Entry for March 22, 2007

Câu blog bằng cách copy có modify comments của mình ở post này trong blog em Minh Diệu (a very talented young girl).



READING MILAN KUNDERA


... as for me, I think the story (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) is more as a story about the contradictions inside ourselves, our concepts of love, of life, and of freedom. We long for freedom but never can be really free because we are always tied by our concepts. So the husband betrays because he believes that in betraying, he's freer, happier and truly himself. In other words, the tragedy is not the tragedy of individuals versus society. It's a tragedy of being individual: we are trapped in this life, we have only one life, we never know who we really are and which "version" of us is better. Being is light, because after all, nothing is really important, everyone only has one life and no-one knows better than others. But on the other hand, this lightness is also unbearable because of utterly the same reason.

Anyway, I consider "The Unbearable Lightness" is his best work, in fact, I believe it as one of the most beautiful and insightful works in several decades. For Kundera's other works, I suggest trying "The Joke" and "The Laughable Loves". Most of the rest are kitsch, Kundera-imitating-Kundera :D.

In a second thought (under the influence of the great thinker today20 and under her heavy pressure for crediting her influence!), I think calling Kundera's works as a tragedy perhaps is too much a word. It should be called tragic-comedy. Or not really so, because they are not tragedy or comedy in the old serious meaning (perhaps he would call these words "kitsch"). His works are both a laugh and a sigh. But that's true for most of us. For most of us, life is both a laugh and a sigh, neither comedy nor tragedy. Or in that way, perhaps it's a real tragedy, the tragedy of banality (the word borrowed from Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil"). Remember the story of Stalin's son and shit?