Sunday, November 20, 2005

Spoil 1.61

Pet hates: News, Film and now, Literature!

1. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra
3. Philip Roth, Portnoy's complaint
4. Jack Kerouac, On the road
5. (nominations welcome)

Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book. If you strip off the exoticism of Brezhnev-era Czechoslovakia (this rinses off easily in soapy water), you are left with a book full of vapid characters bouncing against each other like little perfectly elastic balls of condensed ego. And every twenty pages the story steps outside for a cigarette so that the author can deliver a short philosophical homily.

via The Null Device

3 Comments:

At 5:40 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Stimmt.

Ich fand das Buch seinerzeit sehr enttäuschend und die Charaktere ziemlich doof.

 
At 1:18 pm, Blogger Geist said...

C. Heins "Der fremde Freund", z.B., ist ganz aehnlich von der "Handlung" her, aber grossartig.

 
At 7:52 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ich erinnere mich, es schon einige Male im Buchladen in der Hand gehabt, aber dann doch nicht gekauft zu haben. Vielleicht, weil die Handlung laut Klappentext an das andere erinnerte? Beim nächsten Mal nehme ich es dann doch mit, jetzt, wo Sie mir gesagt haben, dass es gut ist.

 

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