When we last saw our wandering hero, he had decided to “take a break” from his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo and was contemplating his future.
Future contemplated, he returned to Waterloo in January 1991, completed a school term, then headed to Ottawa in May 1991 for a sequel to his 1989 co-op term in the national capital. There, much reading was done, including a new release by Milan Kundera.
Most in my generation probably first associated Milan Kundera with the 1988 movie, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” a cinematic representation of his 1984 novel of the same name. Everything a European movie was thought to be, it was sexy, brooding, intellectual, concerned with war, love, death, bohemian morals, finding a path forward amidst the morass, or not.
Many of us read the novel, too, which was less sexy. What I remember about the movie is the bowler hat; what I remember about the novel is Nietzsche’s myth of the eternal return. At that time, post-1989, Kundera seemed to be widely prominent, if not everywhere.
As Jonathan Coe wrote in a 2015 article in the Guardian:
A glance at the back covers of Kundera’s novels in the Faber editions reveals a raft of quotes from the likes of Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Carlos Fuentes, most of them more than 30 years old, reminding us that his reputation was at its zenith in the 1980s, the decade when everybody was reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Why did those books seem so urgent, so indispensable at the time?
Indeed, why? Perhaps because Kundera had both a gravitas and a sense of lightness. He was both easy to read and difficult to understand. He bridged the communist east and the capitalist west. He had a sense of humour similar to Kafka’s, a honest directness that captured the absurd. He recalled the promise of 1968, the Prague Spring, which was violently repressed by the Soviets, and he almost seemed to call into being the 1989 Velvet Revolution. His novels provided an accessible avenue to history—along with a sense of fun. One of his novels was called The Joke (1967), after all.
In 1991, Kundera published his first novel since The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I bought it—it was called Immortality (1991, English; 1990, French)—in a small mall-based bookstore (a Coles?) in Hull, Québec, where I had a summer job working for Immigration Canada, Settlement Branch. When I returned to the University of Waterloo in September, I published a review of Kundera’s new novel in the student newspaper, Imprint. It was my first published book review. (I will paste that review below.)
Kundera took me beyond my Beat influences. He was the gateway to many ideas that persist until today. I later read many of his novels and deeply absorbed his non-fiction title, The Art of the Novel (1986). Jonathan Coe, however, was right to ask: “How important is Milan Kundera today?” Coe notes John Banville (The Guardian, May 1, 2004) reappraised The Unbearable Lightness of Being two decades after publication:
His tone was admiring but also gently sceptical. “I was struck by how little I remembered,” [Banville] wrote. “True to its title, the book had floated out of my mind like a hot-air balloon come adrift from its tethers … Of the characters I retained nothing at all, not even their names.” Conceding that the novel still retained its political relevance, he added: “Relevance, however, is nothing compared with that sense of felt life which the truly great novelists communicate.”
This is consistent with my thoughts. I don’t remember the plots of Kundera’s novels, but I do remember certain moments, images and ideas. Kundera also provided a frame of literary history that I hadn’t heard before. I was becoming aware of the “eras” and the progression of realism to modernism to post-modernism, Virginia Woolf rejected the Victorians, and all of that. Literature was progressive, yes, linear, surely. Except here came Kundera, saying: No, no, no. The so-called post-modern has been there all along. Or as Coe states:
Many of his favourite novelists – Sterne, Diderot, Broch, Musil, Gombrowicz – really belong to that tributary of ironic, equivocal writing in which the authors are so conscious of the contradictions, pitfalls and contrivances inherent in the act of creating fictions that their books themselves become, on one level, parodies or at least self-interrogations.
Cervantes and Rabelais are the other massive progenitors here. Who? In 1991, I had heard of none of these people. Let me repeat that: none of them.
In retrospect, I can tell you that Immortality is written almost as proof of concept to the theories and arguments Kundera puts forward in The Art of the Novel, but I didn’t know that at the time. For example, Immortality has seven sections (many of Kundera’s novels have seven sections) because the novel doesn’t have a linear plot, advancing to a climax and resolution; it is structured more like a musical score. There are themes and motifs. One section is a digression, related thematically to the novel but not advancing the narrative.
One can easily see how the communists would have no patience for this author; Soviet Realism he could never do. Instead, the telling of the story undermines the story. And he just flat out calls authoritarian governance stupid. I’m sure this is, in part, behind his appeal with young readers. His calling out of the phonies. His articulation of the absurd. One of the images from his novels I remember is the opening of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980, English), perhaps my favorite of his novels.
In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment.
Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to hm. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.
The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.
Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clemetis stood, there is only the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.
That is the end of the first sub-section of the novel. The second sub-section begins: “It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Ah! Now we pause. Now we contemplate. Is it so? Is it profound?
In 2022, with Russia pounding missiles into Ukraine, do we say Kundera is more relevant than ever. Information warfare is now expanded many levels beyond the nth degree.
I think there is also a section in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting where a group of young people hold hands, dance in a circle, and are lifted into the sky. We might say this passage is an example of magic realism, but Kundera would point us to Cervantes and Rabelais. Novels are novels, not life. Anything can happen. Everything should.
Speaking of life, what was I doing back in the National Capital Region? Spending another co-op work-term working for the Government of Canada. Qu’elle fuck? I learned that memorable phrase that summer, where I spoke more French than I ever had before, though not much more than Je m’excuse as I slid into the crowded elevators. I met a pal who said Qu’elle fuck? frequently. He was a brown dude who grew up in Ottawa, perhaps a son of Pakistan, but really a son of the suburbs. He seemed to float around the offices, doing whatever odd jobs people wanted him to do. He rented a place in the Market and told stories about drinking with prostitutes. He told me a story about having sex with a girl on the roof of his high school. One day we left work and sat on the bank of the Ottawa River, opposite the Parliament Buildings, and smoked a bit of hash. It did nothing for me. Qu’elle fuck?
It was the summer of the Spicer Commission. Remember that? Spicer held a big press event in the Museum of Civilization, feet away from where we later smoked up, history in motion.
The ‘Spicer Commission’, formally known as the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future, was part of the Mulroney government’s efforts to lay the groundwork for the Charlottetown Accord. The Commission consisted of twelve prominent Canadians from across the country led by the former Commissioner of Official Languages, Keith Spicer. … The forum delivered its final report on 27 June 1991.
Later, just about everybody that I worked with that summer got laid off. After I graduated in 1992, a year deep with economic recession, I called my old boss, Jean-Paul (we called him JP) to see if they had any openings.
“I’m sorry, Michael. We have nothing. Almost nobody that you will remember works here anymore.”
JP first called me in the spring of 1991 to interview me by phone. I was in bed, sleeping late. I wasn’t expecting the call. But I perked up immediately and accounted for myself well enough because he offered me the position, which was a kind of research assistant. They asked me to look at the different service providers across the country and make a record of the different things that they do. Settlement Brach, settlement services, i.e., services for new immigrants, such as language learning and other practical “how to live in Canada” supports. This was before the internet, so I got a list of service providers across the country and started calling them.
“I’m calling from Immigration Canada. I wonder if you could send me background information on the services you have available for new immigrants. Thank you.”
Packages started arriving from coast to coast, addressed to me.
A few weeks later, JP pulled me aside.
“Are you calling the service providers?”
“Yes.”
“I need to ask you to stop doing that. People are starting to complain.”
Okay. But I was near the bottom of my list, so I just kept going.
I had sublet a room on Besserer, a couple of blocks east of the Market. It was a huge house and my roommates were from a class of wealth I had never been so close to before. The dude I had booked a room from was off working for Ontario Hydro, trimming trees by the sides of highways. One of the roommates managed a clothing store downtown, and he had a large brown dog, who one day ate one of my shoes. Before I even knew about it, the roommate had bought me a new pair of shoes, same brand, same style. They were nice people, but we didn’t bond. We hardly spoke. I lived there for three months, then in August I moved into my cousin’s apartment on the ground floor of a house in the Glebe. He and his girlfriend went to Europe on a cycling trip for a month, leaving me with their deeply dumb Dalmatian.
Now, Dalmatians are apparently not the smartest of dogs, but this was a really stupid dog, though to his credit he didn’t eat any of my shoes. He just slept in the bed and bound about like a maniac. If you want attention, however, there is probably nothing better than walking a Dalmatian along the canal in Ottawa in summer. Everyone loves a Dalmatian. Michael, however, doesn’t love attention, and by that point I was just weeks away from leaving town. I know, you say, a perfect recipe for fun, but alas. Worse yet, my future wife was living just blocks away, and I have shiny sparkly feelings that we crossed paths in those weeks, me, Kate, and that dumb dog. What could have been? Ah, what could have been.
Instead, that summer I played baseball with a bunch of University of Ottawa lesbians, I mean, law students, colleagues of my cousin’s girlfriend. Some of the most sensible people I’ve ever met. I had a bike and bombed all over town, playing ball, and then drinking beer, listening to new takes on “Thelma and Louise” (1991). I was cheap and often didn’t pay my share. I confess. They were law students, and I was returning to school for two terms on campus. I needed to save up. A lot.
One thing I spent money on that summer was a ticket to a Sarah McLachlan concert at the Bytown Cinema. By the poster, which I still have, it was July 25, 1991. I’d seen her first at the Bombshelter, the UWaterloo campus bar, in the summer of 1989, when she was touring on her first album, “Touch” (1987). McLachlan and I are born in the same year. I saw her in, I think, February 1991 at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto with LU and then that summer in Ottawa, when she was touring her second album, “Solace” (1991). What I remember is she merged mid-song into Madonna’s Vogue (1990), and it was a lot of fun: “Strike a pose, let’s get to it!”
There was a used bookstore in the Market I went to over and over. I picked up paperback copies of many of Mordecai Richler’s early books, including his collections of essays, like Hunting Tigers Under Glass (1968). I read his 1955 novel, Son of a Smaller Hero, and I still remember the joke on the first page. The protagonist is renting a room, and his landlady peeks in on him. She sees Normal Mailer’s novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948) on the bed, and she asks him: “Medical student?”
I’m of the generation that first encountered Richler through Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang (1975). In fact, I was given two copies of that book for Christmas that year, which seemed … perfect. I still have both. Later, I attended a party in the late-1990s and Jacob Richler was there, perhaps the most dapper young man I have ever met. And a striking image of his father. “Two-Two,” I thought, but didn’t say. In the 2010s, I crossed paths with him twice again. Once at the gym. He looked less than dapper. And once crossing the street, East Toronto. I glanced at him; he didn’t glance back.
I saw Mordecai later, too. First, during the 1991-92 school year I discovered he would be participating in a debate at Hart House, University of Toronto. I’m not sure how I found this out, because I was at the University of Waterloo at the time, but I found my way into Hart House, where the two debating teams were arguing a proposition about “appropriation of voice.” When they were done, Richler spoke, saying he thought they were both very good, but also the argument was beside the point. It wasn’t about literature, really, it was more about sociology. An impassioned Black girl had argued about the importance of being able to speak her truth, and Richler said, yes, you absolutely should. In his remarks, he made a joke which he had also made in one of the old essays I had recently read, and afterwards when the crowd was mingling, I tapped him on the shoulder and said I had been reading his old essays and noticed he’d repurposed an old joke.
“You are a very observant young man,” he said, and then abruptly turned away from me.
Surely, I can use this as a book blurb some day?!
I don’t know if this is the joke Richler used, but I know he liked this line: “Hemingway once said Henry Miller got laid in the afternoon and thought he’d invented it.” LOL.
Henry Miller was making the rounds in 1991 as well. I read Tropic of Cancer (1934) in my bedroom on Besserer, also Henry & June (1986), Anais Nin’s diary of her 1931 triangular affair with Henry and June Miller. The movie version was released in October 1990. In my favorite Ottawa used bookstore, I also picked up a copy of Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), which I consider his best book. Flipping through it now—the same copy I bought in Ottawa for 65 cents—I wonder why. Essentially it is the story of Miller’s travel in Greece as the horror of the Second World War approaches. It captures a wandering Miller and his dreaminess amidst a tragic crashing world. Dreaminess is the self-defined affliction of Richard Ford’s narrator in The Sportswriter (1986), too. Dreaminess is one way to avoid chaos, and also perhaps responsibility. Miller is searching for meaning outside of great power conflict. I dug that.
What did I think of Tropic of Cancer? First, would I recommend it today? No. What about then? Well, there was something there I hadn’t seen before. I thought it had something to do with the short sentences, the first-person narration, the conspiratorial appeal to confront reality head on, the damn the torpedoes positioning. Page one: “I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.” Miller’s narrator acts as if all illusions have been stripped away, as if he has achieved a true stoicism, a state of enlightenment. It’s no surprise that the title of one biography of Miller is The Happiest Man Alive (1991). We turned to him because of the sex, but if you stuck with him, what you found was the spirituality. You even discover he would take up residence in California, which continues to maintain a shrine.
In those days, I was not poor, and I was not suffering (not really), but I was perpetually broke, saving up for expenses I knew were coming soon. Miller said there were things beyond the material that mattered. There was a calling to something higher, Arty, a calling I was susceptible to. From Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (1991), another book I read that summer, I learned that George Orwell in his essay “Inside the Whale,” said admiring things about Tropic of Cancer. Rushdie, in his essay, “Outside the Whale,” does not. Still, I trusted Orwell more, feeling he was closer to the down and out, where truth surely lied. Later Anthony Bourdain would follow a similar inspiration—and engage the world with an almost Miller-level intensity, travelling the four corners of the earth with deep enthusiasm for the hyper-local, the real, TV crew in tow.
When I think of Miller now, though, I think of something different: Jeanette Winterson on the New York Times podcast (2012) and her review of Frederick Turner’s Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer” (2012).
Well, what if we accept Turner’s assertion that “Cancer” has traveled from banned book to spiritual classic that tells us “who we are”? A reasonable objection is that “we” cannot include women, unless a woman is comfortable with her identity as a half-witted “piece of tail.”
And this:
The question is not art versus pornography or sexuality versus censorship or any question about achievement. The question is: Why do men revel in the degradation of women?
And since the real topic of this piece is Milan Kundera, here’s something else Coe said. Many passages in Kundera are unreadable today for their repetitive focus on the male gaze, a persistent predatory approach to female bodies.
The feminist case against Kundera has been made often, perhaps never more eloquently than by Joan Smith in her book Misogynies, where she maintained that “hostility is the common factor in all Kundera’s writing about women”.
The summer of 1991 I was 22. In the January-April 1991 term, I had taken “Feminist Literary Criticism.” I was part of the first group of students to take this class. It was the first time the University of Waterloo had offered it. I was one of two male students, out of a total of about 10 in this third-year seminar. I got an A+ on my major paper, which was a semiotic feminist reading of The Great Gatsby (1925). I read Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985)—and learned to associate feminism with “the freeplay of the signifier.” Once, I understood what that meant, and I thought it was cool, but I had time for Miller and Kundera, too. I was young, confused, and terribly lonely.
1991 was not a good year for the tale of the heart. I identified with the heartbreak and sadness that grinds through Tropic of Cancer. The year had begun badly, and I was having a hard time moving on. Remember how I had a job interview lying in bed? Well, I had another job interview that spring where I just stopped in the middle and said I really wasn’t feeling great: “I’m broken hearted.” I knew I wasn’t going to get that job, but it would have been interesting, because the guy I said that to went on to become a literary agent. It was Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory, a one-time publisher of Gutter Press, The Quarterly, and Blood & Aphorisms Magazine, which I submitted to for many years and I believe editor Ken Sparling once included one of my sentences. Yes, one sentence! It was an odd feature where they were like, hey, we like this sentence! Can we just stick it somewhere? Hey, sure! I later wrote a profile of Sparling for Id Magazine out of Guelph (1996) and reviewed his book Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (1996), which was edited by Gordon Lish, infamous Raymond Carver collaborator.
Yes, 1991 began with me in love with someone who wasn’t going to love me back. It was a literary predicament but really just a sucky scene for all involved. On January 17, 1991, the day the Gulf War began, I sat in the Bombshelter with her favorite alternate dude, who wasn’t much interested in her, though she was still hopeful. I had asked to see him. Why? Qu’elle fuck, man? Why not? He’d asked her: “Does Michael want to beat me up?” She’d assured him, no. I just wanted to get a sense of the man. The big screen TVs in the bar were showing “Shock and Awe” in Baghdad, the war had begun. He wanted to know what I would do when they brought in the draft. I said, “There’s not going to be any draft.” He liked to talk to girls about Herman Hesse. The literary babes adored him.
That January I started smoking. I was done being goodie goodie. My love didn’t want me to change. “You’re great the way you are.” But not good enough for her. I was done. “We are all alone here and we are dead.” Starting to smoke cigarettes was a huge shift for me. I was mad at the world. I was tired of (trying to be) perfect and I was dropping myself deeper and deeper into the murky world. In November 2014, I lay on a stretcher at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and a doctor leaned over and said, “You’re here because you smoke.”
“I don’t smoke,” I said. “I haven’t had a cigarette since 2002.”
It was true, but apparently my medical file said: Smoker.
Less than a week later, they ripped my chest open and conducted a triple coronary bypass. All good.
I should add I didn’t smoke much. I was one of those irritating social smokers, who never buys packages, instead he bums cigarettes from more committed smokers. I paid for them, sometimes, a bit. In 2002, I became a more significant smoker for a number of months before quitting altogether and forever, but that’s another story.
Don’t smoke, kiddos! Even if you are mad at the world!
Moving on. Winter 1991 was also the term I took American Literature with Ken Ledbetter, who would become my favorite professor. I made it a point to always attend his lectures. I even invited my brother and anyone else who would listen to attend Ledbetter’s lectures. He spoke in full paragraphs that were sometimes 20 minutes long. Others thought he rambled, but if you followed his thoughts closely you saw he always brought it back around. In his final class of the term he lectured on Moby Dick (1851), which we hadn’t read. He spoke about how Melville was telling a story about breaking through illusions. Note the persistence of this theme in Tropic of Cancer. He quoted one line about the world being hidden behind “paste board masks.” I have remembered that line ever since, and in recent years listened to the novel as an audio book and stopped, stunned, when those words again passed my ears.
“Hark ye yet again,--the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—then some unknown but reasoning thing puts forth the moundings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough.”
Ledbetter loved to give dramatic readings to key lines, such as: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” (Eurora Welty, 1941). In one lecture, he was illustrating about hidden meanings, and he told the story about a snowbank in one of the nearby small towns that melted in the Spring, revealing a dead body. I later wrote a poem about Ledbetter, after he died of cancer (1993), which appeared in The New Quarterly (No. 52, 1994), which riffed on this snowbank. He published two novels: Too Many Blackbirds (1984) and Not Enough Women (1986). In 1996, his son, Gary Ledbetter, made a movie based on his father’s work, Gary & Vernon (1996). I saw it. It’s very Faulkner.
Ledbetter was also monumental as a writing teacher, though I didn’t see him in this role. He is one of the authors of The Canadian Practical Stylist (1987), and he started the writing course at the University of Waterloo, which attempted to get undergraduates attuned to the basics. One famous story, which I completely believe, is that Ledbetter brought a dead cat to class to illustrate the splint infinitive. I don’t know if he cut up the cadaver, but I can totally see this.
Splint the infinitive? No!!!
Ledbetter’s instructions to his class for essays was, “Be interesting! Don’t bore me!” I left campus before I knew he had cancer, but later I asked a friend if she saw him around. She said she did, and he was pissed off. I thought, oh, yeah, I guess so. Miller had competition for the happiest man alive. RIP, Ken.
*
[Review first published in Imprint, University of Waterloo, Sept 27, 1991]
Immortality
by Milan Kundera
Grove Weidenfeld
Back after a seven-year hiatus, Milan Kundera has published a new novel. Probably best known in North America for the film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera has returned with a delicate and delightful novel, a novel very much of its time.
Not that its time, the present, is delicate and delightful. Quite the opposite. The present is paradoxical, as is this beautifully heavy novel with a light touch, Immortality.
Translated from the native Czech, Immortality is Kundera's first novel since the end of the Cold War and the restructuring of Eastern Europe. For an expatriate living in France whose last novel studied the intricacies of modern life on both sides of the Iron Curtain before, after, and during 1968's Prague Spring, these must be significant events. And they are. But Immortality sets them in a broader context.
This is not a novel about the end of communism, though the effects of the recent changes are in evidence. This is a novel about Europe(ans), past and present, a continent too old and too much ravaged by supposedly Great Leaders this century to trust too quickly in another promise of renewal.
The novel explores the relationship between personalities and environments in intricate detail. This is a novel about a continent and its people stuck in time, not Movements or destiny or the Great Future. The characters, including one named Milan Kundera, are metaphors, imaging life in our uncertain age. Each character represents a personality-type whose almost every action the novel explains in continually evolving essays: the novel begins by interpreting the connection between the wave of a 60-ish woman to her young male swimming instructor with her adolescent self. Some people, the novel explains, are better suited to their environments than others, are luckier.
Though most of the "action" (very little happens in any real sense) takes place in Paris, late 1980s, the landscape of the novel includes a couple-three scenes in Heaven, where Hemingway, Goethe, the 19th century German poet, converse about their respective losses of power over their images on Earth now that they are dead. Being dead for Kundera is apparently as unbearably light as being alive.
"Nobody reads me anymore," Hemingway complains. "Instead, they read about me."
Goethe, on the other hand, decides that immortality is as much a joke as his first life and zaps himself from eternity.
The relationship between words and reality, a theme explored in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is picked up again in Immortality. Where the first novel included "A Short Dictionary of Words Misunderstood," Kundera now expounds his theory of Imagology, the theory that the illusion is more powerful than reality because the illusion is what people believe.
Bernard Bertrand's father, Bertrand Bertrand, is a big-time journalist. Bernard chooses his occupation, breaking away from the partri-lineal tradition of politicians of his family because he realizes those who choose the images make the politicians. The power base has shifted.
And power, after all, is what life is all about. Think globally, act locally, the personal is political, and we're all responsible. Deluded perhaps, and more than a little confused about how to act in unity with the rest of the world's population, the environment, History, Time and Space (read, Immortality), but still responsible.
Life is a series of power relations, or at least that's the "image" to believe in these days (Kundera says Imagology has replaced Ideology, as both communism and capitalism have proven themselves morally bankrupt).
The Gulf War was still Saddam Hussein's fantasy when Immortality was written, but the century's most destructive one-sided massacre appears only to have provided evidence for Kundera's thesis. Iraq's millions fought the "Great Satan" and the coalition forces fought "Another Hitler." Meanwhile, reality lost once again, along with civilians in both Iraq and Kuwait. The images of hate prevailed.
Immortality is President Bush's New World Order on a literary level. It draws allusions of hope out of destruction. However, like the President's vision of a new and lasting international peace, Kundera's vision of immortality is based on his own politics, not universal truth (the situation of very real death and destruction in Yugoslavia is proof enough that peace and renewal will take more than American rhetoric, or another novelist's sweet despair). His exclusive use of male pronouns reveals the walls of only one of his illusions.
The novel is a fine work of art and great reading, but any attempt to pull definitive truths from its pages will only meet frustration. We have no way of knowing how events are going to turn out, and nothing is new about that!
Great. As always, intensely readable, literary and personal. The Canadian Czech writer Josef Škvorecký had a similar problem with women in his novels. It's a Middle Europe thing, or was. I don't know what they are like now. But they were/are different from us. The women also are different in their reactions. To us, especially now, it sounds tone deaf and misogynist. It creates a reading problem, as you suggest. But it's a problem that, like that signifier, wanders from topic to topic.