Milan Kundera

[implied]

i've seen him typed as SLI in a few places. could be something else (kinda ILI balzacky-looking fellow, sometimes.) i love his works. one of the best representations of social dynamics packed into x # of pages. anyone care to agree/disagree?

[Austy]

Wow...it's amazing how that guy can so consistantly look incredibly pissed off!

[implied]

Wow...it's amazing how that guy can so consistantly look incredibly pissed off!

i seriously didn't even notice that. like i don't see the pissed-offed-ness that you are seeing.

[discourse]

He's a good writer. I hava read one of he's books and wanted to read some more, but I didn't find enough time for that.

[aestrivex]

i dont know his type but i hate his books, as they were forced down my throat by a bad teacher in a badly designed and badly executed european literature course.

[FDG]

In the pic with the blue sweater, he looks like one of my ENTj profs

[silke]

A Czech novelist best known for "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", I was recommended his novels but haven't started on them yet, seems IP sx/sp at first glance, sounds strangely familiar.


edit - tentatively typing him as ILI-Te 5w6








quotes:

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare.

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. … Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

Early in the novel [Anna Karenina], Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition—the same motif appears at the beginning and the end—may seem quite “novelistic” to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as “fictive,” “fabricated,” and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic.” Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences. … But it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

[Gilly]

ILI? Remids me of cpig. Se/Ni for sure.

[golden]

Haven't read him in years but my recollection is he's intuitive as all fuckin' hell and T > F.

[GuavaDrunk]

Sounds Gamma, looks Gamma. Great writer.

[Delilah]

Gamma is agreeable, but is it LIE or ILI? I see both suggested and I'd be inclined to ILI -Te, but Ixxp on the other hand seems problematic and he doesn't quite come across as introvert, esp, in the lightness of being which i've read. hm

I found these quotes by him interesting "No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches."

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."

"A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea."

[Delilah]

Here he looks more extroverted:



I really really liked the unbearable lightness of being btw.