I find it very frustrating to relate to people sometimes. They're slow. I dislike postmodern literary noodling. I fail to see the entertainment in reading a novel where the writer is merely fondling an idea, turning it over and over, revelling in this idea. For me, I saw the idea the first time and saw all possible permutations. Why dwell on it? I'd rather dwell on the implications of that idea. I'd rather dwell of the sociopolitical climate in which the original novel was written and the climates which followed. I'd rather think about the implications that impact might have had on a specific society and the impacts that novel (or even official state interpretations of that novel) had later.
I quite often found classroom literature discussions boring. I enjoy discussing potentialialities, not realities. What happened in the novel is set. It happened. Why did it happen? That's interesting. Was writing this novel revolutionary? That's interesting. What was happening in the author's society at that time, what philosophers did the writer find intriguing, maddening, outrageous? All cool. Noodling over a character's motivation for pages and pages and pages? That's not interesting to me. That's not revolutionary. That's not insightful (though it does tell me that the writer might be a clueless git).
Boy tells me that few people have instantaneous pattern recognition. They have to noodle in order to recognize the patterns. That's okay, but do they have to read the noodling of someone else in order to recognize patterns in another story? Did that noodler need to publish a book of zir noodling? What is the purpose of all this noodling? It seems excessively masturbatory and obvious.
In case you can't figure it out, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is quite aptly titled. One concept, tumbled over and over, becoming less refined and more concrete all at once. The fun is taken out of the abstract. Of course, if just one early paragraph were to stand alone, it would be perfectly rendered, abstract, heavy and light all at once--a wonderful duality. But it wouldn't be unbearable, which I suppose is the essence of the book. I'm afraid to read anything else Kundera has written. And you know what? Tolstoy did it better and he did it earlier.
I quite often found classroom literature discussions boring. I enjoy discussing potentialialities, not realities. What happened in the novel is set. It happened. Why did it happen? That's interesting. Was writing this novel revolutionary? That's interesting. What was happening in the author's society at that time, what philosophers did the writer find intriguing, maddening, outrageous? All cool. Noodling over a character's motivation for pages and pages and pages? That's not interesting to me. That's not revolutionary. That's not insightful (though it does tell me that the writer might be a clueless git).
Boy tells me that few people have instantaneous pattern recognition. They have to noodle in order to recognize the patterns. That's okay, but do they have to read the noodling of someone else in order to recognize patterns in another story? Did that noodler need to publish a book of zir noodling? What is the purpose of all this noodling? It seems excessively masturbatory and obvious.
In case you can't figure it out, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is quite aptly titled. One concept, tumbled over and over, becoming less refined and more concrete all at once. The fun is taken out of the abstract. Of course, if just one early paragraph were to stand alone, it would be perfectly rendered, abstract, heavy and light all at once--a wonderful duality. But it wouldn't be unbearable, which I suppose is the essence of the book. I'm afraid to read anything else Kundera has written. And you know what? Tolstoy did it better and he did it earlier.