2/22/2008 Lame Book

A month ago I finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being, A Novel By Milan Kundera, a Czech writer.
I never saw the movie adaptation, thank heavens, but do remember people liking it, watching and recommending it. Any movie starring Daniel Day Lewis as a protagonist womanizer is destined for success.

I was expecting the book to reveal aspects of human nature, or at least illuminate comparisons of relativism in a "lightness" vs "heaviness" motif. The book was so uninteresting that it took will power to get through. I had to force myself to read that dumb book, and I’m a compulsive reader who has trouble focusing on life if I have put down a good book. Don’t get me wrong; I’ll read some pulp, too; like books you find in rentals when vacationing, or laying in the waiting room at the Toyota dealership. I can enjoy that crap and won’t be perceived as a snob. ’The Unbearable’ had a powerful aura of erotic existentialism surrounding it, but it just didn’t live up to it’s lore.

This story’s paradoxical tales of betrayal, tolerance, and romance are worn out. A chronicle of two people powerless to their own desires, constantly doing the things they condemn, becoming the people they hate is of no interest to me anymore. There was a time when I would have appreciated ’The Unbearable’, attributing it’s sentiment to the old slogan "the world is so fucked, you have to do what you can to be happy", but now the story feels more like an expose’ of sorry romantics who just happen to be operating against the interesting backdrop of eastern European, hippy-commie propaganda.

I can accept the general, insinuated themes of this book:
-There is no such thing as romantic love
-human emotion is the result of chemistry
-monogamy is unnatural
-pack mentality exists in all of us and is natural, but not ideal
-sexual desire differs-there is no standard

Ok. I understand those ideas. What I do not understand is how a person transforms those otherwise tantalizing ideas into such boring crap.


Reading this book was like hearing about a legendary, mystical man around town, then finding out that he really exists. After you finally meet him and have a few riveting conversations with him about a hidden town within the city limits full of freedom and intellect, he promises to take you with him in a week. You have time to ponder, reflect and prepare.
Mystic Man leads you down a trail that ends at a tumble-down warehouse, then into a cave littered with bedraggled knapsacks and shopping carts. The bitter odor of nests and soiled cloth winds through your garments and hair. Urine becomes the least offensive smell as you lower your body through a rocky opening the size of a toilet seat. As your feet find the lowest plane, stagnant water seeps into your shoes. The pitch black of the cave reveals nothing of the Mystic Man’s location. You hands franticly grasp the walls of the tomb until you reluctantly clutch the loose weft of the Man’s oily baja poncho, and he assures you that your perseverance will be well worth it. Both of you fall to your knees to crawl through an ancient spring bed, your face is within inches of the Mystic’s ass.
Blinding yellow light slowly dawns on Mystic’s crooked shoulders as the cave ceiling climbs to new heights, and suddenly sky. As your eyes adjust to the afternoon sun you notice that your favorite jeans are ripped; vertically in an uncool, unrepairable way. Your shoes are black with cave dirt, and alge has collected at the laces and on the underside of the tongue. Without any warning a wrinkled woman embraces you with what appears to be a dog bed and whistles as she says "d’you brang any cigarettes hunny?"
You notice two groups of shoddily clothed vagrants huddled by a small pile of burning tires. They glance at you and their eyes drop to your filthy shoes. A man peeing on a dead tree gestures a greeting toward you. The Mystic directs you and the woman towards an old concrete landing which gives way to a collecting pool partially filled with greenish water. Removing her upper dentures the women spits into the murky fluid, then lowers her teeth into it and shakes them twice before replacing them into her mouth.
Slowly and clearly a realization creeps into your mind as your heart sinks in disappointment;
As you secretly feared, the Mystic Man is actually a Mystic Bum.