But Anyway! Sometimes I like to read when I am sleepy, before bed, or on the train in the morning when my body still hates me for waking it up and thus refuses to feed any blood to my brain. So, for those moments, I pick up something funner, and fictionaller.
Like Life is Elsewhere! I love this book already, love love love it. I think, in fact, that it confirms my general suspicion that Kundera is one of my favorite authors ever. I hope that my writing eventually takes influence from his. High school English teachers always say you should show and not tell. I disagree, at least with how absolute that sentiment is. My favorite books are ones that tell. This style introduces a meta-person that goes above and beyond the diegetic characters. The narrator is in his/herself a character who flavors the entire narrative, though they are never materialized. The narrator isn't always the author, but in Kundera's case I see the invisible man in the armchair, some old scruffy dude under a yellow light with a cigar.
Other authors that tell instead of show: basically every British author before the 20th century, John Steinbeck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vonnegut sometimes. They all create a sense of distance from the characters. It's paradoxical though, because at the same time we are privy to their most intimate thoughts, things they would never confess, things kept secret even from their own psyche. And at times - Kundera does this a lot - suddenly the reader is yanked back because the narrator pretends innocently not to know the character at a given moment. Or either, the narrator skips over natural facts because they are deemed irrelevant. The reader is kept in the universe of the story teller. They aren't allowed really to descend into the story, but the tradeoff is that the reader gains omniscience.
Anyway, another reason I really love Milan Kundera is because he - more than anyone I know - is able to weave together philisophical abstractions with standard plotlines without sacrificing either. I've tried and failed. Well, maybe not. Mirror Men is like that, but the plot is still subservient to the philosophy and that's my biggest problem in the second draft. It's hard!
I have a secret bias toward Kundera too - He's Czechoslovakian. When my folks crossed the pond, they left from Czechoslovakia, which of course doesn't exist anymore in that incarnation. Of all of my ethnic makeup, I'm most fascinated by being Czechoslovakian. I'm German too, but Germans are Western European and thus too familiar. My father's heritage is muddy at best, and what I do know of it (Scots-Irish, Cherokee) is well-worn in American bloodlines. It's Czech culture alone that remains mysterious, aloof. People hardly pay any attention to Eastern Europe anymore.
And I see it in my features. My full-Czech grandfather is the only person I really recognize myself in. I only know him from pictures, and that may have been a blessing. He never became human to me. He was only a distant, frozen expression locked in sepia. He looked handsome and troubled. He had my nose. In real life he drank his way to early death. He couldn't hold a job and couldn't stay away from pretty women and babysat my tiny mom by dragging her to bars with him. Not unlike a Kundera character, actually.
I even seen a vague resemblance in Kundera himself. It's hard to describe. It's less in the particular features and more in the holistic composition of the face. The full lips and strong checkbones, the squinty eyes, I don't know. But Kundera makes Prague feel like a place of narrow alleys and wide wooden lofts, and his generation was one of artistic - if not nihilistic - abandon, of sexual exploration and political unrest. I've been to Prague - it's as gorgeous as everyone says. But Kundera is one who shared with me the spirit of Czechoslovakia. Otherwise, I never would have known.
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