Fixation

Since September, most of the books I’ve read are related to work. I was a bit worried because I started relating reading to stress, hence the much needed revival of leisure reading. I started with Michal Viewegh’s Bringing up Girls in Bohemia, a short novel about Beata’s obscure love affair with her tutor. The novel was interesting enough for me to give up watching You, Me and Dupree in the plane, which is a pleasant surprise, because I only picked this book because it’s set in today’s Prague. If I have a thing for Latin America academically, I now have a thing for Czech writers.

Clearly, my previous statement is just a notch less poser than using the words ‘bloke’ and ‘slag’ in Manila. Before Viewegh, I only knew Milan Kundera. So more accurately, I have a thing for two Czech writers. In any case, my fondness for Czech-based novels is reflective of my lifelong desire of going to Prague. I’d be really frustrated if I don’t go this year. *hint*

In the interim, I am contented reading The Joke. This novel is special because it’s Kundera’s first novel and weird enough, the only Kundera novel I haven’t read. Following Neil’s logic in DVD marathons, I read this novel sparingly because it’s the last one for now.

In a nutshell, the novel is about Ludvic, who was expelled from the Party and sent to a labour camp because of a joke he made –

“Optimism is the opiate of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!”

In a very Nietzschean sense, Kundera alludes to the importance of humour in a revolution, but Ludvic cannot explain humour to humourless people. He spends the rest of his life condemning the totalitarian government, realising later on that he himself has been repressive in his relationship with women. In a geeky way, I’m fascinated with how Kundera plays up structure-agency interaction in all of his novels.

The theme I missed from this novel though is abandonment. Unlike Ludvic, the Kunderan heroes/heroines I like are those who win their battles through dissociation, inaction and exile. I particularly like Agnes from Immortality, who knew she “had nothing in common with those two-legged creatures with a head on their shoulders and a mouth in their face”. Initially, she considered this absurd and immoral and tried to fight it, until she reached Switzerland where her relaxing concept of non-belonging won over the social imperative to “play a small part in some great adventure”. I guess it is not accidental that she realised this in Switzerland, a non-combatant territory, where even internal struggles can be discarded.

One of my colleagues told me – “I get this heavy feeling whenever I read Kundera … Such a sadist Kundera is.” I get that heavy feeling as well, and I guess that’s the reason why Kundera is such an effective writer. He can sell “heaviness” over “unbearable lightness”. Lightness is unbearable because in as much as it causes man “to be lighter than air, soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being,” he only becomes “half real. His movements are free and insignificant.” The heaviest of burdens may pin us to the ground, but it is “simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfilment.”

I guess Prague’s charm can be seen from the same angle. It’s a city that struggles between lightness and weight, memory and forgetting. People marvel and “kneel at the foot of oppressive monuments”. Locals chug litres of Czech beer in quest for dissociation. Of course, I’m just second guessing Prague here. Wouldn’t it be nice if I can confirm this through participant-observation?

---

Kundera, M. The Joke, translated by Aaron Asher. HarperCollins, 1992
_____. Immortality, translated by Peter Kussi. HarperCollins, 1999
Ricard, F. Agnes’s Final Afternoon, translated by Aaron Asher. HarperCollins, 2003
Viewegh, M. Bringing up Girls in Bohemia. Readers International, 1994