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Leaving a Trace
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19300 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1991 |
3,017 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
IMMORTALITY
Milan Kundera, translated by Peter Kussi
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991
384 pp., $21.95
"My lifetime ambition" the Czech writer Milan Kundera once told an interviewer, "has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form." In five novels, Kundera has explored questions that concern, even obsess, him: Who are we? How can we understand our essential nature? Do we know ourselves by our thoughts? Our behavior? Are we the sum of events that comprise our history? What is the connection between our biography and the underlying characteristics that define us?
These are the questions that recur in all of his fictions: The Joke, his first book, which became a major literary event during the Prague Spring of 1968 and earned Kundera his reputation as a literary iconoclast; Life Is Elsewhere and The Farewell Party, published in 1974; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which when it appeared in 1978, caused the Czech government to revoke Kundera's citizenship and ban his books; and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), probably the novel most familiar to American readers, which appeared here as a highly acclaimed film.
Kundera himself admits that the questions he brings to his fiction are not new. "All novels, of every age," he says, "are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It is one of those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based." But Kundera does not find answers through the kind of psychological approach that interested such modernist practitioners of fiction as Joyce or Proust. Nor does he believe that an individual's self can be understood through action or behavior. "To apprehend the self in my novels," he explains, "means to grasp the essence of its existential problem. To grasp its existential code."
Kundera expresses this code through the use of key words that have become familiar for his readers. Lightness and weight, fidelity and betrayal, weakness and strength, memory and forgetting--these are part of the distinctive vocabulary that Kundera redefines in each of his books. A few years ago, he distilled his literary code in an essay, "Sixty-three Words," in which he reflected on the particular terms that recur in his
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