Immortality by Milan Kundera

Can't say I liked the plot of this book or some of the ideologies but it gave me a lot to think about and I ended up marking a lot of the pages with quotes that I liked.

"Solitude: a sweet absence of looks."

Out of context it just seems like a pithy phrase full of more meaning than it actually has, but I just liked that sentence.

Like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there was a lot of meat to the story but I couldn't help but to feel that Kundera had a personal agenda in this particular novel. It's unfortunate but the more I read him, but the more I feel like he has a really pompous self-serving attitude. Granted he seems to look over his work really carefully to properly capture the nuance of what he wants to say, he seems extremely affected (and it shows in his work). Eh. That doesn't change the fact that he has a lot of good nuggets in his novel.

I don't know if this book is accessible to all readers so I don't know how much I'd recommend it to others. Overall, I'd rate this book as "meh". Would I read it again? For analytical purposes, perhaps. For fun, probably not.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

I absolutely loved this book. I think that the way this narrative flowed and the ideas that the author so subtly and blatantly put in this novel are exactly the types of elements I look for in a novel. The circular narrative with the constant reoccurrence of various motifs, ideas, patterns of the way the characters thought just tied in so well together. The first chapter set up the entire novel and the idea of the unbearable lightness of being was so well played out in the novel. I liked how Kundera would slip in that certain situations were "unbearable" and then he spent a chapter on the idea of "being" and the idea of being "light" or "free" and what that meant for each character. He also had such interesting asides that really put into perspectives the actions of the characters. All in all I really didn't want the book to end and forced myself to put it down several times to savor the ideas and just really soak up the entire book. I could probably write an entire book analyzing all the different ideas Kundera brings up.

The only complaint that I can think of was that the book seemed to come to a sudden end. I can see why Kundera chose to end the novel where he did, especially because he already gives the "ending" earlier on but because there doesn't seem to be a solid resolution in the plot, I can see readers becoming dissatisfied with it. However, because his whole novel plays on the idealogical aspect of the various situations of the characters rather than the movement of the plot (with undertones of the war - which I thought was pretty cool), I think that the ending more or less was fitting. I actually thought that the book would end similarly to the beginning of the novel with something more idealogical rather than ending with the characters so in that sense I was a little dissatisfied, but again, I can see why he made that choice.

Also, I can see how people would complain that there wasn't a solid plot because almost all of the conflict that characters had was completely internal and there would just be all this miscommunication between characters. However, I think that that's exactly why the book was so interesting.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this book. There's just so much in this book that I definitely want to come back to it someday.