The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

"In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers."

This is my first Kundera book and I will definitely be reading more of his work. This book definitely, however, wins the award for Most Pretentious Title Ever. People would ask me what I was reading, and I would have to respond by reading the title in a sarcastic, Oxford-Professor-of-Literature voice to make it clear that I was aware of how obnoxiously superior I sounded.

As far as the philosophy of this book goes, it isn't dense and is fairly easy to comprehend. I thought the writing style actually presented its deeper thoughts in a very accessible and relatable manner. The sub textual messages and thought-provoking ideas were actually my favourite part of the book. Kundera has a strange style that feels like, instead of introducing you to a new concept, he is rather putting words to a feeling you have always felt. Or that was what it was like for me at least. 

What I didn't quite like was the surface level, such as the plot and characters. I honestly didn't enjoy any of the four main characters as people, but I could see that they where merely tools for Kundera to explore certain theme. Kundera even owns up to that fact within the book. I felt for each of the people as they felt so very human in the most highly caricatured way. The descriptions of the quiet despair and entrapment where incredibly moving. 

And we haven’t even touched on the sex yet. Kundera’s book is  rife with sex, sex is the other engine driving this dually powered writer, sex both passionate and routine, sex filled up with deep emotional meaning and sex stripped down to its tangible physicality, sex as recurring motif in one’s life illuminating greater insights into one’s personality and sex as secret door into the aesthetics of our time.

To write, as some have, that the book is primarily about erotic encounters is I think to miss the point. Instead it is a book about tyranny, the large and the small, the ones we endure and the ones we resist, the ones we submit to for love and the ones that always rankle silently. The tyranny of kitsch, as understood by the novel, kitsch to mean a subjective, sentimental folding screen that hides away the sight of death. The questions that the book seeks to explore circle around the ideas of polar opposites, truth and lies, love and hate (or indifference), freedom and slavery, heaviness and lightness. 

The Kundera style is a very delightful bit and piecework manner. We focus on one character, that character’s perceptions, that character’s perspectives, in little miniatures, some essay-like, that elaborate on the character’s psychology or history. Then we shift to another character and learn new things about that person, sometimes touching on the same pieces we’ve seen already.

Overall a wonderful, crazy and unique book. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, however I think worth reading. 

Age Rating 16+. Adult content. Sex, sexual encounters, death and military occupation. 

There will come a Darkness - Katy Rose Pool

"The Age of Darkness approaches.

Five lives stand in its way.
Who will stop it... or unleash it?

For generations, the Seven Prophets guided humanity. Using their visions of the future, they ended wars and united nations―until the day, one hundred years ago, when the Prophets disappeared.

All they left behind was one final, secret prophecy, foretelling an Age of Darkness and the birth of a new Prophet who could be the world’s salvation . . . or the cause of its destruction. As chaos takes hold, five souls are set on a collision course:

A prince exiled from his kingdom.
A ruthless killer known as the Pale Hand.
A once-faithful leader torn between his duty and his heart.
A reckless gambler with the power to find anything or anyone.
And a dying girl on the verge of giving up.

One of them―or all of them―could break the world. Will they be saviour or destroyer?"

This is a strange book. So much happened, and yet… nothing actually happened??? The way I see it, this book was a long introduction to a story that is yet to actually come.

It book follows five different POVs. Five seemingly unconnected people with five different goals and five different plot lines. However you soon start to see how they interconnect and link with each others lives. 

Honestly this book is a masterclass on how to write multiple POVs correctly. More often than not, when several main characters are present, all with their own POV/chapters, things can go downhill. The plot gets easily lost and confusing, some characters get developed better, others end up being unlikable, some POVs are slower paced and more boring than others, etc. the list can go on. But this is the first story where I enjoyed every character and there is no POV that is lacking. Each perspective helps the plot instead of hinders it.

I also really enjoyed the Roman inspired setting, a setting honestly not used enough in Fantasy. However I did find this section of the world building odd, they have trains yet the rest of the world building feels very ancient, there are paladins with swords for goodness sake. It threw me a bit, one second I was imagining everyone in togas and then trains, which means a whole different aesthetic to me, like Roman steampunk... I hope that gets dived into more.

The characters are diverse with plenty of POC and even some LGBT representation, which was handled well. It wasn't spotlighted or made into a major plot point, just kind of like yeah why wouldn't these people be here. So the right why to go about writing a diverse cast. I also hope we find more about the characters different cultures as they all seem to come from countries modelled on vastly different cultures, it would be interesting to see if that is explored. 

This is the book where the world and the characters are set up but where nothing much happens plot-wise. We got introduced to all the major players and plotlines and then are left hanging, waiting for the sequel. 

The main villain, The Hierophant, is talked about constantly and yet we meet them in the last 15% of the novel for two scenes in which they do nothing that lives up to all the talk we’ve heard of them. Even the prophecy that connects all the characters and drives the plot forward has no real bearing in this specific book. It’s just sort of there to serve as a plot device.

Even the characters are just introduced. We only know the basics of them. We’ve yet to dive deep into their minds and see them as their truest selves. Basically, this book was the preview. Still, in spite of all that I just said, I actually enjoyed the story.

It was easy to read through, the writing was pacey and fun. It was interesting and I liked seeing the prophecy come together as the story went on. I did call a lot of the plot twists but there were definitely a few that I didn’t see coming and I appreciate that.

The characters were all interesting, even Hassan that I didn’t love, and I can’t wait to read more about them and see how the prophecy unfolds.

This might have just been the introduction, but I am excited to see what comes next in the sequel when Pool can really get into her stride. 

Age Rating 14+. Abuse, murder, large scale death. 

The Golem - Gustav Meyrink

"The Golem is a haunting Gothic tale of stolen identity and persecution, set in a strange underworld peopled by fantastical characters. The red-headed prostitute Rosina; the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum; puppeteers; street musicians; and a deaf-mute silhouette artist.

Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face...

The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle."

This book is easily the most disturbing, unsettlingly, nonsensical, confusing book I have read in a long time, maybe ever. It feels like an incredibly macabre adult version of Alice in Wonderland. You are dragged from nonsensical reality warping situation to the next, each infused with dark occult symbolism. 

Gustav Meyrink's unique infusion of Kabbalism, Freemasonry and the Wandering Jew mythos into the Golem legend can get murky at ti
mes, but in light of the author's own divided spiritual pursuits it makes sense that clarity remains elusive. As an early fictional reflection of this restless search for inner truth, it is disjointed, confusing and thoroughly disturbing. This novel is at times highly episodic in nature (it was originally published in serial form), alternately dwelling on various possible explanations for what is going on, while only tangentially maintaining contact with the overarching narrative. What is truth, imagined, dreamt or the result of madness is always unclear and I think purposefully so.  Though it comes full circle in a manner of speaking, it is still deliberately vague in its conclusion.

While the actual prose and lyrical descriptions are truly wonderful and haunting in the best way possible, I found the actual content of the book too disturbing to enjoy. It is a relatively short book but I found it a slog to get through as you never really understand what is going on. The characters while all so very promising, such as Rosina, Miriam, and the silhouette artist, are never fleshed out and are reduced to boring paper cut-outs. While I can see that Meyrink is trying to make a point in this book, his use of occult symbolism and narrative structure is too abstract to get his themes across with any poignancy. 

Age Rating 16+. Thoroughly disturbing atmosphere with some sexual illusions.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal

"The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as

the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet” in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox.

The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.

In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal unfolds the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. Sweeping yet intimate, it is a highly original meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves."

This is a stunningly written book. A keen sense of aesthetics and beauty pervades the pages. de Waal is a fine writer, bringing an artist’s sensibility to this other medium: a meticulous attention to the detail of language, its rhythms and its evocative potential. Read the book for its exhaustive descriptions of interiors, whether bel époque Paris or Wiener Werkstatt Vienna; for its evocations of historical moments like fin de siecle France, or Austria at the time of its annexation by Hitler and his Nazis, or immediately post-war, bombed-out Tokyo; or for its compassionate portrayal of flawed and fascinating human characters. De Waal's family history is fascinating and I was particularly interested in the link to Proust, Monet and Great Great Uncle Charles being the model for Swann, I found myself googling certain artworks to spot the family members. I loved this book from the way that is pulled you into these spaces, and made you feel the grandeur of the past. 

However I must say, there were a few things that frustrated me. A wronged sense of entitlement pervades much of the book. The accumulation of wealth is seldom a neutral thing; especially in a family of bankers. A lot of energy/ time goes into describing how the family lost most of its wealth under the Nazis (the description of the Kristallnacht mob entering the Ephrussi building and ransacking the furniture is blood-curdling). I did feel for the family, to watch your family home ripped apart and your belongings forcefully packed up and sent away. The pages describing the packing up of the father, Viktor's library, were heart breaking. However, no moral judgment is passed on how the Ephrussi had been spending their money until then, nor is the reader left any clearer as to how the Ephrussi's fortune was amassed so quickly in a few short decades only. I would have been interested in some detail about the lives of those who made them and the conditions in which they were made; and perhaps some sense of the contrast of fabulous wealth with society around them. I also felt a little uncomfortable that the servants were just referred to by their first names, could they really not find out their surnames?

The one character I genuinely would loved to have learned more about was de Waal's grandmother, Elisabeth. At a time when women were tied to the house, Elisabeth broke all glass ceilings and became a lawyer. She was one of the first women to enter the University of Vienna. Her accomplishments flare up time and again in the book and I enjoyed those bits. However, she did not play a major part in the narrative.

The book is supposed to be about the journey of the netsuke that Edmund de Waal inherited from his family. These netsuke are beautiful works of art plundered from a Japan reeling from civil war by Europeans who bought up everything cheap, and then called it their own. In a story touted as a book about objects so intrinsically Japanese there is one Japanese person in this entire book. de Waal never tries to find anything about the netsukes before they came into his families possession. It felt painfully euro-centric. Just a little bit of exploration of where these netsuke originally came from would have been appreciated. 

I understand that Japonisme was a trend and I don't expect incredibly wealthy Charles Ephrussi to give a damn about the Japanese, however de Waal talks about his own uncle buying more treasured artefacts from the impoverished Japanese at a throwaway price after the Second World War. How shameless can you possibly get? Weren't your family members just subject to the same humiliation by the Nazi's? Why would you do that to others? At least, pay the right price for what you basically stole! And you dare to write a book about your family's avarice?!

I would definitely suggest this book to anyone who is interested in art, history and beautiful things. It really was a feast for the senses. Charting history and changing social times through one family is a brilliant way of making history feel alive. I thought that was inspired. Just be aware of the drawbacks to the book. 

Age Rating 13+. Nothing untoward.