TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051391/0513470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 124 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 75

A Plunge into Fancies


By PAUL GRAY

IMMORTALITY
By Milan Kundera
Translated by Peter Kussi; Grove Weidenfeld; 345 pages; $21.95


    Not everyone will be pleased to hear that a character
named Mr. Kundera moves through the pages of this novel. Even
more dispiriting, this Mr. Kundera is an author, and the book
he is writing turns out to be the very one that readers of
Immortality will hold in their hands. What the world scarcely
needs at this moment is more self-referential fiction. The post
modernist point that art is, um, artificial has probably sunk
in by now and does not require further demonstrations.

    But the Kundera character does display some disarming
modesty. He admits that novels, of whatever sort, are not in
much demand except as fodder: "The pres ent era grabs everything
that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV
programs, or cartoons." Therefore, "if a person is still crazy
enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he
has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in
other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold." The
person to whom he is talking responds, "When I hear you, I just
hope that your novel won't turn out to be a bore."

    It decidedly does not. Immortality is every bit as
gripping and exhilarating as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
(1980) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), the two
novels that made Kundera, an exiled Czech who has lived in Paris
since 1975, famous in the West. Like its predecessors,
Immortality swings easily, almost imperceptibly, from narrative
to rumination and back again, collapsing the distinction between
action and concepts. Kundera's characters must cope with their
emotions and with the stresses of daily life in contemporary
Paris; but they also embody, sometimes consciously and sometimes
by example, a number of nagging problems of existence. What does
it mean to be a person in the waning years of the 20th century?
If images have become reality and if people lack the power to
control how they are perceived by others, what happens to the
notion of the unique, inviolable self?

    Agnes loves Paul, her husband of some 20 years, and her
teenage daughter Brigitte. But she has also begun to experience
an eerie sense of distance from people, including those closest
to her: "The feeling that she had nothing in common with those
two-legged creatures with a head on their shoulders and a mouth
in their face." Agnes has a recurrent fantasy: a man from
another universe visits her and Paul and asks them if they want
to spend eternity together or go their separate ways. She
realizes that she cannot answer the question honestly as long
as her husband is present.

    These cerebral anxieties are counterbalanced by the
physical turmoils of Laura, Agnes' younger sister, who has
plunged into a passionate love affair with Bernard, a radio
journalist eight years her junior. But after months of mutual
bliss, Bernard abruptly becomes detached and preoccupied. Laura,
growing frantic, assumes that she is being supplanted by another
woman. Bernard is ashamed to tell her the real reason for his
dwindling ardor: the appearance at his radio station of a
stranger who gives him a diploma-like document, handsomely
executed and lettered, that reads, "Bernard Bertrand is hereby
declared a Complete Ass." This bit of malevolence unhinges him
because it makes him realize that many people, perhaps all of
Paris, may have the same unflattering opinion of him and that
there is no way he can change or escape the judgment.

    The permutations of Agnes and Paul and Laura and Bernard
are complex and entertaining; they trace the pattern of a
conventional novel, with causes leading to effects, including
the violent death of one of the four. This story could be
filmed, as was The Unbearable Lightness of Being, although much
would have to be simplified and unscrambled. The distinguishing
characteristic of Immortality, however, is its refusal to
acknowledge any distinction between basic plot and the
voluminous speculations that a given action seems capable of
prompting. The book possesses a vertiginous sweep of
perspectives from the intimate to the Olympian, along with a
sometimes comic eagerness to explain not only what happens to
its characters but also the evolution of Western culture and the
meaning of life itself.

    The central problem, which Kundera treats both seriously
and playfully, is the concept of individuality. Billions of
people have walked the earth, but the number of ideas,
physiognomies and physical mannerisms on which they could draw
has in theory been much smaller. Therefore, interpreting the
inner truth of people on the basis of how they look or act is
suspect: "A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an
individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable
of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else),
nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the
contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as
their bearers and incarnations."

    Anything can happen, or crop up, in a novel that allows
itself to plunge into such fancies. That is why there is a scene
in which Goethe and Ernest Hemingway meet in heaven to discuss
their posthumous reputations. It also explains the frequent
eruptions of presumably irrelevant aphorisms: "I think,
therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who
underrates toothaches." Or "Music: a pump for inflating the
soul."

    Out of a story about contemporary neuroses, Kundera has
fabricated a context in which everything, literally, can be
claimed to matter. What is more, the author indulges this
obsessiveness without ever droning or turning out a dull page.
In its inventiveness and its dazzling display of what written
words can convey, Immortality gives fiction back its good name.