Tuesday, October 04, 2005  I've just finished 'Immortality' by
Milan Kundera. It's a truly fantastic book. It's about many
things from how we attempt to obtain immortality through death
and what makes us who we are to the intimacies and alienation of
sexual and platonic relationships. He writes his stories with
characters that mirror facets of one another so that the four or
five separate stories that run through the book seem to match
over one another. Often, characters from one part of the novel
do intertwine with a story from another and in the end you
realise that all of the characters, however many years apart are
all somehow linked, even if just by their personalities. There
are some incredible passages in the book, for example a stunning
analysis of a seemingly simple poem by Goethe. Every page
appears to have a new idea or way of seeing something we all
know in an intriguing and surprising way and though his writing
is quite obviously pretentious, I found myself smiling and
frowning alternately throug