Books. I just read that, in recent years, Milan Kundera had lost his memory. It is dramatic that the only real tool that a novelist has is so volatile, it overflows and wears out, the years take it away. I read Kundera for the first time when I was 18 or 19 years old. I remember perfectly – and it saddens me to think that one day I will forget it – the leafless, withered book, whose pages I dropped once by accident. It was, of course, the story of the confused love affairs of Tomás and Teresa, of Franz and Sabina, the mysterious intersection of those lives that, not because they were so far away, seemed less familiar to me. The Unbearable Lightness of Being –so easy to read and so difficult to understand, said its author– was the first novel I bought when I left my country. I covered it with newspapers, I hid the cover, so that when I returned no one would take that book that was finally mine from me. When I definitively abandoned my home, my city, my things, he stayed there. I’m not going to go look for it. Ten years have passed since I opened that book –as a young man of whom now only the ghost remains– and came across a sentence: “The eternal return is the heaviest burden.”
Fleeing from the pamphlet, fleeing from compromised literature, fleeing from parties and ideologies, spitting in the face of those who expect a black and white novel
Leak. After the love affairs, the exchanged and lost books, the conversations in which nothing is said and much is quoted, the university nights, the coffee, the pedantic smoke, what is left for the reader of Kundera? The feeling that books have made one older, have offered him the memory of a man who aspired to have no biography and whose life was, in the end, the story of a century. Reading it in a communist country, where his books enjoyed the privilege of censorship, was having a manual for survival in that ocher, gelatinous world that socialism produces. And yet the great lesson I learned from Kundera was escape. Fleeing from the pamphlet, fleeing from compromised literature, fleeing from parties and ideologies, spitting in the face of those who expect a novel in black and white, in red and black, a novel against the government, a story for publishers to find. find an exotic, combative, militant, martyr of freedom. And even more: never enter the club of those who, comfortably – on one shore or another – have already received applause and an audience, have already found someone to sell the little drama of the exile or the integrated.
Dissident. I guess Kundera hated the word dissident more than any other. The perverse implications of that term—separated, unorthodox, Cain—sound like the revenge of those who stayed, the insult of the upright. Nobody wants to be defined as some kind of tumor, a leper who was forced to leave. No one wants their books to be marked by rancor or abandonment. Not a dissident: a novelist, Kundera said too many times. The opposite of communism is not dissent but individualism and autonomy. The price to pay is loneliness. Nothing more tempting.
Complexity. When a writer abandons the shell that the environment imposes on him – the regime, the history, the goodbye, the other writers – he is left alone in front of the fabric of memory. In that dark room, in the coldness of Paris or any city, walking with a woman or smoking alone in a cafe, the words come again. “I want my literature to be linked to life, that’s why I defend it from any possible compromise.” That is the only real freedom, the only homeland, to which a novelist can aspire. The rest are fictions, much less useful than those that one can plot, even if no one reads them.
When a writer leaves the shell imposed on him by his environment – the regime, history, goodbye, other writers – he is left alone in front of the fabric of memory.
Music. Opening up to the infinite possibilities of a novel, living for months or years in the world that one is creating, cannot be compared to any other trade. I find an example in the interview that Joaquín Soler Serrano did to Kundera in 1980. He remembers his musician father – the writer himself earned a living playing piano from restaurant to restaurant – and offers another lesson: respect for the form that can only be learn in music The change of rhythms, the counterpoints and the motifs, the subtlety of composing a book to reach the echo, the only thing that remains when memory dissolves.
laugh and forget. “Optimism is the opium of the people,” writes the protagonist of The joke on a postcard for his communist girlfriend. I once met a young Czech woman who I asked her to pronounce the original title, Joke. It sounded—I couldn’t reproduce it today—like a spittle, a defiant laugh that encapsulated not only that novel, but all of Kundera’s work and attitude toward the solemn. I asked him to repeat the sound one, many times. She did not understand the revelation that word so elastic and remote was for me, perhaps because to understand her own language one also has to abandon it. I have not heard from the girl since she returned to Prague shortly after.
Final. From Milan Kundera you learn to live and write. He learns an ethic and a certain healthy cynicism, a distrust of power and its emissaries –success, money, the party card– and the vertigo of entering his own solitude. That at the age of 91 he donated his books and his papers to Brno, his hometown, was also a balancing act. Or at least a way to save memory – the heaviest burden – before death came to find him.
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2023-07-17 01:17:43
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