Customer Reviews

Life is Elsewhere

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is Kundera's most harrowing book because his hero is a monster. He doesn't mean to be a monster, of course. He is Jaromil, a dreamy young man who only wants to write lyric poetry. But this is Czechoslovakia, 1948 and the Communists are about to seize power. And they know how to make use of a well-meaning young naif like Jaromil who will end up writing propaganda and betraying his friends to the secret police. Kundera is ruthlessly funny about the kind of sentimentality that ends up serving totalitarian ends. A French critic wrote that "Life is Elsewhere" is "the strongest work ever written against poetry." I would amend that to say it's the one of the strongest books ever written against *Romanticism*. Kundera is completely unenthralled by Utopia. He's seen too many people sent to the gulag in the name of the perfect society. A thrilling, essential novel.

Fidel Castro and his bearded men charged down out of the Sierra Maestra and paraded victorious through the streets of Havana to delirious cheers of adoring crowds. Mao Tsetung arrived with his vast armies at Beijing and declared that "China had stood up". The `Internationale' played and a brave new world began. We dreamed we would change the world as youths, we might die for a great cause, we yelled at barricades (of whatever material-or perhaps they were intangible) and loved with the passions of the times. Repression of anybody (except "the exploiters") never appeared on the cards, no, it was freedom in the air. Hasn't this atmosphere repeated itself time and time again, across the globe ? And there's always a poet or two to inscribe glorious verses on the stones of History. Byron, Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, Marti, Rizal. But what if `the Revolution' ushers in a period of less freedom, greater oppression, and wider stupidity that leads to mass fatalities ? Then what kind of poet would you need ? Well, what kind do you get ? Artists who paint girl + tractor. Novelists who write books called "Cement". And poets like Jaromil, the subject of this great novel. Fidel called the people who fled the new Cuba "gusanos" or worms. Reading Kundera's novel about Czechoslovakia, you feel strongly that the gusanos remained and cooperated, wrote poetry in praise of the unpraise-able. Or, maybe there's a global glut of gusanos. Maybe a gusano poet is about as necessary as wings on a turtle.

OK, this novel is a fictional biography of a very weedy mama's boy who remains naïve, protected and innocent despite everything that happens around him, even the death of his father in a concentration camp. The world around the main characters, the society at large, remain pale and nearly invisible. He (and we) really see nobody except his mother---his loves are extensions of his ego, his poetry or paintings the same. Dreams and fantasy are his stock in trade, his alter-ego jumps in and out of beds, while Jaromil stews. All is self-absorption. In modern America, the poet would be called a "dweeb". We have to laugh at Jaromil or scorn him. LIFE IS ELSEWHERE is a satire that concentrates on unpleasant aspects of the human condition so well that you cringe time and time again. Kundera spares no one, not his main character and certainly not his readers. Jaromil is surrounded, as the author says, with a wall of mirrors, and cannot see beyond. We look into our own mirrors as we read. It's doubtful that we admire the reflections. The basic themes are human nature, art and literature in society, and the sad tribulations of a small nation. Kundera, like Brazil's Machado de Assis, cuts his books up into extremely small chapters, which is an effective tool in expert hands. Each one makes a point, introduces an irony, or engages in new soul-searching. The plot of LIFE IS ELSEWHERE is minor; it is the process of writing and thinking about the issues that counts. Ah, well, readers, I'm not giving anything away to say that the message here is that people who fail to live life to the fullest always pine for some far away paradise where great deeds would be accomplished effortlessly, and imagine that "life is elsewhere". These deluded ones are capable of the dirtiest deeds. Oh, yeah, this is a good book.

"Life is Elsewhere" is a fun, humorous, scathing criticism of youth, lyricism, and poetry. Unlike some of Kundera's other work, "Life is Elsewhere" has very few subplots, and focuses mainly on the story of Jaromil (and briefly on his bizarre alter-ego, Xavier) and his mother. Jarmoil is a poet, growing up in Czechoslovakia just as that country becomes Communist. Idealistic, overprotected, obsessive at times, and ideologically misguided, Jaromil lives and dies according to rapidly changing principles and goals which are often patently ridiculous.

I found "Life is Elsewhere" enjoyable, but not as much so as Kundera's more complex and multifacted novels, such as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Immortality". I personally find Kundera's usual overt cynicism, philosophising, and self-analysis refreshing and fun to read, but there's little of that in this book. To me, the book seems to violate Kundera's assertion that he writes books that cannot be described in a sentence or two - it is a novel in the conventional sense of the word. That doesn't make it unenjoyable -- it's just different.

I finally borrowed another of Milan Kundera's books to read from the university library. I didn't enjoy it as much as I did The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However there were still a lot of incisive and thoughtful passages.

What I like most about Milan Kundera is his marvelous skill in capturing the essence of his thoughts in words, and also the thoughts themselves which reveal a kindred soul in deep contemplation of human and life. Whenever I read his books, I feel a longing to write something as deeply revealing as his books.

Life is Elsewhere is about the life of a young poet named Jaromil. The viewpoint is erected at his demise, as the writer tells us. The poet and his mother's relationship are one of the main subjects in this book. The writer says he meant to name the book The Lyric Age but changed the title at the last moment because the publishers worried that no one would buy a book with such an abstract title.

Many critics see this book as a satire of literature, of literary talent, and of life. However, as I read the book, I didn't perceive it as a satire. I felt it to be honest, sometimes brutally so, but still with sympathy and self-pity wrapped around it. Every aspiring artist is bound to go through some of what Jaromil went through.

It especially makes one wonder how literary genius can be defined or if it even can be defined. The writer himself writes in the preface that Jaromil is not a bad poet. I kept that in mind as I read the book. Jaromil is in fact a very sensitive though naive and immature poet. Nobody can be the absolute judge of literary talent.

Although the protagonist in "Life is Elsewhere" is a poet, this novel has little to do with poets or poetry. "Life is Elsewhere" is an exploration and a critique of a peculiar kind of sellout: the state sponsored artist in a totalitarian country.

From the very beginning, we sense that Jaromile is hardly a talented poet. His lyrical career begins in childhood when he first utters the phrase "mama is caca". This scatological verse is both humorous and prophetic since it inadvertently sullies someone he loves. As a young man, Jaromile is recruited by a friend in the secret police who compliments him on his "good verse". Jaromile rises to national fame as a state sponsored artist, but in the process he condemns a talented poet and unwittingly causes his lover to be arrested and sentenced to time in a labor camp. When Jaromile is finally confronted by a person of strength and integrity (a friend of the poet whom Jaromile denounced) he is publicly humiliated and dies in a pathetic manner by freezing to death on a balcony while his opponent makes love to the woman Jaromile wanted.

The East Block has produced many talented artists including "true believers" who actively supported their government despite its totalitarian nature. Maxim Gorky and Dimitry Shostokovich are two examples of this type. Gorky fully supported the Russian Revolution even after he discovered that the Soviet Government was systematically killing political prisoners, including children, in its prison system on the Solovetsky Islands. Shostokovich lived in daily peril of his life and hated Stalin, yet he was still an ardent patriot who believed in and supported Soviet Communism.

Jaromile has little in common with Gorky and Shostokovich because unlike them he has no talent or principles and consequently lacks intellectual conflict. Instead, he draws a closer parallel to sycophants such as Tikhon Khrenikov, the music critic who denounced Shostokovich for the excessive "formalism" of his music. Jaromile is simply a sellout who believes his own lies and as a result, he is hardly an interesting character.

I think many readers would have enjoyed this novel more, if Kundera had written about a character that possesses both tremendous talent and an ardent love for a villainous regime. Instead, Kundera takes the low road and portrays the typical, untalented "yes man" in the base court of most dictatorships. Kundera portrays his character with great skill and humor, but in the end it is the vapid nature of his subject matter that betrays him.

Milan Kundera's novel, Life is Elsewhere revolves around the principle that in a society with strict rules, a poet risks betraying his lyricism. In expounding his theme, Kundera describes the life of his protagonist, Jaromil, from birth to death. Jaromil misreads the liberty previous poets such as Shelley, Mayakovsky and Rimbaud have taken with their own creations and proceeds to apply those own (misread) liberties to himself.

"Lyric poets generally come from homes run by women," Kundera tells us. And, as if to prove himself correct, Jaromil, too, comes from a home run by a woman--his mother. Jaromil's mother, however, is a monster of deceptive affections and she deliberately leads poor Jaromil so far astray that he comes to believe he truly does possess the gifts his mother assigns to him and that he is "one of the elect," destined for greatness. Jaromil, meanwhile is wretchedly inadequate and soulless to the core. But before condemning his poor mother, the reader should realize that her penchant for making Jaromil's childish utterances into the stuff of Blakean bon mots is not only a defensible argument against romanticism, it is also the best thing in this book.

Kundera lets us know repeatedly that Jaromil is a pariah. But he also invests his protagonist with enough of Byron's charm to let us forgive him his flights of fancy and fantasy. Kundera sees fit to involve Jaromil with that one group of people who are even easier to poke fun at than poets--politicians. The politician's power, however, can be real, while the poor poet's is forever imagined, even in the best of cases. And, while Rimbaud saw fit to rid himself of both poetry and the politics behind poetry, Jaromil never takes that step no matter how much Kundera pushes him.

This is, perhaps, Kundera's most elastic novel, forging ahead while also expanding in every other direction. It is also hilariously funny. While not possessing the classic endurance of Laughable Loves or The Joke, Life is Elsewhere is still classic Kundera and well worth anyone's investment.

Life is Elsewhere is the first novel by Milan Kundera that I have read, and it was the first he wrote. The edition I have, however, was edited and touched up to confirm to the more accurate French translation with the help of the author, so I am assuming it contains a little more maturity than when he wrote it thirty years ago.

The story is very simple, it is about a struggling young poet's first twenty or so years of life, from birth to death. He is the only named character (excluding Xavier, but don't worry about that), and this adds to the sense of familiarity we feel with him.

Another important character is his mother, and we are often privy to her emotions and thoughts away from her poet son. She is quite obsessive about him and wants to make sure his life is how he wants it poetically, but as he grows older, she becomes rather jealous of his growing attraction to females that aren't her.

I really enjoyed the narrator's tone of voice, at times he was an impartial observer, at other times he made little comments about the characters/predicaments, and at other times he threw all that away and started having a one-sided discussion with the reader - even indulging in little flights of fancy away from the main story. I have no idea if this is a Kunder staple or not, but it really worked in this story and I wouldn't mind seeing it again.

The poet is a selfish character, moreso as he becomes older, and this can sometimes be hard to read. He treats his girlfriend very poorly, and looks at life and love with the obsessive attitude of a teenager, which can sometimes be a little difficult to read. He considers his art and drive to be greater than any others, and this makes him arrogant, but he truly is a great poet so this is moderately understandable.

In summation, I very much recommend this book. It was very sad in places, and when it wasn't sad, it was a great meditation on life.

Kundera's study of a young poet is both funny and deeply
jarring as he turns his insightful eye against myths which
not only his characters hold to be true, but most of us
outside the book as well. Following the poet from
conception to death, Kundera weaves a narrative that begins
in comedy and ends in tragedy. He also cleverly weaves in
stories of other lyric poets, including Shelley, Rimbaud,
and the Czech poet Jiri Orten. This is a wonderful story
that is about poetry, but also about changing in a changing
world as well.

(Note that this review refers to an earlier translation of the novel)

This is a somewhat schematic work and not at all what it might appear to be to the casual reader. Superficially it is a fictional biography of a young man, an aspiring poet who is a contemporary of the author himself. The character is conceived (yes, we get a picture of his conception, or at least his mother's version of it, since he is the center of her existence, and everything about him is not only fascinating to her but must fall into the right place in the well-ordered design of his life which she creates), he is born, he lives a life of ambition and shame, he dies. His name is Jaromil ("lover of spring"). His mother worships him and attempts to organize his life so that he will fulfill what she believes is his promise to become a great artist, even a "great socialist poet". He is both comforted by her presence and unconditional affection and irritated by her smothering attitudes, which enchain him to a perpetual childhood. He formulates strategies of psychological escape into what he imagines maturity must be. The strategies are not flattering (e.g., a period of furious masturbation to compensate for a bout of psychologically-determined impotence with his first girlfriend; verbal and physical mistreatment of his second girlfriend, ending in a betrayal of her and her family to the security police; reporting to the authorities on the unacceptable attitudes of his teachers; constant "elevated" poeticizing of his own miserable existence; and so on).

Through his mother the world bows to Jaromil, but he is uncertain how widespread this homage will be. He is the only character in the book who has a name (excepting his idealized, improved self, a creation of his imagination known, with rather heavy symbolism, as Xavier, a heroic wraith who rescues maidens in distress and then abandons them as he jumps from dream to dream without ever awakening to the soiled reality which surrounds us). The rest of the nameless cast consists of: Maman ("Mommy"); the absent then deceased father; the detested bourgeois aunt and uncle; the janitor's son, later a policeman; the dark-haired Jewish intellectual; the artist, a painter who is Maman's lover and Jaromil's childhood mentor; the admired and envied famous poet; the old poet with gray hair; the middle-aged man (who may be Kundera's fictional alter-ego); and, most important after Maman, the series of girls with whom he has idealized or realized romantic and erotic relations -- the studious girl with spectacles (spiritual kinship, erotic failure), the skinny, unattractive red-headed girl (easy consummation, possessive "love", disappointment, confabulation, betrayal), and the young woman who makes films (erotic, social, and intellectual failure of the most devastating type).

The story takes place in Prague, but there are only a few clues to this, and it might as well have taken elsewhere. The settings are generic - a home that is "nationalized" into an apartment, a university, a park, and of course a large "national security" building, whose employees, policemen, have taken over the confiscated suburban villa of a formerly wealthy bourgeois citizen and converted it into a retreat and recreation center, a place to which Jaromil and his fellow poets are invited to present their work and then engage in a very spurious "dialogue" with the guard dogs of the system. There is more information on the shabbiness of underwear (perhaps intended to limn the shabbiness of official ideals and the behavior of men on the make in the new socialist state "under construction") during the critical time depicted -- say, 1945 to 1950 -- than there is on other indicators of time and place. The nameless characters and the accompanying skeletal props are in fact a stage-setting in which Jaromil acts out a narcissistic play, bedeviled by fears he has that the audience - the rest of the world, people he encounters in school and on the streets - will have an unflattering opinion of him, will see him for what he is, a self-centered, immature youth. Poetry is the weapon he will use to rearrange matters to his satisfaction. And lyrical poetry - its basis in false-heroic notions of the self, its deficiencies with respect to portraying the grim realities of most lives, its ability to becloud the mind while it stirs the soul, and its easy co-optation for propaganda purposes by cynical rulers - is the author's target.

For the book is a thesis of anti-lyricism, a polemical position which is never explicitly stated. We are led to the anti-lyrical position by the pitiful conceits and the dreadful consequences of lyricism as they are seen in Jaromil's unlovely existence (and, for the historical period, in his typical biography). In fact, in Chapter 6, Verse 2, we are given a precise description of the misleading yet attractive and satisfying nature of lyricism, a mini-thesis presentation of the ideas that Jaromil's life embodies. Chapter 6 also illustrates Kundera's long-term fascination with older eighteenth-century predecessors of the "novel of ideas" (rather than the novel of characters or plot, which are perhaps better utilized, in Kundera's mind, as devices to get at the discussion of ideas - or as a way into the examination of changing human situations; this latter consideration shows the lasting influence of French existentialism on Kundera). In this chapter the author breaks into the third-person narrative of Jaromil's life in order to address the reader directly, to pose questions about relative perspectives, and to jump forward beyond his protagonist's death into the relationship of two other characters whose lives have been affected by Jaromil's impostures, before bringing us back to the "death of the poet" in the last chapter. It suggests the possibility of alternative novels that might have been written about other characters in the story - the janitor's son who became a policeman, the red-headed girl - but are now excluded by virtue of the author's having made his choice.

The author's intervention has become, in his words, an "observation tower" which allows him to adjust his focus on the main character (who is, in fact, "the embodiment of lyricism") and also point his telescope into the future and the past. Another set of meditations emerges in this chapter, founded in Jaromil's life but pointing to broader considerations: the poet, especially the Romantic poet, as a "Mama's boy" who reconfigures his life through desperate efforts at escape, both in life and through his art. Kundera uses this characterization to briefly illuminate this aspect of the lives and careers of the 1920s Czech poet Jiri Wolker, and the revered Romantics Shelley, Lermontov, and Rimbaud, would-be bad-boys fleeing the embraces of their mothers and grandmothers, each of whom might be seen as erecting a cult of the defiant self. So Chapter 6 - which, in Kundera's favorite musical terms, is a sort of recapitulation of themes before proceeding to the coda of the last chapter - gives the reader a peculiar gloss on a particular phenomenon in the history of literature.

The translation by Peter Kussi seems acceptable and solid to me, a reader who does not speak Czech. Since the novel is schematic and occasionally thesis-like, there is no need for stylistic heroics or adventures, so I assume the translation reflects a down-to-earth expository prose approach of the original Czech text. Kundera is famously attentive to and fussy about the fine points of translation. I do not know if this particular translation meets his standards. Possibly not, since there was another translation by Aron Asher ten years after this one, and it has the Kundera "seal of approval" in a brief postscript. The Asher translation is a little more "flowing", even lyrical, which is surprising when Kundera's animus against lyricism is taken into account. However, in matters of narrative substance and historical allusions the two translations are interchangeable.

With regard to the contentious subject of "the lyrical age" of men (and mankind), Kundera devoted several passages of his "The Joke" to its consideration, and he has continued to consider it in his several volumes of literary essays. The briefest way to put it is that "the lyrical age" of young men and women is a period of intense adolescent narcissism and intellectual immaturity born of uncertainty about the self. This leads them into "all or nothing" attitudes which invariably have harmful consequences for themselves and others (in the Czech case for the period depicted, "lyricism" resulted in a cheerful alliance between poets and hangmen, as Kundera often reiterates). The biographical background of this long-lasting preoccupation relates, I believe, to what he perceives as the failings and poetic impostures of his own youth, most especially his long poem "The Last May", which depicts in stilted terms the last days of the Communist martyr and cult icon, Julius Fucik. How much of Jaromil is autobiographical in its details, that is, a fictionalized version of "early Kundera" can only be guessed at. Just as he killed off Jaromil as a character by having him choose to die in response to his disappointments (his fatal pneumonia stemming from a weak attempt at suicide) Kundera deliberately killed off his earlier self by ceasing to write poetry and turning to prose and to the novel as an "instrument of rational discourse" (my term for his approach). In the end I would call the book a successful thesis and only a qualified success as a novel (tastes and judgments about this will, I realize, vary greatly among its readers). Whatever my own hesitations on this point, I recommend the book as well worth reading to those interested in Kundera's career, in Czech literature, and in that part of the recent past in central Europe which is now entering its late phase of "living memory", which means that it might soon be forgotten altogether or significantly misrepresented.

Although 'Life is Elsewhere' is not one of Milan Kundera's most celebrated novels, it is without doubt one of the most intimate and beautifully written.

Detractors and critics of Kundera often gripe that his characters are unpleasant, underdeveloped and shallow human beings. All these critics need to do is read this novel to see how incorrect this assertion is. Within 'Life is Elsewhere' we see an intimate account of the life and development of a young poet named Jaromil, with a specific focus on his relationship with his mother. The beautiful manner in which this relationship is rendered allows us to appreciate a subtle interplay between the poet's relationship with his mother, and his relationship with the female sex in general.

When one hears of a novel about such a relationship, one is tempted to picture the story of a man who is utterly dominated by a controlling and posessive mother, however this is not how Kundera develops their bond. Here what we find is the story of a mother and child relationship whose closeness transcends the usual maternal bonds. Intertwined with this relationship is the poet's passion for his art and his use of it to express and promote his socialist political ideologies.

The skill, beauty and dexterity with which Kundera interweaves the many facets and relationships of this novel, as well as the depth of character present, should be enough to assuage even the most ardent of his critics.