Katie Kerman > Recent Status Updates

Although not Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera is all the more steadfast with his use of lightness and darkness: the balance between these two universal forces. However, in this novel they are now coded under the guise of laughter—angelic and demonic laughter. This book is as beautiful and perplexing: “laughable laughter is cataclysmic” (62).

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

So…I accidentally read a spoiler but I want to reflect on the perversion of this book thus far. Julian, their professor, is such a ubiquitous and cowardly character-sowing the seeds of murder and Greek absurdity into the minds of his naive, classics students. Further, the sexual transgressions in the book are so uncomfortable to read about but reflect the elitist, carelessness of the uber (formerly) wealth.