Diego Cabales Cabales itibaren Haynes, NE, USA
This felt more like reading a philosophy book than a novel in places, except not as dry. I tend to prefer books that are more plot- and character-heavy than this, but with the philosophical overtones the vague characters and piecemeal story seem to fit. The point of the novel is to illustrate that, in contrast to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, that everything reoccurs an infinite number of times, in fact we only lead our lives once and make decisions once, and thus our individual lives are ultimately meaningless. Furthermore, historical periods—even awful ones like the Holocaust—only happen once and thus can’t truly frighten us once we commit them to simply words in a history book. Kundera’s protagonists are designed to illustrate this theory. They are almost sarcastic caricatures, like pawns in the author’s game to make his point: Tomas’s womanizing is as over-the-top as Tereza’s loyalty to him; and Sabina’s constant need to betray everyone is as pointless as Franz’s idealistic loyalty to her. In the end no character has a particularly happy life, except possibly the dog. Meanwhile the events of the story often border on the ridiculous, like Sabina’s nude poses with the bowler hat, and, of course, the tactics of the secret police to root out dissenters. (From what I understand, Kundera, as a political exile, often wrote political commentary into his early works.) Kundera uses the actions of the corrupt Soviet State in Czechoslovakia in particular to illustrate how pointless most of our (humanity’s) efforts really are, and at the same time, Franz’s death scene illustrates that dissent is equally pointless—in the end neither side wins. There are other topics of discussion to be raised, of course, but I'll save them for my book club.
i don't know what is was about this series but i friggin loved it! i spent three days reading non-stop in the sun room. everyone though i had lost my mind. maybe i did.
Nora Roberts delivers another excellent series. This series was one of the first Nora Roberts books I discovered. I loved it! I can only hope the last book is as good as the first two.