I read this for a book group -- one that meets face to face rather than an online one. We met last night, but only three of us had read it and our responses were pretty mixed. Simon was quite enthusiastic -- you can read his review of it here -- I was rather lukewarm, and the third reader said he'd been enjoying it but had stopped reading before the end. Sadly the one member who had really liked it was not able to come, and so the discussion was a bit truncated.
I have never read anything by Milan Kundera before and knew very little about him apart from the fact that he was Czech and lived in Paris and wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I don't know much more now, but at least I have a handle on the sort of thing he writes. "Philosophical", "experimental", "post-modern" are some of the terms that get bandied about in relation to his work and you can certainly see why. Immortality has a fractured narrative, uses irony and black humour, is metafictional (ie the author intrudes and draws attention to the process of writing), and no doubt makes use of many other devices that come under that useful umbrella of po-mo.
I think, to be honest, I was too lazy to really take it all on board and appreciate it. I ended up skipping bits of the novel, something the writer clearly anticipates that his readers will do and reprimands them for towards the end. But in spite of all that, I have been left with a sort of fascinated after-taste, if you can imagine that sort of thing. The story that runs through the novel, of Alice the lute-player and her sister Laura, their various lovers, and the man who marries both of them (not at the same time, of course) is in fact rather enthralling and some of the connections that are made are startling and ultimately satisfying. So, rather to my surprise, I find myself wanting to read another of MK's novels, though perhaps not straight away.
