Here’s a man with taste (via). On Milan Kundera’s overblown “The Unbearable Lightness of Being“:
The book has that sexy whiff of the Eastern Bloc to it (very effective on anyone who hasn’t been immunized by an actual relationship with an Eastern European), it’s full of young people having complex, turgid sex with one another, and since the first sentence of the book mentions ‘Nietzsche’, it is ipso facto philosophical. It doesn’t hurt, either, that Milan Kundera’s craggy, intellectual face with the thunderbolt eyebrows is staring from the back cover.
The problem, though, is that the Unbearable Lightness of Being is a really bad book. Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who’s paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book. If you strip off the exoticism of Brezhnev-era Czechoslovakia (this rinses off easily in soapy water), you are left with a book full of vapid characters bouncing against each other like little perfectly elastic balls of condensed ego.
There’s an alternative list from an A-team of Slavic authors, rated for slav-o-liciousness, starting with Mikhail Bulgakov’s wonderful “The Master and Margarita“.
I’m no expert here, but what about “I Served the King of England” by Bohumil Hrabal? (new edition coming out in January) – a little man making his own way through the Czech collision with Nazism and Communism. The first paragraph:
When I started to work at the Golden Prague Hotel, the boss took hold of my left ear, pulled me up, and said, You’re a busboy here, so remember, you don’t see anything and you don’t hear anything. Repeat what I just said. So I said I wouldn’t see anything and I wouldn’t hear anything. Then the boss pulled me up by my right ear and said, But remember too that you’ve got to see everything and hear everything. Repeat it after me. I was taken aback, but I promised I would see everything and hear everything. That’s how I began.
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