Though I am often at least the typist behind many of the posts authored by The Rumpus, I am keeping my name on this one as it’s very much a pet list. You’ve probably heard that Milan Kundera passed away earlier this week, and while we don’t have an interview to un-paywall this installment of What to Read When is a small tribute to the man, who was a prolific writer. I’ve made it a habit of picking up his work whenever I see a title at a used bookstore, and so I’ve been fortunate to have read a decent chunk of his *~oeuvre~* which is the basis for the recommendations below.
Of course, the popular picks The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being are currently sold out on Bookshop, but they’re popular because they are good. Lightness was my entryway to Kundera back in high school, and when I was recently gifted with picking a good friend’s next book I selected Laughter in an attempt to convert him to fiction. In addition to his novels, Kundera wrote essays and criticism, and The Art of the Novel has been sitting on my shelf like a small bit of iridium since graduate school.
If you want to order something right now that will arrive immediately-ish, never fear. For those of you who are in the mood for something short and more traditional, I happily recommend Ignorance, which is another sideways love story. For those of you who want to shove your head into a book for hours at a time and come out blinking hard after all the metafiction, Immortality will be your happy place.
And if for whatever reason you don’t feel like actually reading Milan Kundera but are looking for something similar, I’ve included a few titles below that feel like kissing cousins to his body of work.
The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
One spring afternoon, the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow. Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastical, funny, and devastating satire of Soviet life combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem, each brimming with historical, imaginary, frightful, and wonderful characters.
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a feat of striking ingenuity and intelligence, exploring how our reading choices can shape and transform our lives. Originally published in 1979, Italo Calvino’s singular novel crafted a postmodern narrative like never seen before—offering not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together, the stories form a labyrinth of literature known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers pursue the story lines that intrigue them and try to read each other. Deeply profound and surprisingly romantic, this classic is a beautiful meditation on the transformative power of reading and the ways we make meaning in our lives.
The City We Became by NK Jemisin
In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn’t remember who he is, where he’s from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power. In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it’s as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels. And they’re not the only ones. Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She’s got six.
What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret—Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. In “Books and Roses” one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers’ fates. In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” involves a “house of locks,” where doors can be closed only with a key–with surprising, unobservable developments. And in “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don’t You Think,” a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
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