Dear subscribers, I am at my first book fair this week. I will get back to your comments - of which I hope there will be many! - as soon as I can; but on the whole, I will be away from cyberspace. In the meantime, I thought I’d embellish this time in beautiful Prague with a post on Czech literature. Enjoy!
Last year, I wrote a draft for the next post in my In Memoriam series on personal favorite and icon: the late Milan Kundera. When I lost it - I’d written it on paper - I kind of lost the urge to continue for a good amount of time.
But as it so happens, Farewell Waltz - or, to use my Czech-to-English translation’s title, A Farewell Party - quickly became not only one of my Kundera favorites alongside The Book of Laughter & Forgetting, The Joke and of course The Unbearable Lightness of Being; it also became one of my all-time favorite comedic novels. And perhaps one of the few genuinely good ones written in the postwar era. For if the art of literature has been dying over the last few decades, the art of the brilliant comedic novel is definitely a long-lost art. We must appreciate it as much as we can.
For that reason, I added it to the favorites list I told you all about last week. Right up at number 32. For this reason, I’ll also not put a paywall on this post.
For those with a lingering interest in my In Memoriam series, here is the chart I used before. Let me know in the comments if you are still interested in hearing more about Kundera’s other novels. For those to whom this is new, the order in the chart represents the ideal order of importance for both the quality of Kundera’s work as well as an ideal reading order for those readers interested in a greater Kundera experience than the ubiquitous, one-off perusal of Unbearable Lightness of Being:
Essential: The Joke, A Farewell Party, Laughable Loves, Life Is Elsewhere,
Essential essays: Intro to Jacques and His Master,
Less essential: TBD
Unessential or extra: Jacques and His Master
A Farewell Party was Kundera’s third novel. Though not as high profile as Unbearable Lightness or Laughter & Forgetting, it is one of his most important. For it was the last novel he wrote in his homeland before leaving Czechoslovakia altogether in 1975.
A Farewell Party is not only a farewell to those in the plot of the story: it is a farewell to his country as Kundera aspires toward higher heights. While it is safe to say that all of Kundera’s novels must have some things derived from his life story, A Farewell Party is a rare case of a novel representing a singular, widely-known autobiographical detail from Kundera’s life: his imminent departure. The other example is The Joke: for those who missed my post on his debut, Kundera had indeed gotten into trouble over the kind of joke that causes all the trouble in that novel.
A Farewell Party is also Kundera’s black sheep novel. So too is Life Is Elsewhere, but while that novel differs from Kundera’s oeuvre in its (mind the pun) uncharacteristic focus on a singular character, A Farewell Party is not as tragicomic as his other work due to it being a fully-fledged comedy. A Farewell Party is also structurally abnormal as it eschews Kundera’s seven-part structure in favor of a five-part structure. For that reason, A Farewell Party also reads a bit more quickly than Kundera’s other work. Making it an ideal first choice for the time-conscious reader.
A quick note on the title: unusually given my studies of literary translation, I am a minoritarian in my preference for A Farewell Party. The Czech original - Valčík na rozloučenou - literally means Farewell Waltz, the title most readers are likely to find today. Ordinarily, I would have no objection with using the accurately translated title if it wasn’t for the fact that the new editions titled Farewell Waltz are second-hand translations from the French. A product of Kundera’s latter-day belief that his French translations were superior to his Czech originals.
While I understand that Kundera had a complicated relationship with his homeland, I cannot condone this marginalization of the beautiful Czech language. So for this reason, I have to use the slightly less accurate A Farewell Party because it is the title of Peter Kussi’s Czech-to-English translation. A translation the famously picky Kundera was very happy with back in the day before his Francophilia got the better of him.
In short: if you want the actual Czech-to-English translation, acquire the editions titled A Farewell Party. If you agree with Kundera about his French versions or simply don’t care, then it’s fine to acquire Farewell Waltz.
A Farewell Party is relevant to the world of today in several respects:
Abortion
What today is called Mgtow
The discomfort of the Old Country returnee
Gynecological shenanigans
Kundera’s comedic novel is wondrously politically incorrect not only for American readers in the know, but Czech readers today who, since 1989, have rediscovered Kundera’s formerly banned novels. (The older generations tend to like The Joke because it was briefly one of the only ones available and is a good novel; while younger generations tend to share Americans’ preference for The Unbearable Lightness of Being) Personally, this is the novel I’d be most likely to recommend to a Czech since 1. Czechs enjoy political incorrectness, and 2. its comedic nature renders more palatable what, to the Czechs, is perceived as snobbery in Kundera’s authorial voice. And Czechs like snobbery just as much as they like aristocrats: which is to say, not at all. (Unless it is beer snobbery)
For Americans, the casual way in which the topic of abortion is treated is bound to ruffle the feathers of both pro-abortion and anti-abortion advocates alike. Kundera, on top of his game since he switched to prose from poetry, writes about this touchy issue with enviable ease. The story begins when the spa nurse Růžena, presumably pregnant, calls the jazz musician she made love to some time ago, Klíma, and claims that her baby is his. And that she’s keeping it. He, therefore, must assume his fatherly duties. But because Klíma already has a wife, Kamila, who loves him but is eternally suspicious of him having affairs, Klíma comes up to the spa instead to convince her to have an abortion. Here, the comedy begins.
This scenario is most reminiscent of the hardships many men have had over the last few decades (and, arguably, throughout human history) where a woman uses pregnancy as a way to tie a man down; and not always in a lovey-dovey manner. This use of children for selfish reasons is an experience most men who are mgtow know all too well. This novel is certainly for them: I doubt an American equivalent will come our and/or be widely promoted anytime soon.
One of the main characters is a sympathetically depicted Czech-American who has returned to the homeland to receive treatment at the spa. Putting aside the irregularity of such a person traveling to Communist Czechoslovakia for such reasons - not that it matters, since Kundera is always 100% believable - it is rather quaint and most welcome to find that Kundera created a Czech-American character in the Old Country. It is a rarity in European literature: perhaps because relatively few Europeans abroad return to the Old Country. That, or perhaps Europeans simply aren’t interested in these characters. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it even reminded me of Henry James; an author who couldn’t be more different from Kundera if he tried.
The character, Bertlef, is also unusual in that he’s a Christian character. His sympathetic depiction (as a character; his religious views slightly less so in that they come off as an intellectual luxury) is that much more intriguing given that Kundera never appeared elsewhere to have much interest in, or time for, religious matters except insofar as they related to his considerable knowledge of philosophy and the history of philosophy. And yet it is no coincidence that in the famously atheist Czechoslovakia, it is the Czech-American who is religious.
While it’s tempting to sift through the prose and hone in on a criticism from an author who at the time was still on the path toward accepting that Communism was morally bankrupt, Bertlef’s religiosity says a lot more about the Czech lands at that time (and today) than America. Even if Kundera doesn’t give it as much intellectual credence as a Christian reader might hope for, Bertlef is a ray of sunshine in Kundera’s world. And his faith clearly has something to do with it.
All three of these issues make A Farewell Party sumptuous food for thought. But it is the character of Škréta - a gynecologist at the spa town - who, in my view, gives A Farewell Party its richest intellectual nutrients.
Some time ago, those who keep close track of the news noted a series of stories coming out of the Netherlands. There, apparently more than one gynecologist was found to have placed his own sperm inside women receiving in vitro fertilization instead of those of the husband, or sperm donor. Another gynecologist or two was found to have done the same thing. As a result, these gynecologists fathered numerous kids: in one case, over fifty. It is one of the recent scandals of modern Dutch society.
Škréta is a gynecologist who does just that: slips in his sperm where the donors should be. (The clinic in the spa town is, after all, a fertility clinic, adding to the greater humor of the story’s setting) So far he’s been undetected. He feels as if he alone can ensure the future by propagating little Škrétas to, as the Red Hot Chili Peppers put it one time, “save the population.” If Kundera is less interested in enhancing moral consciousness in favor of suspending moral judgment, he nonetheless does a fabulous job of making his readers complicit in very screwy and/or unconventional behavior. Meaning that much as he claimed to prefer suspending moral judgment, his novels have the actual effect of enhancing moral consciousness.
Comparisons with his fellow Czech authors are difficult to ascertain even for those who, like me, are well-acquainted with Czech literature. Apart from the language, Kundera was a Habsburg modernist whose most-admired authors were often from across the border but wouldn’t have been before 1918. The most that can be said is that he had the same hometown as Habsburg modernist titan Robert Musil who, though part-Czech, wrote in German. This suggests that insofar as Kundera is influenced by his countrymen, there is a distinctly Brno/Moravian bias at play. Even so, A Farewell Party has a very discreet resemblance to Kundera’s fellow Prague Spring author Ludvík Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs. (Who, also, was from Moravia)
In that novel, the protagonist buys guinea pigs onto which he performs micro-sadistic little experiments. This is an outlet for the stress of living in a Communist dictatorship. This is, of course, remarkably similar to Škréta and his gynecological shenanigans. Both characters seek control over their own lives and seek strange - or outright sketchy - ways of doing so. Both of them, instinctively, understand the unending series of power plays that is Communism; here, the things they afflict onto others - guinea pigs and women with gynecological problems alike - is symptomatic of their desire to engage in that power play which otherwise has turned them into helpless and hopeless individuals.
What makes Škréta’s “sperm donation” a richer germ of thought than even the abortion angle has to do with the current rise in sperm donation in North America. Many of the stories I’ve heard take place in parking lots with cash exchanges and “DIY” preparations of sperm; suffice to say there are more than a few Škrétas planting their seed across the country as we speak. People who - if I was a betting man - I suspect feel similar feelings of powerlessness on the national level (if not the local) and who find a kind of release in quietly dominating the future.
This might seem only coincidentally related were it not for the current dominance of far-left ideology in the United States: the same ideology that created the conditions for the Czechoslovakia Kundera writes about. We know by now that deconstructing and “disrupting” the nuclear family is an established goal of left-wing America. That Americans are forced into the wholly absurd position of having to be “pro-family” when humanity was unspeakingly pro-family since the beginning of time. We also know that feminism - along with other factors - has caused a gender war to erupt in the US. Meaning that large swaths of men and women find it impossible to trust each other even on the basic social level, not to mention romantic relationships.
While distrust of one’s fellow man and woman in normalization-era Czechoslovakia was different than in America today, the distrust is there all the same. Is it any wonder that Americans circumvent the currently damaging prospect of relating to the opposite sex and just opt for the easy path of sperm donation instead? Is it any wonder that Růžena doesn’t hesitate to try and make a celebrity jazz trumpeter the mother of her child? Or that Klíma, knowing he is with a rare woman who truly loves him, tries to undo this mess? The flavors might be different. But all of this is the result of Marxist destabilization of society and of the family. A force that - remarkably - Americans try to normalize instead of resisting.
Bertlef, in this case, becomes a symbol of Old Czechness, or Past Czechness, subverted. Both him and his wife are there for treatment: Kundera leaves us to suspect that Škréta treated her. Or should I say: “treated” her. Even before Kundera leaves the country, his first depiction of Western naivete about Communism comes out as fresh and strong as a healthy baby from the womb. Here, Bertlef’s Christian values continue to lose their appeal: by being given the Škréta treatment, his entire biological dignity is undermined by a man who is the product of ideological imposition upon Czech society. And Bertlef, for all his kindness, is equally hapless.
The fertility clinic, as a result, becomes a symbol not of the furthering of one’s lineage through the miracle of reproduction. But a place of genetic subversion and Communist domination. Of control where Klíma is concerned. Of resources where Růžena is concerned. Of destiny and a kind of “biological” engineering of human souls where Škréta is concerned; for the fertilization of numerous wombs with the sperm of a man who will never know his sons signals the completion of Communist subversion of the family irrespective of Škréta’s personal intent. And a loss of faith on Bertlef’s part; not in God, necessarily, but in his Old Country compatriots.
A character not mentioned hitherto in this post is Jakub. Through Jakub, Kundera connects the events of the relatively insular spa town with the reality of Communism nationwide. A former political prisoner, Jakub went to Škréta, his friend, and asked him for a pill with which to kill himself should he be imprisoned again. However, he is visiting the spa town so that he can bid his friend goodbye: the government has given him a passport and permission to leave the country. He also wants to return the pill.
As Jakub drives to the border, he passes through the closest village to that side of the Iron Curtain: a God-forsaken place. There, he sees a little boy living in these conditions of poverty. Though Jakub is hardened by the system, this moment touches him and moves him to pity. It is one of the few such times we encounter this emotion in Kundera’s work. And it is one of my favorite moments in all literature. If I do not describe it further, it is because as a self-exile it is hard to describe these things.
My interpretation of this moment is that behind the complications, Kundera never lost his love for his country. And his output confirms that: apart from his last work, The Festival of Insignificance, he never left the Czech lands as a setting even if he did. And if the introductory essay for his play Jacques and His Master is any indication, his encounters with the occupying Russian forces following the Invasion of Czechoslovakia brought his Czechness close to home. That experience made it impossible for the Czech lands to leave his heart and soul, even if he himself could not remain there in person.
Naturally, I await the arrival of a big biography with which to confirm these details. But until then, A Farewell Party remains one of the more personal Kundera novels out there. Even if it wants you to believe otherwise.
To me, feminism just means a belief in the equality of all people regardless of whether they are male or female. Radical feminism seems to involve hating men.
I've yet to read this one. Thanks for all the ideas and hope you enjoy the fair!