Immortality
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
8mentions
8people
2009–2024years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Moby Dick, Herman Melville
VALIS, Philip K Dick
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance + also Lila, Robert Pirsig
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
Immortality, Milan Kundera
Catch-22, Joseph Heller (pair with The Deserters, Charles Glass -- In fact a lot of the stuff in Catch-22 is actually toned down from reality)
Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha, Daniel Ingram (but ignore 80% of it)
- While I value The Unbearable Lightness (and it's more widely known because of the movie), I think that it's Immortality where Kundera is the deepest, the most inventive, the most subtle. (It's also written in a way that makes it really hard to turn into a movie, and the book explicitly mentions it in passing.)
- It’s hard to pick a favourite but I figure a decent rule of thumb would be to list books I’ve read at least twice:
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
- The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
- The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien
- Watchmen by Alan Moore
- From Hell by Alan Moore
- V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series by Alan Moore
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Immortality by Milan Kundera
- first 3 books in the The Dark Tower series by Stephen King
- The Dark Half by Stephen King
- The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman
- Coalescent by Stephen Baxter
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Immortality by Milan Kundera
It made me think about mortality, love and sexuality in ways I'd never thought of before
- Non-fiction: Antifragile by Nassim Taleb was very good. Reminded me of Hayek's deep insight into chaotic, organic systems (e.g. human interaction systems). Also helped me to find out what direction I should take after my own book (http://www.nationbydesign.com)
Fiction: re-read Milan Kundera's Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Still lifetime favourites after all these years.
- A similar point of view is expressed by czech novelist Milan Kundera in his "Immortality" (http://www.librarything.com/work/2601/41486088), analysing the way people build their outwards identity by means of adding - or subtracting - attributes such as the ones you point out.
