Gulliver's Travels

by Jonathan Swift (1729)



REACTION: ★★★★ (Loved)

All the makings of a classic children's book lined with subtle but pointed stabs at conventional society that will take on such different undertones when read again later in life. Enough insight and bite to make you question your way of being in the world and imagine other ways and possibilities that could be. I really enjoyed the play on opposites the worlds that Gulliver journeys through represented compared to the world we're used to. You have: 1) the land of tiny people where Gulliver was the giant; 2) the land of giants where he was the tiny one; 3) the floating circular island that defied gravity and our laws of physics; 4) the land where horses were the dominate species who ruled over humans and treated them as brute animals to be dealt with. Gulliver trying to explain humans and our societies to those who are not from our world and trying to not be stumped by their perfectly logical questions about why we do the illogical and arbitrary things we do, so much fun. The book mocks everything: human nature, religion, language, funeral rituals, sexism, warfare, philosophy, science, fashion, government, law, lawyers, scholars, doctors, colonization, etc. I find this very fair because it levels the playing field. There's no favoritism or agenda, since all's fair game when it comes to mocking. I remember the word "prodigious" was used a lot in this book. And some toileting details I've never encountered in any other work of literature before or since, which is oddly refreshing.


QUOTES:

"These people thought it a prodigious defect of policy among us, when I told them that our laws were enforced only by penalties, without any mention of reward."  (Gulliver, in Lilliput)

"Nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison."  (Gulliver, in Brobdingnag)

"For he could not understand, why nature should teach us to conceal what nature had given; that neither himself nor family were ashamed of any parts of their bodies; but, however, I might do as I pleased."    (Gulliver, about nudity in Country of the Houyhnhnms)

"Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. For these reasons, the trade of a soldier is held the most honourable of all others; because a soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill, in cold blood, as many of his species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can."   (Gulliver, in Country of the Houyhnhnms)

"He looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we disarmed ourselves of the few abilities she had bestowed; had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions"  (Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master's reaction to human society)

"Reason alone is sufficient to govern a rational creature"  (Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master)

"Temperance, industry, exercise, and cleanliness, are the lessons equally enjoined to the young ones of both sexes; and my master thought it monstrous in us, to give the females a different kind of education from the males"  (Gulliver, in Country of the Houyhnhnms)

"But as those countries which I have described do not appear to have any desire of being conquered and enslaved, murdered or driven out by colonies, nor abound either in gold, silver, sugar, or tobacco, I did humbly conceive, they were by no means proper objects of our zeal, our valour, or our interest."  (Gulliver, about English colonization)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera (1984)
~ original language: Czech




REACTION: ★★★★ (Loved)

Perfect rendering of the imperfections of life and people. I felt like the book delves into pretty heavy, philosophical topics in such quirky and endearing ways. I appreciated the overall theme about how the weight and burden we think we have is nothing compared to the lightness we bear when we have to face the impermanence and insignificance of our lives. We can't handle absolute freedom. It's unbearable because we invariably want permanence and the realness that comes from weight and being bound to something. I liked that the author breaks from narrative to comment on the ongoing story and his process as a writer. It's like the book version of breaking the fourth wall. I also enjoyed the nonlinear structure where the story follows each character's point of view around and jumps back and forth in time. It's told in a way that's not hard to take in all of what's happening to everyone and really works for the story. So much symbolism in this book I can't even keep track. Sabina is hands-down my favorite character, just everything she represents. She may be the only one who could handle the lightness of being. Her entire relationship with Franz is made of win with its inevitable fail and Dictionary of Misunderstood Words. Then the irony of Franz being wholly misunderstood by Marie Clove in the same way he had misunderstood Sabina. Fascinating all the stuff the book goes into about the undertones of meaning in different languages for the word "compassion," lyrical vs. epic womanizer, the concept and theme of "kitsch," dividing people into four categories based on how and who we wish to be looked at by, etc. There's virtually nothing I disagreed with about this book.


QUOTES:

"If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness."

"The absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air...and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant."

"And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No, 'sketch' is not quite the word, because sketch is an outline for something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture."

"Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself."

"She yearned for the two of them to merge into a hermaphrodite. Then the other bodies would be their playthings."  [Tereza, about Tomas]

"On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through."  [Sabina, about her paintings]

"It was a drunken carnival of hate... But no carnival can go on forever.  [Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia]

"A monument to time past... it was a recapitulation of time, a hymn to their common past, a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story that was disappearing in the distance."  [Sabina's bowler hat]

"Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had assume the correct attitude to her unchosen fate. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it."

"Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."

"The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own “I” ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. But enough. Let us return to Tomas."

"What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear--in other words, Communist kitsch."  [Sabina]

"Man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse."

"Man is as much a parasite on the cow as the tapeworm is on man"  [Tereza]

"Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."

"Mankind's true moral test...consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy" 


MOVIE (1988):


I actually saw the movie before I read the book. And I have to say it's probably the most effective adaptation of this book into film that could be made, capturing the essence of the story without following exact narrative structure since to do so would be too confusing to watch. Of course, nothing compares to the book and it's not like one of my favorite movies or anything. But it resonated enough to make me want to read the book in the first place. That scene where Franz walks into the empty room was my favorite part.