Premier Rock Forum

Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera.

nc

i've only read 'the unbearable lightness..', but i thought his writing was really great. i guess a lot of people think he's 'self-indulgent', but he sustains my interest in an otherwise average story line.

Do the words of the critics sway my opinion on Milan Kundera as a writer?

No, they do not, and I think he's pretty Not Crap.

Milan Kundera is about as far from Crap as you can get. I have almost finished "Identity" which is an amazing book. "Laughable Loves" is also excellent. Along with Philip Roth a master of the examination of love and relationships in the modern world.

I have read about 75% of Immortality and found it to be not crap. Don't ask me why i never finished it, though. Something to do with me being an idiot.

Identity is one of the worst books, if not the worst book, I have ever read.

That asshole owes me three hours of my life. Fucking garbage.

Ess Muss Sein

Not crap

..

crap. tiresome lifestyle porn.

I guess saying you like Kundera is the literary equivalent of saying you like Pearl Jam. There’s this Times piece on taste in books where novelist James Collins (whoever that is) recalls his reaction to finding Unbearable Lightness of Being by a love interest’s bed: “Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat.”

I've never gotten what’s so offensive about Kundera. I thought Unbearable Lightness of Being was convincing and did a pretty decent job conveying what it was like to be Czech in the 1960s and 70s. I don’t have a problem a book that wants to ask why we bother when life is meaningless, and didn’t find its answers unsatisfying.