minne-h-a-h-a.

[rakka_]

so i just read this book called The Joke by Milan Kundera (some of you may have heard of his most famous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being). it's a great book. definitely not one of those... erm... fluff novels that one carries around to read in snippets while awaiting the bus or the next teller. more the sort one reads when it's saturday and raining and cold and an overstuffed couch with a table of cookies and hot cocoa nearby is infinitely preferable to anything else that one might have had planned. the book is about a communist who is forced to work in "the mines" for a few years by his own party because of a misunderstood joke, and how this pause in "the springtime of his youth" sort of puts an end to a lot of his life. its themes center around the meaninglessness of one's actions and the dissatisfaction that relationships leave you with and how people try to give meaning to events and their lives by invoking fate, but it's all in their heads.

however, in spite of that bleak picture, the novel somehow manages to never be really depressing. i mean yah, there might not be any significance to anything you do, or to anything that happens to you, and some wrong that someone did you may be constantly on your mind but never on theirs, but overall, you're alive, and what can you really do about it?

it's a bit slow-moving at times - not exactly action-packed - but Kundera has an amusingly sardonic sense of humor, and most of is interesting and some of it is even beautiful.

anywho, excellent book. i highly recommend it.