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Reading Kundera is a bit like watching Mad Men. You find nearly all of the characters in The Farewell Party and Mad Men repellent and highly limited (which makes you as a reader/watcher feel so clever) and yet they are so v. v. compelling, often their looks are what defines their behavior, how they are treated and what they can and can't do. Worlds built on artifice. What gives? Kundera and Weiner are masterful at using sexual politics and blind ambition to critique what is horribly wrong within confining ideological systems of gov't, for Kundera of course it is socialism and in MM it is rampant post-war mid-20th c. American capitalism. Why are these dramas so compelling? (and Kundera is a dramatist, moving his characters in and out of scenes quickly, ushering the reader into their lives as suddenly as they are whooshed away and replaced by others who carry the narrative. There is little description in Kundera, always attention to character, the richness of the individual mind, dialogue.)

In the case of the Farewell Party, we can see how 1970s Soviet-style communism limits their actions of these characters (except of course for the American Bartlett who is a Christian proselytizer enamored by his own martyr complex)and forces them to re-conceive notions of freedom within the circumscribed roles of gender and social status rather than opting for real social change. Mad Men functions in the same way--if not for 1950s unabashed post-war American capitalism, then Don Draper and his sordid retinue as well as their suburban wives would not be limited by their strict hetero-normative gender roles that determine how middle-class white men and women behave, what they desire, and how and why they think the way. For all of his grossly sexist cliches and commonplaces about women and their jealousy, their cunning, their hatred of each other, their oozing and often flabby bodies, Kundera's female characters usually have the moral high ground, if there is one to be found in his novels, because they are doomed based on their attachment to men, while the men are abhorrent because they resort to childish forms of behavior that they can get away with.

And yet as readers, we feel for them because they are ultimately human, they have their failings, and are blunted by their own obsessions. And Kundera's fiction, regardless of what you think of his deplorable characters and their often reprehensible actions, is driven by a volatile cocktail of erudition and compassion. we never feel like he is going through the motions, using fiction as an empty form to fill with his ideas rather writing fiction is the only way to express these ideas, because they are so particular, so complicated, so exasperatingly haunting and incomplete.