Milan Kundera (1929–2023)

Es complicado hacer una crítica acerca de una novela (o algo mucho más que eso) de Milan Kundera. Principalmente, porque se trata de un trabajo muy íntimo, muy especial y hasta personal. Da la impresión, incluso, de que invadimos su propia vida al hacernos con sus palabras. Palabras escritas con la hermosura de un maestro de la literatura.

El libro de la risa y el olvido trata sobre muchos temas, pero nunca sobre la risa o sobre el olvido. Porque la risa, aquí, aparece tintada de show more amargura y de tristeza. Porque cuando Kundera nos escribe sobre la risa, tan solo sabe hablar de risas falsas, o risas grises, tan grises que duelen. Y, en cuanto al olvido, el olvido no existe para Kundera, porque el olvido está lleno de recuerdos.

Tamira, el personaje principal, recueda muchísimo a Teresa (su personaje femenino protagonista de La insoportable levedad del ser). Bajo la misma permisa que sufría Teresa, Tamira (vaya, si hasta tienen nombres similares), también vive fuera de su país, víctima del exilio, y trabaja allí como camarera. Sufre la muerte de su marido, que Kundera aprovecha para hablar de la muerte de su propio padre con dulzura y dolor. La muerte, en sí, es un tema recurrente en esta obra de Kundera.

Hermosa, en el propio y estricto sentido de la palabra, refiriéndose a la hermosura literaria, he disfrutado enormemente de sus páginas, careciendo de medios propios para criticarla de modo alguno. Tal vez no soy imparcial con Milan Kundera, pero escribe las novelas que yo siempre he deseado leer. show less

Si Milan Kundera define su propia novela (aunque es mucho más que una simple novela) como una obra que está más allá de la filosofía y de la psicología, tratando de buscar la esencia existencial de los personajes, para los millones de lectores que se han sumergido en su lectura, será lago así como un alivio, un llanto o un desgarro sentimiento de dolor.

El ser leve de Kundera relata, con una hermosura sencilla y profunda, la vida cotidiana de Tomás y Teresa, de Sabina y Franz, de show more Tomás y Sabina y de Franz y la estudiante de gafas. Sea como fuere, parece que la historia que Kundera nos plantea, no es más que una excusa para exponernos una serie de cuestiones, o verdades irrefutables, en referencia al ser humano, o al no ser, en forma de capítulos breves y dinámicos, que provocan una pausa después de cada reflexión.

Y a su vez, como el mismo confiesa, se esconde detrás de sus personajes. Pues asegura que es imposible escribir sobre algo ajeno a él. A la par, haciendo que esta filosofía forme parte de los echos más ordinarios de las personas, crea un nexo entre el lector y el escritor, ayudándole a ahondar en su propio ser, en su propia levedad, o en su propio peso. De una forma puramente hermosa, tal y como si se tratase de un padre hablando con su hijo.

El análisis de la obra puede ser muy exhaustivo, y seguramente cada cual lo interprete a su manera, lo cuál es la magia de la literatura. Y al contrario que ocurre con otras obras filosóficas (lo siento, Kundera), es fácilmente entendible, sencillamente accesible, porque el autor no quiere poner barreras entre el saber y el ser. show less

Kundera’s third novel is a hymn to lyrical poetry, revolutionary passions and youthful testosterone. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven,” and all that, although it turns out that the young Wordsworth (and Goethe) are among the few poets not to be channeled by Kundera’s young hero, Jaromil. And it isn’t hard to see why — they had the bad taste to go on to become old men.

And of course this is Kundera, so there is a heavy layer of irony going show more on. Youth is a time of great clumsiness, self-doubt and acne as well as of great energy, beauty and passion; lyrical poetry usually mixes the trite with the profound in its grand images; first love is often in so much of a hurry to get its rocks off that it picks the wrong object; revolutions (not least the Czechoslovak one of 1948) mix in a good deal of petty revenge, bureaucratic dogmatism and political pragmatism with all the youthful idealism and passion; and even the most romantic poetic gesture of all, the early grave, can have more than its fair share of bathos.

This is all very clever and often funny, but you do sometimes get the feeling that the author is taking unfair advantage of the situation to indulge his own fantasies and write in an unnecessary number of sex-scenes — particularly as none of the female characters in the book have names or more than a minimal capacity to act independently of men. Admittedly, the men don’t have names either (other than Jaromil, his dream alter-ego Xavier, and various real-life Dead Poets), but they do seem to be able to act independently, and don’t spend all their time being undressed. show less

Kundera begins with a riff on Rabelais and leads us on a wild tour of European literature from Cervantes to Gombrowicz, with special attention to authors that I love including Musil and Broch. I found his continual focus on the ideas of literature attractive enough; but he assays music as well including a wonderful chapter on Janacek.
In part 1, “The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh,” Kundera speaks of the importance of humor in the novel. He loves the fact that the early show more novelists, such as François Rabelais and Miguel Cervantes, reveled in humor and delighted in allowing their characters to make fools of themselves. He also writes that the history of humor is closely connected to the history of the novel.

Perhaps more interesting to this reader was his thought-provoking discussion of Stravinsky's place in European music, “Improvisation in Homage to Stravinsky,”. In this section, part 3 of nine-parts, Kundera writes about Igor Stravinsky’s émigré status: “having understood that no country could replace it [his homeland], he finds his only homeland in music; this is not just a nice lyrical conceit of mine, I think it in an absolutely concrete way.” Kundera’s situation is similar to that of Stravinsky and to those of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, about whom Kundera also writes. Kundera, the most famous Czech writer, left Czechoslovakia in 1975 to live in Paris. He has continued to write fiction in Czech, but The Art of the Novel (1986; English translation, 1988) and Testaments Betrayed were written in French. As Stravinsky inhabited the world of music and served as one of its most important citizens and statesmen, so does Kundera inhabit the world of the novel, communicate in its unique language, and serve as a spokesman for its worldview and its practitioners.

Kundera’s main area of interest is specifically the European novel, by which he means “not only novels created in Europe by Europeans but novels that belong to a history that began with the dawn of the Modern Era in Europe.” For Kundera the history of the European novel is transnational; he believes that it is a mistake to view the novel in terms of national literary traditions. At one point, Kundera mentions the reaction of the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch to his publisher’s suggestion that Broch be compared to the Central European writers Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Italo Svevo. Broch proposed that he be compared instead to James Joyce and André Gide. Broch, like Kundera, believed that his realm was the macrocosm of the European novel, not the microcosm of Austrian fiction.

For Kundera, the novel is far more than a literary genre. It is a way of viewing the world which, when it is practiced by a great novelist, leads readers to think in fresh ways, to question some of their assumptions, to put aside their prejudices. In one interesting passage, Kundera speaks of the ways in which lyricism has been used in the service of totalitarianism. He mentions as an example the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a true artist who placed his verse at the service of the Russian Revolution. Kundera writes, “Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it’s a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them.” In the world of the true novel, such lyricism is anathema, the enemy of clear thought. Repelled by the totalitarian lyricism he saw around him in the communist Czechoslovakia of his youth, Kundera turned to the novel.

Kundera wishes to be identified with no political position, no country, no rigid philosophical point of view; he wishes to view and to be viewed purely as a novelist. And with this in mind he includes embedded references to literature, great literature, and his own work, most of which I've yet to read. And did I mention his exceptional essay on Kafka. This is a relatively short book, but one of great depth and breadth. It is simultaneously brilliant music criticism, elegant literary criticism, commentary on the art of writing and translation, and a guide to the great literature of modern Europe. With this book, a loaf of bread and some wine (along with dozens of other texts) one could while away a year or two. show less