In Gunter Grass' 'The Tin Drum' Oskar almost drove me insane with his delusional egoism and pettiness. I always find it difficult to endorse books that feature a protagonist I dislike. To my mind the novel works less as a story about poetics than about a certain time and place – one in which people informed on those they knew or suspected harboured counter-revolutionary attitudes or plans – and it is this aspect of the work that I found most memorable. In a Postscript, Kundera asserts that it was his intention to write a novel that would be both a critique of poetry and at the same be itself poetic he also claims in that it was not his aim to write a novel about a particular period. The event grows in significance if one follows up what became known as the Miroslav Dvoracek controversy, in which Kundera was himself accused of having been an informer in the 1950s. Those freedoms, curtailed by the Czechoslovak communist state, take on importance in an episode towards the end of the novel, where one character turns informer. To my mind it is not as good as ‘The Joke’ or the novels that principally made Kundera’s name, ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ and ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, but Kundera is always worth reading, and some of his literary trademarks are in evidence here, including his troubling portrayals of women, who seem to exist principally in relation to sex sometimes I wonder if the sexual promiscuity of Kundera’s characters is something they practice in lieu of other freedoms. If some of this sounds rather heavy, it is worth noting that the novel also has a dash of wry humour, sometimes shading into satire. But this is not just a coming of age novel, for it is also, in passing, about the relation between a mother and her son, the role of art in times of revolution, the writing of poetry and the sartorial consequences of postwar undergarment manufacturing. Jaromil exhibits the hallmarks of many adolescents, including self-absorption and a self-serving attitude regarding the consequences of his own actions. Mostly set during World War II (when Czechoslovakia was under German occupation) and the early years of communist rule, it follows the childhood and adolescence of Jaromil from birth through his loss of virginity to his attempts to make a mark on life. Kundera’s second novel is a portrait of an artist as a young man, and not an especially likeable one at that. When he realises the gravity of his action of reporting the red-headed girl’s brother to the police, he is quick to banish away the feelings of guilt. He comes across as a self-centred person.
He wants to be respected and highly regarded and be the centre of attention he achieves this when he is basically parroting the insights the painter once said to him. He is exasperated when the work that he pours his heart and soul into doesn’t win praises from the painter who he looks up to and is like a mentor to him, yet the work that he does half-heartedly on the other hand gets praised enthusiastically by the painter. Jaromil desperately wants his poetry work to get the recognition he believes it deserves.
It explores various themes, issues and emotions such as adolescence, the changing dynamics in the relationship between mother and son, love, betrayal, romance, jealousy, living during the revolution era etc. Overall, I found it quite an interesting book to read. It can take a bit of time to get into the flow of the prose.
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