3/4: Procrastination...
So: When I was seventeen and in the midst of graduating and preparing for college and etc., one of my older friends/coworkers at the Morton Public Library gave me her personal, clearly well-loved copies of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Thomas Pynchon's V (complete with a torn/barely extant cover), Chuck Bukowski's The Roominghouse Madrigals and Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Deluxe Transitive Vampire as a graduation gift. This particular librarian was a serious, dictionary-devouring logophile - we'd kind of bonded over it, even - so she handed them to me and proceeded to outline their contents with some impenitrable English major gusto while I pretended to follow. At the end of her spiel, she somehow managed to flatten her theorrific message into something less demanding ("I hope you'll come to cherish these books as much as I do") and I, happy to find a moment of clarity in all the word-fog, smiled and said I would go home and read them as soon as I had the chance. But, unsurprisingly, reading was barely on my post-high school docket; after thumbing through a few of Bukowski's poems, I filed the books away in a box somewhere and went to college.
Five years and a whole B.A. in English later, I've figured out what she was angling for: Being the scholarly, twenty-something theory geek that she was, she wanted these books to be my entryway into college/"adult" literature, a sort of rough course in metafiction and postmodernism for a Vonnegut- and Salinger-weaned, teenaged boy on the brink. The ploy failed on an almost embarrassing level, however. I mean, sure, I discovered Pynchon on my own as a freshman (thanks to - no kidding - a Yo La Tengo song called "The Crying of Lot G"), but it took years before I really dug into any lit theory and philosophy, let alone felt like checking out something as willfully "foreign" as a Milan Kundera book. And so, despite my semi-belated love of both The Crying of Lot 49 and Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - both eagerly devoured at the beginning of these interests or long before - I still somehow left my English program having never read either Unbearable Lightness or V. Intentions aside, my librarian friend made two complete miscalculations: The assumption that I was into "difficult" or "mature" fiction as a high schooler (which I wasn't, though I liked to think I was) and, less damning, the assumption that I gave suggested books any sort of chonological priority. Neither of these actually applied to me until I became a collegiate upperclassman and, by that point, I had more than enough books in my queue, placing Unbearable Lightness and V on some perennial backburner.
2
So: One of the few good things - maybe the only good thing, even - about living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is the well-off, bookish locals' need to spread their discarded books around. Residents here regularly fill boxes with books and leave them on stoops, near street corners and in fenced garbage areas, basically begging other, less-well-off-but-still-bookish locals to pick them up and "recycle" them. And, thus encouraged, my girlfriend and I, being young and poor-ish, pick up armfuls of books (and, in one case, about three years of Harper's) whenever we get the chance. It was in this manner that I obtained yet another copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being - apparently, I'm destined to always get this book secondhand - but, this time around, I actually (and guiltily) read it. Score one for my librarian friend, wherever she is.
Was it good? Well, yeah. I once described Kundera's style to a friend of mine as being "warm and wise," ala Italo Calvino, and I stand by that. And, appropriately, there wasn't any particular moment in Unbearable Lightness where I felt like the prose was getting too dense, in either sense of the word - a minor miracle, given the narrative's tendency to switch characters, histories and time periods in a way that, in the hands of a less controlled author, might feel a little ADD. Instead, Kundera kept up his usual hypnotic sense of pacing, maintaining a metronomic, D.H. Lawrence-inspired Calvino vibe for the bulk of the novel. Being longer and slightly more involved than his pitch-perfect The Book of Laughter or Forgetting, Unbearable Lightness exhausted the hell out of me by its end - after three hundred pages of "nature of love" turmoil couched in a parable about extremes (i.e. public/private, lightness/weight, brightness/darkness, etc.) and their inherent "gray areas," I was ready to move on - but, like most of the writer's work, it maintained a satisfying balance of formal tricks and a brisk plot. The unconverted might want to check out The Book of Laughter and Forgetting before giving this one the time of day, but, as far as I'm concerned, it was almost worth the five years of nagging guilt/indifference. Or not.
Oh, and I just picked up V from the library, so a quick review of that one should be up within the month. Then I plan to get on with my life.