I unknowingly fell in love with Milan Kundera’s work during my childhood. Renowned physicist Dr Ali Asgar used to live on the fourth floor of our building, and his younger son Vaskar was my classmate, and probably the first friend I’d ever made. Almost every time I went to his house, he secretly brought out a book from his father’s library (a huge library, which probably had over 10,000 books), and we both read a part of that book intensely.
Now, I feel no shame to admit that it was a guilty pleasure. The book was a Bengali translation of one of Kundera’s finest work – The Joke. And the part we used to read was the one where Helena inadvertently stripped in front of Ludvik. I can’t remember properly right now for how long we continued to do that, but it was after my SSC exams that I actually thought of reading the whole book.
I read the whole book (an English translation), and it was a mixed journey back then. It was hard for me to understand the complex nature of Ludvik and I was too naïve to comprehend the jokes of Ludvik’s life. But the book did one good thing for me – it upgraded my reading habits from Jeffery Archer to a whole new level.
Four years later, when I was a second-year university student, I read the book again. But things had changed a bit by then. I was kind of influenced by Samajtantric Chhatra Front (socialist student union) and I used to read a lot about communism. The journey was amazing then. “A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity!” “Long live Trotsky!” I was actually able to grasp the humour of that amazing line.
My affection for Kundera started then. PG Wodehouse is the writer who I would claim to be my favourite, but Kundera was something else. The hunt for his book in the old bookstores at Nilkhet had begun. The first one I found was Slowness. I read it; how much it had influenced me I can now say by giving one example – I enrolled for the French language course in Alliance Francaise, and when the instructor asked the customary question “why do you want to learn French?” I had replied “I want to read Slowness in French.” Slowness was one of Kundera’s books originally written in French instead of Czech.
Anyway, I dropped out only two semesters later, and the only line in French I can remember is – “Je reviendrai à apprendre le français” (I will be coming back to learn French).
Within a year, I found five of his ten novels. I could have easily gone to the large bookshops or asked my brother living abroad to send me Kundera’s books, but I just didn’t want to miss the sheer joy of hunting down his books one-by-one in the vast jungle of old books at Nilkhet.
My favorite Kundera novel to date is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It explores the artistic and intellectual life in Czech society during their Communist period, from the Prague Spring to the Soviet Union’s August 1968 invasion and its aftermath. I really can’t explain why, but I think the character Sabina, which Kundera sketched in that book as the epitome of the “lightness” of being, is a haunting character. Through her character, Kundera tried to portray love as fleeting, haphazard, and an endless string of insignificant coincidences. It was kind of scary to me.
Later, I saw its film adaptation, and the character was portrayed by Lena Olin in the film. She was amazing in her part, which consolidated my idea of considering Sabina the “haunting character,” who would repeatedly come to someone’s dream and whisper “life is insignificant, and decisions do not matter.”
I haven’t read any of Kundera’s works for the last six years. Somehow, my literary appetite has reached a place where I now prefer reading Reader’s Digest (no offense, it’s the greatest magazine of all time) instead of pure literature. But for every year since 2005, I have been eagerly waiting for the announcement: “This year, Czech writer Milan Kundera gets the Nobel prize for literature.” Unfortunately, I have been reminded time and again that Santa isn’t real. That blasted little prize!
