"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" - Milan Kundera (8-13 Nov)

Between 2008 and 2009, a much younger Juan had begun to wander into the fields of post-modern and erotic literature. It was only convenient that two kinds of changes were taking place in his life, which contributed to his liking "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" so much: first of all, he was becoming a young adept at juggling different kinds of affections with women, and secondly, he had recently left the place where he was born, never to settle there again. So this two-fold sympathy with Milan Kundera was a fertile foundation for his pretentious blend of intellect and spirituality, which, much to his disappointment, brought him some complications with women throughout the following couple of years.

Some years later he came across "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". In reading it, he re-discovered some less likeable traits in these problematic men, which he had ignored some years back with a youthful gaiety. At the same time - because it seems like Kundera does have a habit of intertwining the historical with the romantic - he was able to trace many common threads between the political reality of these people and his own. Alas! He has lived first hand the struggle of blotching out bits and pieces of the past to shape his new self. But while Kundera rightly point out that this is a problem when applied to a nation, why should it be so when one talks about oneself?

It was a tough book. On the one hand, Kundera's scattered and impressionistic style has always been a challenge for our Juan - which doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy it - as his recent experiences with Murakami have demonstrated. Juan likes consistent plots (no matter the size, and regardless of whether they are winding or not) and when the author himself becomes self-aware and throws in bits and pieces of advice ('[this] is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina goes off-stage, it is a novel for Tamina'), he feels tricked. Kind of like when somebody says "don't think about a white elephant". On the other hand, because there are so many precise questions he can relate to, it becomes harder to keep track of all the common threads. So this time Juan has attempted to collect some of the most interesting ones he came across, and just write them down with some of his own to try and make some more sense out of them:

'"I don't really get what it means, that they all turn into rhinoceroses," said Gabrielle.
"You have to see it as a symbol," Michelle explained.
"That's right," said Gabrielle. "Literature is made up of signs"'

Yes, yes, this is a good start.

He also finds a good laugh when he reads about symbols written from an Eastern European perspective, that easily apply to his Latin-American upbringing:

"Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist believing in horoscopes), make us laugh". Or adherents to a radical 21st Century socialism who rush into a home-appliances store to loot flat-screen tellies larger than their bookshelves. http://www.ultimasnoticias.com.ve/noticias/actualidad/economia/fotos-y-video---saqueos-y-destrozos-en-daka-valenc.aspx

"You know," said Banaka, "the novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?"
"Nothing," said Bibi.
"That's true," said Joujou.
"All anyone can do," said Banaka, "is give a report on oneself. Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie."

This surprised Juan at once, as it echoed one of the first thoughts introduced by Murakami, when Toru Okada wonders how much he actually knows Kumiko. Only it seemed to be a problem for the Okada, not so much for the merry and the not-so-merry folk in Kundera's universe. But what do we do if not tell our own stories? Isn't every personal account a novel of sorts? I think we structure our stories in a way that makes sense to us, and it might be misleading, but it's what we've got, and I'd much rather believe that we can actually do so intending to cross personal boundaries, as opposed to the so-called 'graphomaniacs'. It seems to Juan that Kundera has more than just a handful of criticisms directed to particular authors or people he knows, and since speaking from outside of his novels is not Kundera's cup of tea, he has to give up on that question.

In other respects, Juan struggles with (one of) Kundera's definitions of love: "(...) because love is a continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love." Juan thinks he knows some more suitable definitions (though not necessarily more lofty or romantic), but because he's also an aspiring writer, he's saving those for later. Mind you, they are of coursed based solely on his experiences of love, and the ones he has witnessed around him.

Then, as he realizes his ramblings have been drawn out too long, Juan tries to tie some loose ends in the shoelaces of Kundera's helplessly childish and spoiled male characters: many of the men in this book remind him of someone, as if they were shadows or sketches of somebody else he has known for a while, but who could this be... Ah, yes! Of course! It is Tomas, the slightly more complex (but hopeful) womaniser of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Could it not be? The difference being that Tomas actually wanders back and forth in this cycle of 'lightness' and 'weight'. It doesn't mean that he has overcome his oppressive desires, but Tereza does seem to keep him true to himself, in her innocence and gentleness.

In the dreamlike island of the children where Tamina finds herself at a loss, she feels a hollowness in her stomach. "That hollowness in her stomach is exactly that unbearable absence of weight. And just as an extreme can at any moment turn into its opposite, so lightness brought to its maximum becomes the terrifying weight of lightness, and Tamina knows she cannot bear it for another moment. She turns around and starts to run." Much like Tereza fears Tomas.

"'When a woman says "No," she really means "Yes."' That male aphorism has always outraged me. It's as stupid as all human history."
"But that history is inside us, and we can't escape it," replied Jan. "A woman fleeing and defending herself. A woman giving herself, a man taking. A woman veiling herself, a man tearing off her clothes. These are age-old images we carry within us!"
"Age-old and idiotic! As idiotic as the holy images! And what if women are starting to be fed up with having to behave according to that patter? What if that eternal repetition nauseates them? What if they want to invent other images and another game?"
"Yes, they're stupid images stupidly repeated. You're entirely right. But what if our desire for the female body depends on precisely those stupid images and on them alone? If those stupid images were to be destroyed in us, would men still be able to make love to women?"
Edwige broke into laughter: "I don't think you need to worry"

Silly, silly Jan... You haven't been paying attention, it seems, to all the talk about how capable we are to alter our history.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, 29.10-7.11 (Sunniva)

So, how will I write about this book?

Will I mention the autobiographical and non-fictional blended with the fictional and slightly fantastical? Will I mention the history and factual and political inbetween the sexual and sensual and philosophical? Or will I most of all mention the disturbing parts that creep up on you without you really noticing?

I really don’t know where to start. All right. I started reading the book on the plane the morning I left for Tenerife with my cousins and aunt, to celebrate my mum’s 50^th on a restaurant in Spain. I read a lot of it, then listened to music, looked out the window, talked with my cousins, and saved the last hundred pages or so for the last bit of the trip when all electronic devices must be switched off. Then we were landing, and I still had eighty pages to go. It was impossible for me to pick it up again while on holiday, for nine whole days the book stood in my room, went in my backpack and waited to be read. I couldn’t read this book, which had captured me, while lying on the beach in a bikini, or slouching on the sofa in our rented flat drinking Fanta limón (the most important drink of my childhood vacations in Spain, when Norway only had Fanta orange).

On the plane back, however, I did read it. So, you see, I didn’t read it between October 29^th and November 7^th, I read it on October 29^th and on November 7^th. But I am stalling.

How does Kundera make this perfect (although imperfect, but still perfect in its own way) mix of stories that become a book that makes sense, even if I can’t say what sense? I enjoyed the separate stories. I realise that together, they make a book about Prague, and history, and memories, maybe people in general but more about Czechs.

What disturbed me was the SPOILERS YES THEY’RE HERE amount of mentions of rape, while now that I’m thinking back,  I couldn’t tell you that there was any explicit rape mentioned in the book. Let’s see. There is the one time Kundera – because we must suppose the I, who is, I think, named Milan or Kundera  is the author himself – there is the one time he gets an inexplicable urge to rape his friend. He is confused himself as to why. And I wonder what the author is trying to say with this scene. Do all men have this dormant urge inside them? Or is he trying to comment on our ideas of rape, and saying that we should call it by its right name more often? Then there is the scene with Tamina on the island of children, which I thought was a strange scene, but still it seems to happen with her consent, even if Kundera calls it rape a few pages later. Finally, the discussion between Jan and Edwige had me enraged at the author, until Edwige got more of her say and I remembered that I often project main characters’ views on the author themselves, and probably without reason. It also brought up an issue I was thinking about while reading Murakami. Even though Murakami can write some strong women into his stories, as far as I can remember, the weaker women far outnumber the strong ones, and the strong ones (example: May Kasahara) often become weak, or dependent on the man. I remember hearing  that in Japan, or perhaps in some Japanese subcultures, there is a fetishization of rape. It goes back to the idea that Jan is talking about, that women are supposed to be chaste, fleeing from sexual encounters, while men attack and are very manly for doing so. Apparently, there is an idea that a woman should say “no” several times when a man propositions her, even while they are having sex, even to the point of saying “stop, stop, this is rape” or something similar. It is completely ridiculous and undermines our free will, and also blurs the lines between regular intercourse and a sexual assault. This comment partly belongs with the Murakami review as well, because while his books and texts never go as far as that, they have a milder version of the idea that the men want to have sex, the women resist, or they accept the act but can’t say that this is what they actually want. Toru Okada says something like “Then we had sex for the first time, in Kumiko’s apartment. I think that is what she wanted, because even though she was just lying there [so and so]”. This is a man who’s been married to this woman for how long? Six or eight years? And he still doesn’t know.

What am I trying to say? That there is a dark streak throughout the book, lying underneath the funny and serious and poignant stories about everything and nothing? I’m not sure. This is a book to be read again, and probably one that will change in my mind as I get older.

I did enjoy the book very very much, and I am already looking forward to reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I have in Norwegian and have owned for two years without getting as far as reading it yet.

"Doktor Proktor og Verdens Undergang. Kanskje." - Jo Nesbø (23-31 Oct)

Well this was heaps of fun - as in, cracking up sitting in my living room, and trying to contain that a little bit whenever I heard one of my house-mates walking down the stairs for not wanting to seem silly or too childish-fun.

The thing is (a bit about my daily life at the moment), thanks to our house's composition of house-mates, most of our conversations over dinner or about books revolve around issues of post-colonialism; power structures inherent in migration policies in Europe; everything that's wrong with the global patriarchal tradition; the ways in which sociolinguistic structures reveal these power relations; why and how we should collectivise the food we buy in the house to accommodate for vegetarians and how all of this is tied to the dissertation topics that everybody's working on - all of this usually accompanied by exquisite and perfectly enjoyable German and Venezuelan cuisine. Don't get me wrong though! I wholeheartedly enjoy and appreciate this sense of community and discussion we have in the house right now, and I couldn't ask for more. But (perhaps unfairly and because I'm a bit prejudiced), I felt that laughing out loud to children farting their way up into the sky with a para-glider was something I'd best keep to myself.

This book though. Admittedly, it had been a while since I read a proper children's story (I think "Stardust", "The Lionheart Brothers" and "The Solitaire Mystery" are the closest ones, but they're very, very different), and this one was so cartoonish that I enjoyed it a lot. Of course, there is also a lot of political commentary in it, which I think is perfectly suitable and even necessary in children's literature, along with a few healthy references to mortality and all that. But the way the characters are built and the tension and misunderstandings that happened between them all too often:

(A sudden blast far off - "what the hell was that?!" - "a perfectly tuned A-flat, I believe")

made me really enjoy it every single time I picked it up. I also liked the fact that amongst the odd team of heroes there were all sorts of personalities, and each one of them was absolutely necessary to overcome one or another impasse of the story.

I'm not going to make any unfair comparisons with children's literature from Venezuela or Latin-America or the ones I grew up with, because, I must admit, I never did read many children's stories from the place I grew up in. I'm inclined to say we imported most of it, produced very little, and until not too long, many families tended to value the foreign over the national, which is in great part a shame. Not in all parts though, as I was a happy child with Harry Potter, Robinson Crusoe, The Lord of the Rings and a few anonymous Spanish folk tales about gnomes and fairies. So it might as well be the same in children's literature in other places, but in any case, I've noticed some things I really appreciate from Scandinavian stories, and that is the plurality in characters and portrayals, which leads me to my last and more formal remark about this book in particular.

It might be particular to Norway because of the lively discussion around language, but I think the way Nesbø (and other writers, I remember noticing that Anne B. Ragde does this too) writes "in dialects" whenever people from Trøndelag or elsewhere show up, is a very effective and positive habit in several ways: it is efficient in describing characters, as one makes up an image about them without the need for so much description. Even if kids might not pick up on these things because they might not have been exposed to them that much, it begins that process of exposure and acceptance to the fact that people speak differently. This, at least, is something I really would like to see in more literature. Spanish being my main frame of reference, I can say it is somewhat disappointing to what extent authors enshrine "Spanish" Spanish, missing out on so much that could be said through writing differently. The only author I can remember who differentiates between sociolects in his characters (and I've already referenced him before in this blog) is Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, but even then, there is much more that could be done and much fun to be had with language.

So all in all, I'm convinced that Nesbø's books (at least Doktor Proktor's ones) would "incidentally" find their way into my hypothetical children's bookcases in the future.

Doktor Proktor og verdens undergang. Kanskje. by Jo Nesbø, 23.-24. October (Sunniva)

(Doctor Proktor and the end of the world. Maybe.)

Seriously, this book. When we first chose this book, I imagined that it was a children’s book for younger children, as in 3-5 year-olds, while I see now it is clearly aimed at 10-12 year-olds.  I imagined it would be a short picture book that I could read in one afternoon. Probably because the first book in this series is called Doktor Proktors prompepulver  i.e. Doctor Proktor’s farting powder.

I did read it in two nights, though. It is the strangest mix of satire and just plain fun and scariness (it’s a story about the end of the world. Maybe). It also took some time to realise where I had seen and read this kind of story before. It is a very grand comparison, but I think it’s the closest comparison I could find. Did you ever read The Witches, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl? There you’ll find some of the same wild ideas and fluctuating story lines, where BOOM HERE THE SPOILERS START the most random-seeming thread still comes back in the end, either as a pun, a plot point or an important story-changing part.

It is brilliant in everything that happens. I did wonder, now and then, seeing that their plans kept being thwarted, but it was only seemingly so, as I said before. It doesn't underestimate the average ten-year-old, which I find amazing. That they understand humour on several levels, irony, and that some things can be true and some not. I was constantly thinking: my ten-year-old cousin needs to read this. But also his four year older sister, and his six year older one. Actually, also my aunt. And mum. Maybe my grandmother. It was just too much fun not to share with a lot of people.

This book is filled with all the Norwegian jokes. When the moon chameleons start to infiltrate the earth, they hypnotise people. The only way you can tell that someone is hypnotised, is when they pronounce some words the wrong way – the way that a lot of Oslo youth have started pronouncing words today. The illustration of the weather report has a man looking like one of the Norwegian now retired weather reporters. There is an odd man from Sør-Trøndelag called Petter who talks a lot about winning, and I am guessing it has something to do with Petter Northug, our best man at skiing, our national sport, who can be very cocky when it comes to talking about himself and winning. I also wondered a while about the band Debitels, that everyone is listening to, until I read the lyrics of their song Slåvsjujejeje out loud, and realised that if you put on a very Norwegian accent, OR you are ten years old and write words the way you hear them, this is how you would say or write The Beatles and She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah). You also have the band BABA with Dænsin Kvin (ABBA with Dancing Queen) and so on. There were so many other small things I’ve forgotten. Of course there are things like the King’s New Year’s Speech. One of the funniest (I feel very odd translating all this into English, but hey) injokes must be that the King in exile gets a Swedish servant named Åke. Now, in Danish and Norwegian, “tjener” means servant or waiter. In Swedish, “tjänare” is a greeting. In this book the servant is constantly called Tjänare Åke, which ends up in the joke where the King is shouting for him: “Tjänare Åke! Said the King. Tjänare Kungen! Said Åke, laughing.” (paraphrasing a bit here). My bad memory won’t tell me where the expression Tjänare Kungen comes from (It's a film from 2005 but that is all I could find), but knowing that I’m sharing this project with a non-Norwegian makes me certain that I will have to get my cousins to read this book so we can have some Norwegian laughs about it. And just so that's said: No offense. I am never going to get any of the references in our Spanish-language book by Saramago.

Anyway. All the laughs. All the serious laughs with surreal fabulousness from Jo Nesbø with a shadow of Roald Dahl. If these are translated into English, please read them. Just forget all I said about injokes. It really is funny anyway, only a little less phunny.

And again, I am sorry that my past two reviews have been a bit thrown together. I'm sat at the Red Cross Youth Autumn Camp at the end of October, trying to get these done before I go on holiday, after having handed in my laptop and getting told it would take 2-4 weeks to repair it, and before handing back this Red Cross laptop. I know I like to complain that I am busy, but the business these days is being happy with the Red Cross Youth, packing for my holiday, seeing my friends and actually going on the holiday. Completely not complaining, just trying to explain my laziness in doing these.

I have to say that sometimes I enjoy writing - i.e. when I have lots of time and the book has been exciting and stirred a lot of thoughts, but at other times I get stressed about it and the reviews become thereafter. I worry that my reviews are not literary enough, even though I prefer less academic reviews myself and am trying to write something that could be interesting to read even if you have no idea what I'm talking about. Well. We'll see how we do by Christmas!