After many days I found a book which I read through day and night without a wink of sleep or sense of fatigue. Milan Kundera has that ability to take readers on an imaginative trip while keeping them rooted in the reality of human existence. Immortality is a novel, but through it he has explored many philosophical questions which are unavoidable.
What I liked about the book is his ability to create characters and give them a modern life full of modern dilemmas. It is a novel within novel which is created out of one single gesture of a woman. So we see birth of Agnes, a very real but fictional character and her life journey becomes our own. People created around Agnes are interesting too because they are so real with real eccentricities, obsessions and fixations. This book is a meditation about life, death, being, love, sex, immortality, human memory, human mind and manipulations and human indulgences like music, literature, art and even war.
What I simply enjoyed reading was the conversation between Hemingway and Goethe in the other world. They are taking a walk in the other world long after their deaths and they discuss the images they have left behind. Images, which have made them immortal but over which they no longer have any control. We actually see a flip side of immortality.
Milan Kundera reduces great men and art to images and even imitations of themselves. All philosophy, literature, music, art is a mirror to view the human world but he also questions the validity of that very mirror and what it reflects. At one point, all the past understanding of human nature and life by great men actually looks like a baggage we can do without because it hardly comes to any aid when we face real existential dilemmas.
I also believe in what he says about importance of chance and coincidence. Isn't it a coincidence that when I was thinking about death and immortality I came across Immortality and Milan Kundera's reflections on the subject? The book made me laugh, wonder, ponder and observe human life from a happy distance.
It is also a happy coincidence and chance that I can share my ramblings without any inhibitions with some friends and strangers who chance upon it.Yes, please forgive me for my imperfect English, I am a bad editor with a lazy brain. I know, it is no excuse, but right now I want to ramble for no particular reason, maybe a time will come when I will start editing my sentences before hitting 'Publish Post'. Right now, the state of mind I am in, each blog is my momentary death, I have no wish to become immortal.
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