For love (or hate) of books
December 04, 2005
I am a petty person who takes great pleasure in having her uneducated opinions externally justified, okay?
So please read this article entitled "Dating without Kundera". It details and justifies so much of what I felt and tried to chronicle here. Plus, it�s just really funny, and offers recommendations for other (better) books by Eastern European writers. In fact, I�m just going to go ahead and paste the text right here:
One of the terrors of dating is Milan Kundera, and specifically, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the sexually-transmitted book that this Czech-born author has inflicted on a generation of American youth.
I fully recognize the important role of the dating book, that is, the carefully selected work you lend a prospective lover sometime in the golden honeymoon period between your second cup of coffee together and the first time you spend a night in the same bed without touching. In that short window of time, your partner is still a delicious mystery to you, an enigmatic and discerning being, and to her you are a dark continent of adventure and excitement, waiting to be explored. And so you lend her books that are funny, playful, and good subway reading, but also complex enough to hint at your Hidden Depths. Something unusual is a plus, as are lots of sexy bits, to serve as a reminder of the animal fires that burn within. And since you don't yet know one another too well, you try to choose a shotgun of a book that fires a wide pattern, thematically speaking. Like an early physicist studying the atom, you will hurl little bits of culture at your new love and collect valuable data about her inner life by observing the way they bounce off.
Given these requirements, it's not surprising that many people have gravitated towards The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The book has that sexy whiff of the Eastern Bloc to it (very effective on anyone who hasn't been immunized by an actual relationship with an Eastern European), it's full of young people having complex, turgid sex with one another, and since the first sentence of the book mentions 'Nietzsche', it is ipso facto philosophical. It doesn't hurt, either, that Milan Kundera's craggy, intellectual face with the thunderbolt eyebrows is staring from the back cover.
The problem, though, is that the Unbearable Lightness of Being is a really bad book. Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book. If you strip off the exoticism of Brezhnev-era Czechoslovakia (this rinses off easily in soapy water), you are left with a book full of vapid characters bouncing against each other like little perfectly elastic balls of condensed ego. And every twenty pages the story steps outside for a cigarette so that the author can deliver a short philosophical homily. Kundera has a sterile, cleanroom writing style meant to suggest that he is a surgeon expertly dissecting the human condition before your eyes, but if you look a little more closely, you see he's just performing an autopsy on a mannequin. Or more accurately, a RealDoll.
This is particularly galling given the A-team of Slavic authors just waiting to get their chance in the American dating ring, authors who've written funny, sexed-up books of great literary merit and philosophical depth that are fun to read no matter the mental wattage at your disposal. And just as importantly, fun to re-read - a salient feature of dating books is that you are likely to have to read through them over and over again in your great romantic life journey. In fact, you may start to find that the books are more fun than the dating, and then you're in the best position of all.
At any rate, given that Christmas is coming, given that a Google search for "Kundera sucks" unconscionably returns only a single (albeit highly interesting) result, and given that I could use a few referral bucks, I present the following books, optimized for seduction, a thoughtful and romantic gift for the long-term lover, or ideal for marriage bed, when you have all the time in the world to get your reading done.[Go to site to see the full list of recommendations.]
Finally, I want every book on NPR's list of gift books.