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I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do.
This, I realised, is what I wanted to read; this was what I wanted to feel when I read. Everything else was a distraction. But why?
Of course, apart from the overt philosophical frame, Kundera's novel is a prime example of mainstream literary fiction in the 1980s and because of its mix of sex and Cold War politics it received a good deal of media attention, much of it sniggering at its hyperbolic title – these pretentious foreigners, what? – and this is why I had heard of Milan Kundera and not of Nathalie Sarraute, and yet this brief admission of distance changed everything. It has stayed with me for 40 years.
Perhaps only three sentences is all it takes to convert a reader from one camp to the other because before long I had lost interest in Updike, Roth, Amis et al. For all the pleasures their novels afforded, not one produced something like vertigo.2 From then on I looked for more of the same. I assumed the key difference was that the novel was from continental Europe and discussed big political and philosophical issues, so I read novels like Josef Škvorecký's The Engineer of Human Souls....and was bored, utterly.3 Kundera's other novels were also disappointing. I was confused. Later, I discovered the same had to be different.
The realisation came in the form of the only novel cited in Josipovici's review apart from Tu ne t'aimes pas 4 now reissued by NYRB Classics in the US and And Other Stories in the UK.
Is Beauty Good is nothing like The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Those sniggering at Kundera's title would likely question whether it is a novel at all. For a start there are 31 chapters across three sections contained within 136 pages (111 in the Serpent's Tail edition), and then there's the absence of a question mark in the title. What's that all about? One of the Booker Prize judges said it almost made that year's shortlist but the jury felt it was too radical for their audience. One reviewer of the reissue does well to make the novel more palatable to this imaginary readership: Lara Pawson says the diverse chapters are held together by "Belben's obsessions with the loss of the natural world, with human folly and, as the title makes plain, with challenging the idea of beauty".
Along the way, much is said about dying, deafness, desolation, depression, dogs, deckchairs and ducks, about horses, fish, frogs, swans, bees, "brackn", brain cells, bad teeth, beetroot and bodily excretions, about elephants, litter, gardens, graters, colanders, streams, dreams and doubts.
In another, Joseph Schreiber describes it as "polyphonic, multifaceted" and a "dynamic and immersive reading experience", which it is. He places the novel in the context of Belben's earlier novels, also recently reissued. When I wrote about the book under my 39 Books constraint, I described the original cover painting rather than summarise the contents because the experience of reading a book is like that of looking at a painting, only in reverse. One is aware of the detail before the whole. This has consequences for its reception.
Soon after the first reading, I lent Is Beauty Good to a friend. They were hesitant to respond but said they enjoyed this or that chapter. I realised that I had not read the book as a collection of short stories from which one can pick and choose favourites. But how had I read it? The book's first words are "And so" plunging the reader within an ongoing expression or conversation as if each chapter is part of a fugitive whole.5 This is why Henry Broome says "quotations don’t convey the experience of reading the book". And this is why I want only to recall the experience of reading the book for the first time rather than performing an aesthetic analysis 35 years on. In her introduction to the new edition, Esther Kinsky recognises this demand in the appearance of untranslated German words, seeing "an element of Fremde between the lines". In general use today the word means "somewhere between strange and foreign and alien". However, Kinsky says it shares its root with the English 'from' and originally meant "coming from another place". Picking out themes or connections between chapters is the usual direction of criticism and reviewing; attending to the sense of another place is not. How can one do that? Where or what is this other place?
In a brief talk on his specialist subject, Noam Chomsky resists the commonly held belief that language is fundamentally a tool of communication. "You can communicate by your hairstyle, you know, style of walk, everything. And yes, language can be used to communicate, but it doesn't seem to be part of its design."
You find in case after case, right at the core of language design where there are conflicts between what would be efficient for communication and what is efficient for the specific biological design of language ... the communicative efficiency is sacrificed. It it just isn't a consideration.
Readers of Is Beauty Good will recognise this sacrifice – call it poetry – and Chomsky's conclusion that, rather than a tool of communication, language is "a mode of creating and interpreting thought". If "much is said" along the way, it is not so much precious recuperations of folk wisdom than manifold articulations of the space between thought and the world as it is, the world perhaps as experienced by animals and objects. This is explicit when Felix is struck by the possible absence of opposites and awareness that the means of experiencing the world is the very thing that maintains our distance from it.
That word again: distance. If three sentences in Kundera's novel provoked something like vertigo, Is Beauty Good did so over 111 pages.
Josipovici's says the "mode of narration" of Tu ne t'aimes pas "is contingent upon the truths of affirmed by the narrative" and this applies to Is Beauty Good. For all of the intimacy with the individual voices, another place impends. In 'Air Ride', members of a brass band are in a cable car rising to play music in the mountains. The tuba player chatters about his instrument "being hugged, shining, making sunlight dart" but whose message he reckons is blocked by all those who "rabbit on about this and that, whether beauty is good or not". He says "I adore playing, yet I am not important, we should be listening to our instruments and not ourselves." Is Beauty Good allows us to listen beyond all chatter to the instruments of thought and language.
This poses a challenge to our idea of the novel as a unified work ("It won't suit everyone"). The genre that arose in response to the incremental disenchantment of the world, promising a a sense of totality, the opportunity to recover clarity and meaning, is undone. This could be another means to distinguish the two camps, even if it is there in only three sentences. The challenge begins in Is Beauty Good even before the first line with the absence of a question mark in the title. We see it anyway – a ghost question. If the question mark at the end of Sarraute's novel is "a sign of anything but irresolution" its disappearance into the wall at the beginning of Is Beauty Good is a sign of infinity, the unspeakable origin of thought. We hear it anyway.
Notes
1. The full review.
2. I can hear objections to the latter by pointing to the metafiction elements in Roth's later novels and a character called Martin Amis appearing in Money. Why did these not have the same impact? Compared to Kundera, each lacks subtlety and genuine existential pressure.
3. Later, I read Škvorecký expressing admiration for Margaret Thatcher.
4. Translated as You Don't Love Yourself by Barbara Wright. The final lines of the novel not translated in the review are:
How good it would be for everyone... how everyone would benefit if we too could feel it, that self-love...
If we could...
We would like nothing better...
We would like nothing better?
Nothing better? Really?
5. The first words excluding title and chapter headings, that is.
