Both these facts are significant. A lot of time had passed since all of these traumatic events. And it shows. The results, though, are not necessarily beneficial and, in my opinion, represent a definite falling-off in imaginative power and charge. I can identify three aspects:. This long novel is full of all-too-familiar Western griping.
The first-person narrator makes his first in-person appearance on page five and quickly proceeds to share with us all his moans and complaints about life in the West. Listening to the plaints of this grumpy old man prompts you to reflect on what made his Czech-era fiction so great.
But I wonder if it was also because the protagonists of his earlier novels are young. Reading Immortality made me realise that part of the reason I like The Joke so much, maybe more than the famous later novels, is because its main protagonist, Ludvik, is young and tough.
Although terrible things happen to him, he is a survivor, and although it turns out that he has misunderstood just about every important thing that ever happened to him, nonetheless it is in a proactive, uncomplaining way, which is inspiring and invigorating to read. His plan to humiliate Helena Zemanek may be immoral in all kinds of ways, but it is lively and energetic and funny.
The narrator of Immortality pretty much the same meandering, opinionated narrator as in the previous two or three novels — basically, Kundera — or Kundera-as-he-presents-himself-in-his-novels by contrast, sounds tired and pissed off. Bloody lifts. Bloody muzak. Bloody paparazzi everywhere. Bloody packed pavements. He put up with it for a certain amount of time, but now…. And so an air of defeat sits over the book. It makes you realise that one of the inspiring things about the earlier books was their air of defiance — defying the communist authorities, defying conventional wisdom, defying the scorn of women, his heroes may well be wrong in their interpretation of their lives but they are cocky and confident Ludvik and Tomas in particular which are life-affirming qualities — whereas the tone of Immortality is defeated and sad.
