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“Milan Kundera Wants to be Immortal”

Leonard’s review of the Czech author Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality (1990). After reading the essay, it’s still unclear to me whether Leonard liked the book (I suspect not)…but, in any event, still worth the effort to plough through the review to read lines like:

Surely cultures are their own feedback loop, susceptible to Chaos and Catastrophe Theory, capable of rearranging themselves in a hot flash after an idea or a bomb, like Islam, the Mafia or the party line.

Good quote from one of the lead characters, Professor Avenarius, who Leonard tells us is “the accused rapist and guerrilla tire-slasher”:

Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some borders between the important and the unimportant.

New word: Einmal ist keinmal = Greman for “once is never.” Evidently a key to the theme of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s classic.

New learning: Lena Olin stared in the film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Leonard tells us that she “did for bowler hats what Pythagoras did for triangles.”