشاهد والملاحظات إدهاشًا إلى مجرد مرحلة تقود إلى الحل النهائي الذي تتركز فيه معنى كل ما سبقه. هكذا تحترق الرواية بناء توتّرها الخاص مثل حزمة قش.

دا كان وصف ميلان كونديرا للرواية
يعني مينفعش حد يسألك بتقرأ لمين وتقول بقرأ الخلود ويرد عليك بتتكلم عن إيه الرواية دي
مش هتعرف تجاوب يعني مينفعش تختصر الرواية في فكرة خلود الشخص، لأنك هتلاقي كونديرا بيتكلم عن حاجات كتيرة في الرواية
تحسهم ملهمش علاقة ببعض وفي الآخر تلاقيه رابطهم ببعض
مينفعش تعدي صفحة أو تقفز على سطر من الرواية كما يقول، دا مش علشان هو بيحكي قصة جميلة ومرتبطة ببعضها، لأ دا لأمه في كل صفحة ممكن يتكلم في موضوع مختلف ومينفعش متقرأش هو كاتب إيه
كونديرا يقرأ ثم يقرأ ثم يقرأ

في الخلود اتكلم عن الوجه، الإيماءات، الانتحار، الصورولوجيين والإيكولوجيين
اتكلم عن الضحك والإبتسامة
عن غوته وهينغواي
عن بيتهوفن
عن العالم الآخر

باختصار ميلان كونديرا هياخدك لرحلة بعد ما تنتهي منها
مش هتعرف تعبر عن سعادتك بأي كلمة
كل اللي هتتمناه وقتها إنك تعيد الرحلة دي مليون مرة.

وشكرًا للصديق أحمد عرابي لأنه وضحلي مفاهيم كتيرة كانت مستعصية عليّ إدراكها وفهمها، شكرًا تاني لقراءتنا المشتركة، وللرحلة الجميلة في عالم كونديرا.
لك كل التقدير والاحترام.

كونديرا آسيادنا راضيين عنك وحياة ربنا :D

Of my favourite authors, Haruki Murakami is like my enigmatic, bohemian tutor; Fyodor Dostoyevsky my reclusive, yet highly proficient counselor; and Milan Kundera an amiable uncle full of wit and wisdom. While Kundera's stories in themselves are beautiful, it's his philosophical insights and observations about mankind which I can't get enough of - yes, this is someone who I can truly respect in raising their voice about the human condition.

When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons; he does not yet sense that his life contains just a single theme; he will come to realise it only when his life begins to enact its first variations.

There are countless themes swimming inside this novel (or are they merely variations on life and death?), and every few pages you're left wondering how you feel about what he's just touched on - have I ever thought about this?; yes, he has put it perfectly; that's what I've always wanted to put into words but never could!

'Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone would put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.'

One of the strongest forces in our lives, and perhaps a natural human constant, is identifying with ourselves. Could you go a day without looking in the mirror? Isn't your name so dear to you that it even feels like it's something you yourself created out of talent and inspiration? Are our gestures, familial relations, mannerisms in making love and what we hold as our own peculiarities, actually unique when the sheer number of people on Earth suggests otherwise? If we created art, do we wish for its immortality or our own as the creator? Just how well do we think we know how others perceive us?

Reading Kundera, you're put face-to-face with many questions about your present and identity, but you're also pulled back to your past, with your childhood, family home, regrets and first steps in love; as well as the future, where your dreams and aspirations lie, what we want in love and matrimony, how we want to be seen by the world in life, and in death. Personally I think too little of the present, sandwiched between my past and future.

'I long for an experiment that would examine, by means of electrodes attached to the human head, exactly how much of one's life a person devotes to the present, how much to the memories and how much to the future. This would let us know who a man really is in relation to his time. What human time really is.'

I especially liked Agnes in this novel; I felt that her own world and dignity were precious to her over anything else, and I could relate to that. While she realises she loved and truly connected with her father, there's always an insurmountable gap between her and her mother, sister, lovers, even husband and daughter.

Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes).

The only reason I didn't give this book five stars is that it fell just short of the standards of The Unbearable Lightness of Being which touched me deeper, but I must say that Immortality easily overpowers most novels I've rated four stars. If you haven't read Kundera before, I highly recommend these two, in my eyes, works of art that speak through their wisdom, insights, and most of all, love.

August 5, 2015

2016 edit: Kundera isn't on my Favourite Authors list any more, but I still love this work and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I let myself be captivated to the point of bewitchment by this book by an author as amusing as he was lucid and desperate.
We can find much in this book.
There is a reflection on the history of literature.
There is an exhibition of what one might call the wisdom of erotic existence.
There is also an exhibition of the dissolution of the senses and all values. Western civilization has flourished through characters whose anchoring in modernity is brilliantly marked.
And everything we find is so intertwined that we get lost forever in finding ourselves with great pleasure tinged with bitterness.

بتینا توی یه نامه داستان ملاقات گوته و بتهوون رو تعریف می کنه و تضاد شخصیتشون رو به چالش می کشه:


روزی گوته و بتهوون در کوچه‌های ویَن در حال قدم زدن بودند. جمعی از اشراف‌زادگان ویَنی از مقابل آن دو در حال عبور از همان کوچه بودند. گوته به بتهوون اشاره می‌کند که بهتر است کناری بروند و به اشراف‌زادگان اجازهٔ عبور دهند. بتهوون با عصبانیت می‌گوید که «ارزش هنرمند بیشتر از اشراف است. آن‌ها باید کنار روند و به ما احترام بگذارند.» گوته بتهوون را رها می‌کند و در گوشه‌ای منتظر می‌ماند تا اشراف‌زادگان عبور کنند. کلاهش را نیز به نشانهٔ احترام برمی‌دارد و گردنش را خم می‌کند. بتهوون با همان آهنگ به راهش ادامه می‌دهد. اشراف‌زادگان با دیدن بتهوون کنار می‌روند و راه را برای عبور وی باز می‌کنند و به وی ادای احترام می‌کنند. بتهوون هم از میان آن‌ها عبور می‌کند و فقط کلاهش را به نشانهٔ احترام کمی با دست بالا می‌بَرد. در انتهای دیگرِ کوچه منتظر گوته می‌شود تا پس از عبورِ اشراف‌زاده‌ها به وی بپیوندد.
.
و جالب اینجاست که چنین نامه ای واقعا وجود داره

يجعلك في حالة تشويش في البداية، و كأنه يلاعبك "نط الحبلة" يعطيك طرف الخيط
و يحتفظ بالآخر، يوهمك بأنك تعرف ما تؤل عليه القصة، و من ثم يفاجئك بإعطائك طرف خيط واحدا تلو الأخر
تكف عن اللعب، و تنهمك بفهم فلسفة الحياة من وجهة نظر كويندرا ...

رواية درب، لكل خطوة في الدرب متعة و معرفة و حكمة و جمال تكتشفه في الرحلة
ليست رواية طريق، تبدأ بنقطة و تنتهي بنهاية ... المهم الرحلة في الدرب و ليس الوصول لنهاية الطريق فقط

في معظم الروايات يكون هناك بطل وحيد او بطلان، أما في هذه الرواية- روايات كويندرا مجملا-كل شخصية لها دورها. ليس هناك بطل ينفرد بالأفضلية للقصة، كما في الحياة...
لا أنا و لا أنت و لا أي شخصية هي محور الكون ...
كلنا لنا دور في الحياة، في حياتنا و في حياة من حولنا.