I probably would have liked this more if I hadn’t just read a bunch of Ursula Le Guin’s work.
She had me wondering deeply about the roles we play in society, about how much ideas of gender shape our experience however much it matters, and looking with fresh imagination at the world around me.
By contrast, Milan Kundera’s repeated portrayal of women as sex objects was grating and tiringly primitive. Even the disproportionate focus on the female body, both in description and in the importance of it to female characters, wore on me.
It was not, however, just a sex romp without redeeming qualities.
Even though I started getting bored somewhere in the middle, the author started appearing to talk about the story and its characters before slipping away again. The entirety of the story was there for the author to make some points, some of them directly addressing the reader. Each character’s inner journey was filled with relatable and sometimes profound observations that struck me.
The sum of the experience was a deeper exploration of human aspirations and nature, light and dark, the heaviness and lightness that can come with existence—and how our actions have us moving between them. How fragile each of our paths and decisions are, having only a single life to live and not many lives to learn from.
Lots of sex, politics (specifically Communism), and dream imagery.
I was simultaneously gutted and relieved by the end, which ultimately lived up to its title.