The Kundera Rant

If I had to describe it in one line I would say this:

Every joke is not a joke. Every joke is exactly the thing you believe.

The rant begins like this:

I am right now reading Slowness by Milan Kundera. It has a hideous cover I think was drawn by Kundera himself, and I think this because it’s so bad that only out of the author’s own vanity would he allow for this cartoon to grace his novel. Or maybe it’s a joke. My favorite thing about Kundera perhaps is that he loves to tell jokes.

Kundera is one of my favorite authors even though this is only the second book by him I have read. The first is Immortality. I am privileged enough that I found this book in my parents’ library last summer and quickly devoured it. This copy has a beautiful cover, lavender and glossy and marked with the figure of a Renaissance cherub. It is nothing like Slowness.

I treasure this book so much that on a trip upstate to visit an ex-girlfriend, I bring it for her to read on the beach. All trip I think about it packed in my white canvas bag and wince at the grains of sand that tuck themselves in its leaves when we read it by the water. I leave it with her to bring back to New York.

I still remember it sitting on her bookshelf, laid horizontally like a farmer resting after a day of hard work. Prostrate in the little apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. I assume it still sits there, unopened, one of the most upsetting casualties of the breakup.

For months in the back of my mind I consider the loss of Kundera. He has taught me something extremely important, but along with the contents of the book I forget it as quickly as it has come. I can only mourn the physical copy because I remember how it felt to the touch.

Looking back, this is extremely Kunderanian - a brush with a lesson and a quick forgetting. But we have not yet gotten to the core of what he means.

A few months later I am in my favorite bookstore in the East Village. It has a perfect CD section and behind a door that lets you out into the cold there are a few discount shelves where everything is a little cheaper. All the books here are used.

For a second I wonder how this can be my favorite bookstore if I have never bought anything here. I am puzzled by its perfect ambience considering the fact that the owner (or is he the sole employee? I have never seen anyone else at his desk) is one of the worst people I have ever met. This is a man who scoffs at anyone who would even consider buying from him. If it were not for the perfection of the air inside the store, he could not be in business.

Here in the rant I remember that I have actually bought something here before.

Flashback: I had around eight dollars in my wallet and I thought it would be enough to purchase one used book. But the worst man in the world disagreed and pointed to a small cursive fourteen on the inside cover of the book I wanted (it wasn’t Kundera but I have not forgotten him or you, reader). He scoffed as he did so and I felt dumb. Since he didn’t accept cash, he extended me the kindness of pointing to the ATM across the street.

Unfortunately that ATM did not work and so began a search of over a mile before I finally found an ATM that did, and thus returned to buy my fourteen dollar used book all those months before.

But back to Kundera. As I stood in my favorite bookstore, the second time, I considered whom I would want to read. It was then that I remembered that lost copy of Immortality, and realized there was more by him that might interest me. Sifting through the Ks in the fiction section I found a series of Kunderas, each more expensive than the last. 12, 13, 14 dollars - cash only. Used copies! All scribbled in cursive in the top right of the inside cover. I could hear the worst man in the world scoffing from his desk. So I decided I was too good to spend all this much on a book (a second time) and parted without any Kundera or any book whatsoever, empty-handedly walking lower Manhattan. One lovely thing about Kundera’s characters, though not the main thing, is that all their journeys involve a wandering.

I want to take a detour but I promise I will relate it to Kundera and his lesson. Some nights ago I was scrolling Instagram Reels when I found a hilarious influencer whose video took place right by the bookstore I loved. At first I did not believe it - did Instagram know where I went? (Obviously yes). But yes - there were the poems on white sheets printed out and taped to the door, there was the musty old sign, there was the air I could almost breathe through the screen. Across the space of the internet, this bookstore had brought me to a bit of humor. More importantly, it was a strange kind of humor - reminiscent of our old friend Kun. I loved this influencer because at first you did not believe he was as hilarious as he is. This is a guy extremely self-aware, extremely vain, but extremely capable of using irony and sarcasm to poke fun at the things-in-the-world of today. It took multiple videos for me to accept that not only was he hilarious, but he knew exactly what he was doing and played the part to perfection. In this way, he reminded me of Kundera.

Last week I returned my book at the library in Park Slope and checked out its own meager fiction section. It felt like there were thirty copies here of everything bad and zero copies of everything good (that is, the stuff I liked to read). Winding through, I arrived at the Ks, where that old friend returned to my mind. I wonder if they have any Kundera here, I thought.

All they had was a single book: Slowness, thin and small with a crappy white doodled-on cover. Hell, someone in the park yesterday asked me if I had published this book myself; he must have seen the drawing. But I took the book anyway because it was the native Czech writer’s first book written in French and because it was a Kundera, with whom I’d been playing cat and mouse for the previous year.

Slowness follows two parallel stories, both of which are terribly concerned with the control of pace. In one, two illicit lovers (a knight and lady) from an 18th century novel follow a three step evening of passion, semi-meticulously planned by the lady. In the other, a great theorist and his disciples discuss and partake in public and political maneuverings - effectively, in performance. Kundera himself appears intermittently, joined by his wife, to reinforce his argument of the effects of pace: great speed is used to forget, and slowness to enhance the burn of memory.

In choice moments does Kundera break the action (although he, as the writer, interjects constantly) to physically insert himself. These are the moments that interest me the most, because they are overt bits of evidence in favor of Kundera’s conviction. They are forced pauses, the same ones that the lady carries out to construct the pleasure of the knight throughout their enchanted evening - a dance in a meadow, a sweet, long-drawn-out kiss by the Seine. Simultaneously, more than once, Kundera points out that the theorist’s great power lies in his ability to pause during a speech. The power in forcing others to wait, in captivating their attention so raptly that they hang on a thread even as you do not speak.

But what does Kundera do with his pauses, in these scenes where he literally appears? How does he choose to use the special breaks he imposes on the anxious reader?

He tells jokes.

In one of the great scenes in the novel, Kundera awakens his wife from a nightmare. She has been dreaming of one of the scenes he (the narrator) has just recounted, and he wakes her up as a show of power and to pause her suffering (nothing is ever a single-purpose deed). Upon waking and after explaining her dream, Kundera’s wife does a very peculiar thing. She reminds him of something his mother used to say: “Milanku, do not make jokes.”

I read this and burst out laughing, if only at first at the beauty of Milanku, the little nickname he has tossed in. How cute, until you see the writer’s face on the back cover and scoff at this greyed out old man. This absolute jester; I think back and realize he has done nothing all book besides make jokes. Every character has some terrible, hilarious flaw, even the ones he clearly respects. There are pages where the phrase (carefully separated by a space so as not to indicate the insult) “ass hole” is used a minimum of ten times. He is vulgar, he is scornful, he is constantly and innumerably making fun of everything.

Just a few sentences after his wife’s reminder, he refers to this very book (yes, the one I’ve dedicated at least one hundred pages to so far) as his joke project.

This is the crux of the Kundera rant. This is the lesson I have learned, and maybe you’ll think it’s a stupid one or maybe you’ll find it interesting or maybe you have stopped reading by now. Here it is:

For a long time, I thought serious writing had no tolerance for humor. That somehow these were enemies, or opposites, two people on points as far apart as any on Earth. I swore to remove my personality from my writing in pursuit of saying something true, and serious, because it would be impossible to do either if I included a joke. But this is just foolish, and, if I may, funny. Humor is incredibly truthful and incredibly real. Kundera proves it time and again - his argument on the power of slowness hinges on the pause before the punchline of a joke. The influencer proves it because it is the humor in his content that makes his points ring true, as loudly as they do. There is a perfect irony in the most wonderful bookstore being run by the worst person in the world, and I’m not sure it would be as wonderful or memorable if the owner was any better. (If he’s reading this, I’m not sorry).

Humor is essential to who I am and when I write truthfully I am so ashamed that I wish to blot it out. But Kundera’s philosophy is the opposite: he in fact inserts himself, humorously if possible, instead of withholding. Humor is a self-defense mechanism that seeks to mask the truth, you say. And I agree; but also it is the truth, and you don’t even have to look behind it because it is itself a window to what is real. All you have to do is look through.

There’s a famous Keats poem that ends in a totally culminating line, but I’d propose a revision:

“‘Humor is truth, truth humor–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”