A couple of minutes ago, I was curiously reading Kundera’s Immortality (a book, that my friend passed on to me), and I was struck by how fucked up this writer was. He was describing in a passage, a scene, where people were incessantly in a symphonic manner yawning or stretching open their mouths, and the absurdity of capturing such a moment struck me as inane. Not only did the writer integrate this mundane moment into a paragraph, but managed to write an entire book, disparate in essence, depicting random nonsensical associations of people and situations that an otherwise semi-intelligent individual would perhaps only ponder upon in his feverish reverie. Thus the manifestion of it in an actual bestseller would seem very foolhardy.
I am not sure what merits a bestseller, the intelligence of the judge who picks out the book or the intelligence of the readers who sustain the sales pitch of the market? Let us assume, the judge adores the said novel, he is blown away by the simplified narrative/structure and cannot wait to let the world know about it, so he makes the announcements, and the book is awarded, a pulitzer, booker etcetra. But a certain inquisitve reader out of the million others, happens to get his hands on it, spends an evening trying to invest his concentration to look for that ’something’ but never finding it, assumes he is perhaps lacking certain neurological functions.
A Hundred Years Of Solitude is another such book, which petrified me, and I was never able to complete it. My father on many an occassion has said to me, and well himself, that if something is incomprehensble, don’t attempt it, don’t go near it. In short, he meant, things should be simple, or they’r not worth your time. Now, he is not a simple man. His kind of simplicity is the highly complicated kind. The mental maze, and puzzels you’d have to navigate in order to stand by his side, and understand his vision. Marquez writes a book, where the character names are beyond difficult to follow through as one continues to read, as well as the story which fails to sustain attention. I am not sure now, whether these writers encompass the greatness that the world professess to, or I lack the intellectual vigor, to amass what they have expounded upon.
The wise men say that if you possess inner clarity, your words, your actions, and your speech will likewise be. In reference to Kundera, or the likes such as Coelho, who attempt to relate to a civilization, that suffers from its own disintegration, elucidating rationalizations of love and life, in an attempt to create cohesion, where none can possibly exist, I can only arrive to the conclusion that we as a people are simply too complicit to fight our own selves. Societies like relationships fail, when efforts are ceased; the act is voluntary, and thus, the reticence to admit otherwise.
