I am reminded of the mild antipathy those novels used to generate in me by this week's reading of Kundera's The Art of the Novel. It is a worthwhile book, but Kundera's authorial persona remains odious! Anyway, a few bits I especially liked:
Joyce set a microphone within Bloom's head. Thanks to the fantastic espionage of interior monologue, we have learned an enormous amount about what we are. But, myself, I cannot use that microphone.And, preciously but pricelessly: "I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods." So dandyish, so self-absorbed: and yet I cannot help but sympathize...
Weren't we in college at basically the same time? I felt like everyone thought of Kundera as something you might have liked in high school, like John Irving. Maybe I was hanging with THE RIGHT SORT.
ReplyDeleteKundera is one of those writers who write the same novel over and over, but at least he managed to get his novel right once - and that is with Immortality, which is an excellent book. His work before Immortality is basically rough drafts of the novel (including Unbearable Lightness) and afterwards he began to write long studies instead of real novels. But Immortality is very much worth a read. A novel that actually fits the tag "post-modern" as opposed to most of the trash labelled as such by people who don't know what the name means (see also Auster, Paul).
ReplyDeleteAnd JSE, I don't really see how John Irving (a middle-brow Steven King) fits in any category with Kundera...
Thanks so much for this--that's great about the semicolons & periods!
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