Re: Unbearable Lightness (which i keep on calling/typing as “Eternal Lightness…”), I’m kind of in the opposite boat to Chris in that I read it once, thought it was fantastic but also had a nagging feeling that I needed to read it again after a while to see if I felt it stood up. Must do that.

Did you know that love is . . . oh, I can’t even remember. Something cliched.

Oh, and then there’s Tom Robbins. He has one idea, repeated over many books. Back when I was an impressionable youth, I really enjoyed Jitterbug Perfume. The same friend who’s reading East of Eden read Jitterbug Perfume not long ago, and disabused me of my flawed memories.

Speaking of people who don’t like Naipaul, what do you make of Paul Theroux? I’ve read a couple of his books and come away with the impression that he’s utterly repellent.

I actually haven’t been able to get into any books that might be described as “postcolonial.” I’ve tried Naipaul, “Things Fall Apart,” Ghosh’s “Glass Palace,” and a number of others that I can’t remember right now; they all seem really shallow. Maybe they’d do more for me if I were colonized rather than colonizer.

The way Kundera tries to blend essay and fiction into a single form is really intriguing. If he could pull it off it would be really extraordinary. But he can’t. It’s ok to have stunted to characters. That can make for some interesting fiction. But the essays make clear that the characters often describe certain limits in Kundera’s appreciation of human beings. The lustless sex is only the start of the problem.

I’ve been meaning to go back and do a big reread to figure out if I’m missing something. Perhaps some day.

East of Eden seems to me like a bunch of other Steinbeck books – awesome in a seriously flawed way. (I still haven’t read Grapes of Wrath.) I read that in high school too, so it was a long time ago. But I still remember being very moved by the final page. I won’t ruin it for anyone by describing any further.

Some pretty fun Steinbeck is Cannery Row. If you haven’t read that, well, you just have to. Tortilla Flat is set in the same place, with many of the same characters. It’s good, but not quite as good as Cannery Row.

I did have some nagging fear that maybe a person who was better read in fiction than me would see through Unbearable Lightness of Being somehow.

I feel bad for having read a lot when I was younger and having not written reviews, because now I just don’t have the arsenal to come to Kundera’s defense. I read “The Joke” back then, and “The Unthinkable Touchiness of Czechs” or whatever it’s called. I seem to recall their being good books. I remember that they had something to do with kitsch, in a certain totalitarian sense of kitsch. Like, kitsch isn’t just tchotchkes; it’s the whole way in which people are forced to feel regimented emotion within a totalitarian state. Something like this. I can’t remember much more about it, and come to think of it I’m pretty sure it was just a long lecture channeled through the mouths of its protagonists while they have lustless sex. But I could be wrong.

A friend right now is reading “East of Eden,” which I adored at the time. But I can’t remember a goddamn thing about it now. Er, one thing: it recapitulates the Cain-and-Abel story through several generations of the Trask family. That’s literally all I can remember about EoE. Which saddens me: at the time I loved that book, and now my friend says he’s pretty sure it’s the best book he’s ever read (!). I also loved “The Grapes of Wrath,” which I read somewhat after EoE, but … yeah, I remember nothing at all about TGoW. Nothing at all.

Damn.

One of my hobbies is trying to convince people that Milan Kundera sucks. It’s fun. If you watch closely you can actually see a sort of light die in their eyes.