Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí

Just heard that Milan Kundera, Czech-French author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and other fantastic books had passed away on Tuesday in Paris. I still remember from the mid 1980’s the deep impression this book left on me, both as a bitter-sweet love story with the Prague Spring and its aftermath as its background, and as a philosophical existentialist reflection on the absurdity of life. I have not reread any of his novels since the 1980’s, but they still stand on my bookshelves and in a lighter (and bearable) future, I will likely get back to them. May the lightness of unbeing be more bearable to him!

“It would be senseless to try to draw its borders exactly. Central Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate.”

remembering Prague Spring, 1968

In 1968, I was quite young (!), but I do remember vividly the invasion and repression of Czechoslovakia by troops of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Maybe because the French public radio [our main source of information then] was quite vocal about it, maybe because my parents were early subscribers of a progressive, anti-colonialist, third-Worldist, Catholic newspaper named Croissance des Jeunes Nations, which I read as well and which mostly covered liberation movements in the Third World, but also the resistance of Czechoslovak people against Soviet tanks… Today these tanks are back, now in Kyiv streets. (With the difference that the China of 1968 denounced in the strongest terms the Soviet invasion.) While the Iron Curtain prevented most inhabitants to flee the country, the death toll was relatively limited, with 108 registered victims. After a few days into the Russian invasion, the toll is already much higher and the increasing bombing of Ukrainian cities is going to see it rise faster and faster. Support Ukraine!

feu rouge

the secret Commonwealth [book review]

Now that I have read The secret Commonwealth over the X break, I cannot but wait eagerly for the third volume! The book is indeed quite good, much in the spirit of the first ones in His dark materials than of the previous La belle sauvage. When La belle sauvage was at its core an oniric and symbolic tale floating on the Thames, with some events on the side, The secret Commonwealth on the opposite is much more centred on adventures and quests and a real story (or rather make it three!) and a growing threat, with side philosophical musings. Quite the opposite of the first book, in short. Even the time localisation is reverted. While La belle sauvage was taking place ten years before His dark materials, making Lyra a very young baby, this book takes place ten years later with Lyra a young adult, growing very quickly in maturity through the pages of the book. The two are so incredibly different that they could have almost be written by different authors… The secret Commonwealth is also much more cosmopolitan than its older sibling as both Lyra and Pan leave Oxford, then England to travel through Europe and Middle East towards a most dangerous destination. The central theme of the book is whether or not Reason or Rationalism should guide one’s life. Given the magical realism of the novel, where the soul of each character is expressed as a companion expressed as a particular animal, a marten called Pan (short for Pantalaimon) for Lyra, it is somewhat an easy (easier than in our own World!) plot line to dismiss rationalist thinkers pretending they do no exist. And to paint the philosophers following this route as either shallow and more interested in rethorics (than philosophy) or fake and deluded. Since Lyra reading these authors is the reason for a widening split between her and Pan, I did not find this part the best in the plot, even though it seemed inevitable. But the resulting quest and the “chance” meetings of both central characters are gripping and well-written, as well as deeply poignant. All characters build some depth, esp. compared with La belle sauvage where they were mostly caricatures. As it is very rare that the second volume in a series brings so much pleasure and improvements, I strongly recommend it (even as a start, skipping La belle sauvage !)

Prague fatale [book review]

Another Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novel I order after reading [and taking place after] Prussian Blue, again with a double entendre title and plenty of smart lines representative of berliner Witz and Schnauze. But much darker than Prussian Blue, as the main character, Bernie Gunther, is getting more morally ambivalent, as a member of the SS, having participated in the mass murders of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front before his return to Berlin as a member of the intelligence branch of the SS. Under direct orders of Reinhard Heydrich, whose role in the novel is almost as central as Gunther’s. It is thus harder to relate to this anti-hero, and his constant disparagement of Nazis, when he is at the same time a significant if minor part of the Nazi State. It is also unplesant that most characters in the novel are mass murderers, to end up being executed after the war, as described in a post-note. Still, the story has strength in both the murder inquiry itself (until it fizzles out) and the immersion in 1942 Germany and Tchecoslovakia, a strength served by the historical assassination of Heydrich in May 1942. An immersion I do not wish to repeat in a near future, though…

As a side story, I bought this used book for £0.05 on Amazon and received a copy that looked as if it has been stolen from a library from East Renfrewshire, south of Glasgow, as it still had a plastic cover, the barcodes and the list of dates it had been borrowed. I thus called the central offices of the East Renfrewshire libraries to enquire whether or not the book had been stolen, and was told this was not the case, the book being part of a bulk sale of used books by the library to second hand sellers. And that I could enjoy reading the book at my own pace! (As a second order side story, East Renfrewshire is the place in Scotland where Rudolph Hess landed when trying to negociate on his own a peace treaty with Great-Britain in 1942.)