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Title: Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher ISBN: 0060997028 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.18
Rating: 5
Summary: Writing Against Poetry (and Socialism, Too)
Comment: This is Kundera's most harrowing book because his hero is a monster. He doesn't mean to be a monster, of course. He is Jaromil, a dreamy young man who only wants to write lyric poetry. But this is Czechoslovakia, 1948 and the Communists are about to seize power. And they know how to make use of a well-meaning young naif like Jaromil who will end up writing propaganda and betraying his friends to the secret police. Kundera is ruthlessly funny about the kind of sentimentality that ends up serving totalitarian ends. A French critic wrote that "Life is Elsewhere" is "the strongest work ever written against poetry." I would amend that to say it's the one of the strongest books ever written against *Romanticism*. Kundera is completely unenthralled by Utopia. He's seen too many people sent to the gulag in the name of the perfect society. A thrilling, essential novel.
Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent Pre-exile Kundera
Comment: 1969's Life is Elsewhere is a fine example of pre-exile Milan Kundera. The Kundera of this era was a black sheep of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, kicked-out once in 1950 and perennially on the verge of being ousted again for his questioning, free-thinking nature. Thus, at this time, Kundera was more of a gadfly of the Party and its ambitions to transform not only government but artistic expression and day-to-day life, rather than the embittered, yet sensitive, critic he was after the Party did cast him out and forced him into exile.
Life is Elsewhere is story of Jaromil, a young, Czech poet growing-up in the shadow the Russian Revelation and the initial spread of communism. Throughout the novel, Jaromil adopts several roles. He is the son of a loving, but overbearing mother. He is the lover of two women, first a university student known as the "stone maiden" and latter a bubbly, working class red-head (Kundera has always shown an aversion to naming his characters). He is a young communist, who applies Marxist ideals to all his ambitions. And he is an artist who feels "elected" to write poetry. The driving force behind this novel is the ways in which these roles (son, lover, communist and poet) conflict. How does he keep his mother from becoming jealous of his girlfriends? How does he tailor his work to Marxist ideas of art and beauty? How does he react when his mother and her family detest his joining the Party? A wealth of such situations examines, with remarkable depth and precision, the strange predicaments involved in coming of age in such an epoch.
The only flaw of Life is Elsewhere is that the more art-sy aspects of Kundera's writing have not quite developed. While devices such as historical anecdotes and the narration of dreams and fantasies made his latter novels even more wonderful, their presence in this particular work seems intrusive and awkward. Fortunately, these devices have only a small presence in Life is Elsewhere. For the most part, this is an extraordinary, idea-filled novel that thoroughly explores some captivating concepts.
Rating: 5
Summary: ¿Nerdy Wordsmith Rats On Flame, Conks Out Young¿
Comment: Fidel Castro and his bearded men charged down out of the Sierra Maestra and paraded victorious through the streets of Havana to delirious cheers of adoring crowds. Mao Tsetung arrived with his vast armies at Beijing and declared that "China had stood up". The 'Internationale' played and a brave new world began. We dreamed we would change the world as youths, we might die for a great cause, we yelled at barricades (of whatever material-or perhaps they were intangible) and loved with the passions of the times. Repression of anybody (except "the exploiters") never appeared on the cards, no, it was freedom in the air. Hasn't this atmosphere repeated itself time and time again, across the globe ? And there's always a poet or two to inscribe glorious verses on the stones of History. Byron, Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, Marti, Rizal. But what if 'the Revolution' ushers in a period of less freedom, greater oppression, and wider stupidity that leads to mass fatalities ? Then what kind of poet would you need ? Well, what kind do you get ? Artists who paint girl + tractor. Novelists who write books called "Cement". And poets like Jaromil, the subject of this great novel. Fidel called the people who fled the new Cuba "gusanos" or worms. Reading Kundera's novel about Czechoslovakia, you feel strongly that the gusanos remained and cooperated, wrote poetry in praise of the unpraise-able. Or, maybe there's a global glut of gusanos. Maybe a gusano poet is about as necessary as wings on a turtle.
OK, this novel is a fictional biography of a very weedy mama's boy who remains naïve, protected and innocent despite everything that happens around him, even the death of his father in a concentration camp. The world around the main characters, the society at large, remain pale and nearly invisible. He (and we) really see nobody except his mother---his loves are extensions of his ego, his poetry or paintings the same. Dreams and fantasy are his stock in trade, his alter-ego jumps in and out of beds, while Jaromil stews. All is self-absorption. In modern America, the poet would be called a "dweeb". We have to laugh at Jaromil or scorn him. LIFE IS ELSEWHERE is a satire that concentrates on unpleasant aspects of the human condition so well that you cringe time and time again. Kundera spares no one, not his main character and certainly not his readers. Jaromil is surrounded, as the author says, with a wall of mirrors, and cannot see beyond. We look into our own mirrors as we read. It's doubtful that we admire the reflections. The basic themes are human nature, art and literature in society, and the sad tribulations of a small nation. Kundera, like Brazil's Machado de Assis, cuts his books up into extremely small chapters, which is an effective tool in expert hands. Each one makes a point, introduces an irony, or engages in new soul-searching. The plot of LIFE IS ELSEWHERE is minor; it is the process of writing and thinking about the issues that counts. Ah, well, readers, I'm not giving anything away to say that the message here is that people who fail to live life to the fullest always pine for some far away paradise where great deeds would be accomplished effortlessly, and imagine that "life is elsewhere". These deluded ones are capable of the dirtiest deeds. Oh, yeah, this is a good book.
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Title: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060932147 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Identity: A Novel by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060930314 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Ignorance : A Novel by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060002093 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: The JOKE by Milan Kundera ISBN: 006099505X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Unbearable Lightness of Being : A Novel by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060932139 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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