immortality/Milan Kundera

I somehow completed a graduate degree in the Literatures and didn't read any Kundera. I'm not honestly sure if any was assigned, or if it was assigned in the those first few semesters where I might have let the occasional requirement slide by unscathed. I picked up immortality because it seemed like I should, not because I expected to love it - but then I did.

If the book were to have a center, and I'm not sure that it does, it would lie in a gesture. A simple, almost unnoticeable gestures any one of us makes on any given day. That gesture is planted in the mind of our narrator, Kundera himself. And from there the reader embarks with the narrator through a series of events and sometimes non-events that track the creative process, as he spins the web of tails around Agnes, her sister and her husband.

Entire characters are invented and developed from the slightest movement another. The all seeing eye of the narrator vacillates seamlessly between the fiction he creates and the one in which he lives. To call the novel pomo, as I'm sure has been done, is selling it short. Honestly, I almost wonder if this novel wouldn't be the most effective reading students in intro fiction labs could read.