The Unbearable Lightness of Being was a sexually transmitted book, later mercifully replaced on American dating websites by Haruki Murakami, who spared a generation of American men from having to read Kundera.
Nice of you to self-quote, I'd never read that old blog post.
I do find this sentence quite unkind towards Dave Matthews though: "Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless". If a hack is talented and "pays his dues", he stops being a hack, surely? What does it take to be an accomplished artist then, apart from being David Bowie?
Your question cuts to the heart of what makes art art, and I can't answer it. But hard work and perseverance doesn't make a hack into an artist; it just makes them a more prolific hack.
Assuming that you're the same idlewords who wrote this [0] blog post in 2005:
It's funny - as someone seemingly a little bit younger than you, I'm pretty sure your top recommendation, The Master & Margarita, did replace Kundera, at least in my experience.
(which - no disrespect to Bulgakov and tongue planted in cheek - is a shame, because Kundera's better!)
I like Murakami, but I think he'd make for a poor "sexually-transmitted book". Most women I know would treat a line-up of his work on a shelf as a bit of a red flag, actually.
Oh cool, I'm happy to hear that! I left the online dating scene around the time a lot of women were posting pictures of themselves suspended from aerial ribbons, while dudes were posting photos of themselves holding up a large fish they caught. At that time, the author of choice was Murakami. So I am badly out of date and welcome more such updates from recent veterans.
haha, I somehow expected you to participate to this thread.
I still disagree with your reading on Kundera, though I found unbearable lightness of being his least interesting work. The joke, "risibles amours" and immortality are great.
Not GP, but The Joke changed my conception of what a novel could be. It was the first Kundera I read, nothing after that came close, including ULOB. But The Joke was so good I had to read everything else he wrote just in case.
Maybe "risibles amours", but biased as it was my first book from him.
As novel, it is hard for me to split between immortality and the joke. The joke touched me more, immortality is more "serious".
But hey, I am French, so my immune system against this kind of thing is definitely weak. And I did read those as teenagers, and girls were definitely part of the appeal, at least originally
Seems a touch uncouth to say it, but 'Dating Without Kundera' has been the little voice in my head that catches me any time I start spouting pseudo-intellectual pop philosophy, in dating or otherwise.
lmao true enough but idk about mercifully. I'd rather read kundera any day he's kind of overblown sometimes but it's better than a 400 page fantasy-justification for author standin having sex with teenagers.
