Immortality by Milan Kundera
“….. success is like a horrible disaster, worse than a fire in one’s home. Fame consumes the home of the soul.”
Milan Kundera in an interview in the Paris Review of Books
Milan Kundera is one of the best novelists I have ever read. One of the most challenging too. I admire his great intellect, his use of language, his extraordinary ability to delve into the labyrinth of human behaviours.
Immortality is the last of a trilogy that includes The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. As the two previous, Immortality is a great book, complex and intelligent, rich and mesmerizing.
Death and immortality “form an inseparable pair,” writes Kundera and both, are actively present in the novel. For a writer, is the idea of achieving fame, hence immortality, the ultimate goal in writing books? One of the most interesting parts of the book is the meeting between Goethe and Hemingway in the heaven, debating whether themselves of their books are what has brought them fame.
"Instead of reading my books, they're writing books about me," Hemingway says. "That's immortality," Goethe says. "Immortality means eternal trial."
And it’s getting worse. “The present era,” says the ‘Kundera’ in the novel, “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 very 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 such a way that they cannot be retold.”
Despite the preoccupation with death, Immortality is not a sad novel. In a way, it is also a political novel. By introducing the concept of ‘imagology’ Milan Kundera, explores the post-modern world of globalisation, greed and speed-worship, where clarity and truth have been replaced by sensational images and sound-bites, simplifying and distorting political discourse. The last few decades imagologists have dominated the political scene, the media, especially the TV, and recently, the social media. Examples of the political implications of this domination can be seen in the United States with the election of Donald Trump into the presidency, and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.
The novel is beautifully translated from the Czech by Peter Kussi.