A Czech person goes to apply for an immigrant visa.The immigration officer asked him: "Where are you going?" "Anywhere." The immigration officer gave him a globe: "Choose yourself." He turned the globe slowly, looked at it carefully, and asked: "Do you have any other globes?" Finally, he went to France, where he lived for more than twenty years.This Czech is Milan Kundera. Milan Kundera's works are very rich, among which the famous one written in Czech, "The Farewell Waltz", "The Book About Laughter and Forgetting", "Unbearable Highlights of Life", and the short story anthology "Interesting of Love," and in French, "The Leaked Testament," "Retardation," and .

Kundera completed it in France in the autumn of 1996.The characters in the novel are very simple, actually there are only two, Chantal and Jean-Marc, a pair of lovers who have been in love for many years.They were immersed in happiness and never thought of breaking up, but later, certain imaginations broke into their lives.The imagery that troubled Chantal took place on a beach in a small town in Normandy, where the men she saw were all with children.Therefore, she concluded that all the men have turned into fathers, and all of them have become fathers, not fathers.She suddenly thought, if she walked by one of the fathers, would the man look back at her?She doesn't think so.She sees herself living in a world where men never look back at her again.She told Jean-Marc this idea, and tried to speak lightly, but, to her surprise, she heard a painful melancholy in her voice.

Jean-Marc also heard pain and melancholy, but he had no time to be jealous, because his own imagination was tormenting him too.While he is looking for Chantal on the beach, he suddenly takes another woman.Mistook her for her—an old, ugly woman.How did that happen?How could he fail to recognize his beloved, his one and only?When he saw Chantal in the hotel, she didn't look like her anymore—her face was very old, her eyes were very cold, her expression was like that of a traveler. Later, Mark had a dream that Chantal had a strange and annoying face.Yet she was not someone else; she was Chantal, his Chantal—he had never doubted it.Only, his Chantal has the face of a stranger.Even in his waking moments, it is palpable to him that Chantal's social self is not equal to his beloved.The fear was too much for him to bear.

In fact, what frightened him was not that he would lose Chantal, but that he would no longer be able to distinguish her from other women: she meant nothing to him like anyone else. what.On this subject, Kundera unwittingly came together with Proust. In his "Remembrance of the Past", Proust also described the various distressed loves of the protagonist Charlie Swann.Charlie Swan was passionately in love with Odette de Cressy, but suddenly the passionate lover was blurred and insignificant. He could hardly recognize her in a photograph, could hardly comprehend her face connected to his pain - like suddenly seeing an x-ray with no description, even though it actually reflects our condition, we find that it has nothing to do with the pain we are enduring .

Kundera connects love and death even in a more surprising way than Proust.In his view, this is not because people always talk about "very vague" similarities between the two, but because it forces us to ask the "mystery of personality", the "mystery of nature", Further questioning: Who is it that we love?Who are we who are ups and downs in love? "I asked myself, who is dreaming? Who dreamed the story? Who conceived it? She? . Although Kundera has never been good at describing the turbulent psychology of the characters in detail in a realistic way, in this novel, the protagonist inevitably feels too empty, rather than the ambiguity of most of his early works. : There is a three-dimensional in the abstraction, and flesh and blood in the ethereal.In this novel, the imagination of the protagonists is everything, and everything else, including their occupations, their bodies, their past, their friends, their residences, their manners, their clothes, the author may be One stroke, sometimes, even one stroke is too much.Chantal once had a child who died, and that was all there was to this child: a child who died—as simply as anyone else in the novel.Perhaps, this is because Kundera gave up his mother tongue - Czech.His previous novel, "Retardation," also written in French, also seemed hollow.However, we prefer to believe that this is because Kundera is deliberately pursuing a simple and unadorned style, just as he does not hesitate to use a lot of clichéd metaphors in his novels.

In any case, of all contemporary writers, only Kundera can transform a feeling so secretive, so overwhelming, into material for a novel.This is one of his finest, most thoughtful, and illuminating novels.Unexpectedly, you will find that it is a love story. translator November 1998