Reading list update -16

It took me ages to finish this book but now I can get it off my TBR. Here is my updated reading list and the previous reading update. Now for the 13-point review:

1. Immortality by Milan Kundera gets a 3.8 on 5.
2. An intriguing book where characters and stories are overlaid through strange connections. The past (the story of Goethe and Bettina and their aspirations to immortality), the surreal (Goethe and Hemmingway talking in the afterlife about their work), the present (the author himself getting inspired by a random gesture and writing this novel), the imagined (the characters and incidents of the “novel”) and a Prof Avenarius (either real or imagined, appearing both in the present and the imagined).
3. But the novel as it steps through all its convolutions is written in an engaging style: even the frequent philosophic musing, even the rambling descriptions of a side character and his fetishes, even the unexplained structure, never push the reader away.
4. He debates immortality in the first half of the book, distinguishing between minor immortality “the memory of a person in the minds of those who knew him” and great immortality “the memory of a person in the minds of people who never know him personally”, leaving the reader wondering about themselves.
5. “You may say what you like about the immortality of poets, but military commanders are even more immortal” – he says, in an anecdote about Napolean and Goethe. Kundera opines that “man reckons with immortality and forgets to reckon with death”, also that immortality “no longer interests the weary old man at all”.
6. Goethe says to Hemmingway in the skies, “You did everything to remain immortal.” Hemmingway replies, “Nonsense, I wrote books. That’s all.”
7. And in the imagined story (the novel Kundera in writing in the book) of Laura and Agnes and Paul and their obsessions and loves and weaknesses, there are questions of love and lust and stupidity and society and the failings of ordinary people, never destined for that great immortality. “Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another”.
8. The problem is Agnes, Paul and Laura are not interesting enough. Their lives play out, mirroring that of Goethe and Bettina, but don’t have the same crazy intensity. Rather they meander slowly like backdrops to the disconnected musings of the author.
9. “In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.” Kundera delves into the story of a girl who ends up on the highway alone and survives death though killing those in cars that swerved to avoid her. How alone are we and who really loves anyone in the end. The 80-odd pages on Rubens in the last section of the book perhaps cycle back to this point but they do seem pointless after the intensity of the first part.
10. “I long for an experiment that would examine…exactly how much of one’s life a person devotes to the present, how much to memories and how much to the future” – Prof Avenarius on man’s relationship with time. Avenarius, clearly the most interesting character, knows the writer of the novel and also the characters, creating a very interesting surreal mix that points to interesting possibilities.
11. “Life is as stuffed with episodes as a mattress is with horsehair, but a poet (according to Aristotle) … must remove all stuffing from his story, even though real life consists of nothing but precisely such stuffing.” An interesting detour into the apparently meaningless episodes that happen and are forgotten though Kundera points out that “In infinity every event, no matter how trivial, would meet up with its consequences and unfold into a story.” That is if we, like god, were eternal.
12. “Literature will die out and stupid poetic phrases will remain to drift over the world.” – Kundera as Kundera in the novel, writing a novel, meeting his characters.
13. “Imagine that you have a friend who loves Schumann and hates Schubert, while you madly love Schubert and Schumann bores you to tears. What kid of record would you give your friend as a birthday gift? The Schumann he loves, or the Schubert you adore?” – This is the question, I am left with at the end of this very mortal novel.

Which would you choose??