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A B G D E F Just something about Kundera By Kathleen Flynn Immortality by Milan Kundera What is it about Milan Kundera? Every sentence he writes seems to emerge from a secret corner of one’s mind, as if he were the literary varient of those magicians who can pull quarters from the ears of children. He writes about the most essential, profound mys teries of human existence with disarming sim plicity and never an excess word. When I reading Kundera, I always feel as if lam on vacatioh ... some place I’ve never been that is nonetheless familiar, like a landscape seen in dreams. It seems like a forgotton corner of Europe, with snowy mountains, cobblestone streets and, in the distance, lakes. There’s some thing about his prose style that creates this atmosphere. It’s the sort of writing where you must sometimes slowly reread whole para graphs, not out of incomprehension but be cause they are so delightful that you want to prolong the pleasure. Or maybe it has to do with the characters who populate his books. They are invariably cosmopolitan without being self-important. They never worry about money or their exercise regimes or their careers or mildew in the shower or the ozone layer. People in Kundera’s novels are preoccupied with the important things: love, death, and the nightmare of history. It’s probably best to start with his latest book, Immortality. Although all of his works are excellent, the early books are more cryptic. He wrote them when he was still in Czechoslo vakia, still trying to write in a way that would not offend government censors. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Immor tality, in that order, were written since he fled to France. They are all about an East European’s attempt to deal with the West, which in Kundera’s view has become crassly materialstic and soulless. Because we have all grown up in this crass atmosphere and know it well, these books are easier to appreciate. After you’ve read them, however, you will also understand Kundera’s peculiarly Czech viewpoint and be in a much Time has come for McCullers’ Southern love By Vicki Hyman “The time has come to speak about love,” Carson McCullers wrote in her novella, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, a curious and cracked little story that interprets, illumi nates, and even justifies that phosphorescent slippery phenomenon in a muscular 72 pages. A tale of the grotesque, the androgynous and the bizarre, and of their search (and ours) for a love both impossible and necessary, the story centers on the aberrant triangle of Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon and Marvin Macy in a backwater Southern town somewhere be tween Society City and an agnostic oblivion. McCullers’ characters are preposterous, MNOP 0 R S better position to relish The Joke, Life is Elsewhere and The Farewell Party. It’s difficult to summarize the plot of Im mortality, because there are so many of them, all going on at once. There are two sisters, a professor who slashes people’s tires at random in an act of ecological terrorism, a meeting of Goethe and Hemmingway in the afterworld, a runing critque of mass culture and the triviality of modern life. Kundera also appears as a char acter. At first, the author seems to be digressing madly. Then you start to see how all the parts connect; at that point you are hooked, in his world and anxious never to leave. I imagine Immortality as a three-ring circus, where the lion tamers are named Goethe, Beethoven, and Kafka. And high above, them, juggling flaming torches and turning cartwheels while he recites passages from Hegel, with a serious, yet modest air, the famous tightrope walker, Milan Kundera. inconceivable, yet utterly authentic and human, and fi nallyheartbreaking, as we see how love revives and then ransacks the soul, and irrevocably Hn wreaks the most es- HJDb M ■ changes in fl for t ■'>Ho good and bad. The ballad’s moral, warts and all, is simple, sacred: To love is the point. Abandon your television fo By Kevin Kruse Back before the earth-shattering inventions of the remote control and satelite cable televi sion, there was a means of communicating ideas with the printed word on bound sheets of paper called “books.” It’s like TV Guide, but it actually tells a story in and of itself. I know, shocking. I actually found a couple of these “book” things sitting around. Here are some I enjoyed: 1. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson This is a gripping novel about a black stow away aboard a transadantic slave ship. An elabo ration on the longstanding sea themes of Ameri can literature, the story compresses ten times the narrative, philosophy, and power of a weighty tome like Moby Dick into a third the length. Johnson’s creation is both a compel ling, engaging story and a poetic treatise on mankind. One of my all-time favorites. 2. Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years by Haynes Johnson Johnson’s account of the greed and corrup tion of the ’Bos is brilliant. The work begins with Reagan’s rise to power and the resultant attitude change in the country and then pro ceeds to stroll through the big scandals and the unabashed avarice of the Greed Decade. The book compares the outlooks of several groups in 1981 and later compares these with their feelings in 1989. The evolution is unbelievable. Wall Street lingo normally reads like stereo instructions, but Johnson’s account of the eco nomic maneuverings of the era zips along like good drama. And if only to read about Donald Trump, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Ollie North and the other crazed psuedo-celebrities, this is something you should check out. Caution conservatives: the enshrined Reagan-myth will be debunked a wee bit. The chapter on George Bush’s 1988 campaign is interesting at least, damning at most. It’ll make you think. 3. Beloved by Toni Morrison Probably the most acclaimed of her novels, this is a haunting stoiy of one woman’s reckon ing with her own sins in Reconstruction America. Morrison’s usual lyric style flows South African w By Wendy Mitchell Before I read Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy in America: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa, I viewed apartheid as morally wrong, but it was a very abstract concept and I did not understand the implications of this racial seg regation. But after completing Kaffir Boy, I realize that these South African blacks are truly vic tims of an appaling tradition. It amazed me to find out how cruel and oppressive humans can be to one another. Author Mark Mathabane paints a vivid portrait of the first 18 years of his life in Alexandria, a notorious ghetto outside of Johannesburg. He prefaces the work by ex plaining the term “kaffir,” of Arabic origin meaning “infidel.” It is a highly derogatory address directed toward blacks, including the author, by the whites of the nation. Mathabane’s powerful narrative starts when he is a young child, awakening from his card- be wi re: 4. 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Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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April 15, 1993, edition 1
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