“So here I was. Home again after all those years.”
This is Milan Kundera’s first novel, and of all the one’s I’ve read it’s more or less the most straightforward. It’s not straightforward, but the conditions of the plot are. We meet Ludvik in the opening pages returning home to a small town in Moravia some seventeen years since he’s last been there. We know something has defined this return in ways that have complicated it, but we’re not year sure how. We also learn that he’s there to meet with a woman, as she will be in the town on a journalism assignment, and he’s tagging along. In the next section we learn that she herself is ambivalent about his presence because of the ways it will complicate her own life. She is a journalist who among other of her assignments has exposed some people who cheated on their spouses. She has done so in the “sunlight cleanses all” kind of way, but now feel conflicted about it, perhaps because of the ethical ambiguities and self-righteousness, or perhaps because she is meeting Ludvik, even though she is married.
We find out that Ludvik has gone through a period of exile and ostracization for telling a private joke that was critical of the party. We don’t know the joke yet (and don’t worry, we get to find out), and this led to his expulsion from the party and other political, legal, and social consequences, that in part the novel will walk us through. This sets off the novel here as we jump back in forth in time, and from multiple different voices, as we see Ludvik make an irrevocable choice that completely diverts his life.
In one of his essays, Milan Kundera says something to the effect that he’s never been interested in dystopian literature, having lived in a dystopian state. This book is about the nature of authoritarianism, but unlike books like 1984 or Darkness at Noon, the destruction of the individual at the hands of the state is not done in a dynamic and violent fashion. Instead, it’s about the slow, seeping way in which someone becomes persona non grata. I think it’s fair to think a lot about how the nature of authoritarianism often takes on specific flavors (like fascism or Stalinism), but that the actual functioning and exercise of power is more universal. I often think about people who want their own version of authoritarianism, whether they’re arguing for it directly or indirectly, because the lie at the center is that they will be the good kind, they won’t ever get caught in the middle of it, and it’s the right thing to do. A book like this reminds me that anti-democratic movements often look like good on paper.
