Mango trench
Zara top (similar)
H&M jeans
Birkenstock mules
Chanel handbag
RayBan sunglasses
Mejuri necklace (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Saint-Boniface Cathedral – Winnipeg, Manitoba
Book: Immortality by Milan Kundera
Immortality. Goethe was not afraid of the word. So begins the second chapter of the second part of Milan Kundera’s Immortality, published in Czech in 1988 and in English in 1990. Like all of Kundera’s novels, Immortality, which is his sixth, is both ambitious and deceptive in its simplicity. The language is plain, even spare, but the concepts expansive. We meet not only Goethe, but his supposed lover, Bettina von Arnim, and three famous friends he makes in the afterlife; Rilke, Hemingway and Romain Rolland.
…and we read a whole story about them. But, somehow, within three hundred and sixty-eight pages, there is also space for a story about Agnes, her husband Paul, her sister Brigitte and their daughter Laura. Kundera himself also makes an appearance, a self-inserted narrator within his own narrative.
This is what makes Immortality memorable. It is, perhaps more importantly, what makes Kundera worthy of his status as an idol of writers everywhere. He brings to life our heroes – Hemingway, Rilke, Goethe – in a way that is not only true to the history we know of them, but that is at once unassuming and brilliantly rendered. He dares. And he inhabits these characters, creates a world for them in the afterlife where the rest of us would be too protective of their status as literary heroes to go anywhere near them. Not only does he have the audacity to do it, but he executes on that audacity impeccably. We should all have such a way with our words – particularly in translation. But since we don’t, we read.
I picked up Kundera’s work for the first time in the early days of the pandemic, after someone told me that I reminded them of Sabine from The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a particular set of photos. And while I wish it had happened sooner, I can also acknowledge that I may not have been prepared for astonishing depth of ideas that I would find within them any earlier in my life. There was a time, I suspect, when their words would have intimidated me, or felt like a standard that it would be impossible for me to live up to.
Now, I know that when it comes to writing, there are people like Kundera. And then there are the rest of us.
Within Immortality, it is the story of Agnes, Paul, Laura and Brigitte that is more elegant, in my opinion. The lives they lead are artfully but simply drawn, neither over nor underdone. There is a character who serves no purpose but to move the plot forward. He is the favourite of many readers, and with good reason. He is Kundera’s favourite, and we all wish we could be a bit more like him; cleverer, more succinct. But we need paragraphs, filled with long sentences, adjective and adverbs, to get our point across, where Kundera needs only a few verbs and prepositions. So we admire his purposeless character, and rightly. There are so few people who could write one like him.
But – it is the story of Goethe, on trial in the afterlife, facing a jury of his peers, that I like best. Not just because Kundera makes our shared literary heroes real – immortal, as it were – but because, without being any of them, he speaks through them to convey wisdom that is his own, but that rings all the more true because it could, conceivably, have come from any one, or all four, of them.
He makes it sound so simple. And in this way, he assures his own immortality in a book by the same name. These words belong to Kundera, make no mistake. But they could have been expressed by Goethe, Rilke, Hemingway or Rolland, in the right context, at the right moment. In a single sentence, he manages to make sense of what does not make sense when we live through it, of what the others might have explained but, for all of their writing, failed to. There is no other way to express why his books are so worthy of reading. And he does it with humility, with recognition of their influence and how it led him, ahead of the rest of us, to the answers we’ve been collectively searching for for such a long time.
The thing about Immortality is, you really just have to read it. Kundera is unique in his ability to make sense of many things, including his own work.
