Milan Kundera - Immortality

Due to my limited experience of life, I cannot claim to have understood Immortality completely. Because of my own insensitivity to political content and Kundera himself saying that his work contained only aesthetic value rather than political value, this review will purely focus on the impact of the book on my pathos, and politics will not be discussed.

My favorite part of the book is the first half of it, with Agnes, Goethe, and Hemingway being the central characters. In Agnes’ part, it seems like Kundera is trying to describe her familial relationships, but I think that the center of focus is individuality. Agnes once had an argument with Paul that she found the current era was not an era of individuality, rather, it suppressed individuality. The unanimous presence of cameras and the ability to take photos of people’s faces without permission do not make people more different, instead, people were made to look more alike. Agnes was always in conflict with her own body, because A) she did not trust her face as a definition of her identity, and B) she viewed the female body as defective. As a female reader, I could empathize easily with Agnes, since the female body does carry a lot of burden and pain, starting from the first period. Starting by dismissing the individuality of gestures and faces, Kundera aimed to explain what ultimately constitutes our identity. After dismissing the role physical attributes play in our identity, he then destroyed the impact of relations on our identity. Some may suggest that one way to define one’s identity is to figure out what one’s name represents. For example, when we refer to “Agnes”, are we merely referring to “Agnes”, or the wife of Paul, the sister of Laura, the daughter of a mathematician, the sum of an infinite number of relations? Kundera attempted to weaken the strength of such argument by showing Agnes’ distrust against the world as a whole. One of my favorite moments in the book is that whenever Agnes felt overwhelmed by the noise of the city, she would buy a blue forget me not. She would hold the flower in front of her eyes so that she could focus only on the blue of the flower as she walked through the noisy crowd. When she was placed in such an antagonistic environment, she would suddenly have the urge to kill somebody merely because they were making noise or were disrespectful toward her. I think that it is the depiction of such desire to kill somebody, to make somebody disappear that causes Milan Kundera to be such a great writer, because not only did he capture such a realistic and true moment of life, but he also offered a response to it. Agnes later decided that she should not (or could not) hate them, because she had no relation with them, or with the world.

If Agnes does not trust her physicality, and at the same time had no relation with the world, who is she?

However, Kundera did not simply propose this difficult question. He raised the difficulty to another level by cutting off the link between life and identity. To Agnes, death is always a lure from her father and from Switzerland. But simply making death seem desirable is not enough, death has to be extremely close to life to show that identity is something that can exist without life. The mentioning of Goethe’s poem achieved this. How can a poem that seems so innocuous (even to children) be an invitation to death? The only answer might be that death itself is as innocuous as life, and immortality can be achieved.

At least one thing is certain, if immortality is achieved, the only thing that remained will be our identity being stripped away from physicality and relations.