Waiting in vain

I plucked a copy of a Milan Kundera book, Immortality, from my bookshelf the other week. Kundera is an author who everyone seems to rave about, so I've given his books a number of chances to enter my personal canon, but to no avail. The Unbearable Lightness of Being didn't do much for me, to the extent that I can barely remember the plot or characters. Ignorance struck more of a chord, with its exploration of the themes of memory and nostalgia. But the thing that bothers and prevents me from enjoying his writing is the pompous narratorial style. Immortality fared even worse than the last two, I abandoned it after 150 pages. I know he put the imagined dialogue between Goethe (Or was it Beethoven?!) and Hemingway in heaven there for a reason, I was just completely uninspired to delve very deep into it.

I switched to a novel by a Chinese emigre, Ha Jin, called Waiting. It's the story of an army doctor, Lin, stationed far away from his village, and a wife he didn't choose and can't love. He has a lover, a nurse in his compound named Manna, who is patiently waiting for him to divorce his wife. Every year when he gets his leave, he heads back to the village, and she consents to a divorce, but then retracts her promise at the last minute. This goes on for nearly 18 years. Life in communist China is viewed through the clandestine relationship, as Lin and Manna circumnavigate regulations and red tape to try to find some hope in their situation; it's also shown through the perks and hardships, the meals and the deprivations, of each season, and the branded goods that punctuate the dreary routine of the compound like jewels. This narrative takes no rose-tinted view of love, and seems to point at all the counterfeit forms that masquerade as love. It has no conclusion, and leaves you feeling that in love there are no winners, but in spite of that I found it a bewitching story with intense characterisation and both realism and compassion.