He interprets kinship and finds that mothers can be disgusting. He remembered little of his engineer father. Maybe he just remembers the smell of his mother’s milk and her pretty face. Jaromir is a spoiled brat, and to a certain extent I feel that La vie est ailleurs is an ethical novel. Perhaps all mothers in the world have a special affection for their sons, and it is not difficult to understand why most mothers do not like the sight of their daughter-in-law, who would steal away the man she loves most in the world, even her husband, whom she does not love that much. So when Jaromir took a woman to live in his childhood room, the mother outside was uneasy. She hates it when the person she loves the most is shared by another woman. It reminds me of a father giving his daughter’s hand to another man at a wedding ceremony. At this time I think the father’s mood is complicated, because from now on he is no longer the only man in this woman’s world, there is a man will take his place, become the most beloved daughter’s favorite.
Ethics is always a vague topic, many younger brothers always want to find a woman like his sister to marry, because his sister is the most beautiful woman in the world who knows him best. But Jaromir took the unattractive salesgirl to his childhood room, regardless of his mother’s distress. We all know that some pain is necessary because a mother cannot replace a lover. The poor mother was indeed poor. She knew clearly that her grown son would no longer belong to her, but she could not let go. We have also seen that the man the mother loves the most is always the son, even if the son does not necessarily love the mother. But it was bound to be a painful love.
Jaromir, the spoiled child, I do not like very much. He always thought he was the one who had been ‘ordained’. Yes, he was gifted at a young age, and he was well received in the adult world. But he is an overprotected female, unable to withstand a little ordeal and the torture of reality, setbacks will wither. And full of vanity, let him be himself. He expressed himself in poems, but those poems could not withstand the wind and rain, like his people, and the storm of one night made him past. His poems were no longer remembered, and they were buried with him, as he thought they were beautiful.
He yearns for freedom, for freedom from his mother’s surveillance, hence Xavier, a shadow living in a dream. Sleep was life to him, and life was a kind of dream, passing from one dream to another, as from one life to another. He went from one dream to another, from one landscape to another, and this was the condition of his survival, as surely as he would die if he stayed in the same place for a long time. Is Jaromir free? No, he will never be truly free, and as soon as he leaves his dear mother, he dies. The man in the dream died with the dreamer. He was a poet, and he lived in a world of lies in his own poetry, which even now seems ridiculous. Kundera did not like those poems, or he would not have treated Jaromir so harshly and let him die early at the age of 24, leaving his dream of becoming a poet to nothing.
The immature man will always yearn for the safety and unity of a world that he did alone in his mother’s body. So when he faces the adult world full of relativity, he feels afraid, he is like a drop of water in the vast ocean. In the adult world, most people are well aware that “absolutes” are just a trick, that nothing human is great or eternal. Jaromir is not special. He cannot hide in his mother’s womb forever, or he will not be able to truly become a man. And this spoiled child, after all, was too weak to withstand the challenges the world threw at him, and he was doomed in the first battle. Maybe the only woman he can bully is the one who dotes on him the most.
What is true love? True love is listening to the rest of the world said everything, believe that their loved one is the best lover in the world. Jaromir, however, does not know what true love is. He is more dominated by lust, and he wants to bid farewell to his boyish embarrassment. He wanted to show those women that he was a real man. What is justice in his heart? Is to send a woman who loves him to prison, let a young woman in prison to become everyone’s ‘snack’. He destroyed a woman who loved him, robbed her of all her life and vitality. When a woman is willing to bid farewell to the past for him, with all the mind to love him, he is so bitter arrows in return. He is selfish and loves himself more than anyone else. He did not know that to love someone was to trust her unconditionally. His doubts caused her pain, and his face was excited to see her pain. He stood by and enjoyed the tears of his lover. As if a woman’s tears were a compliment to him, an affirmation of the man he had become.
What is fame? Fame is nothing but a man’s vanity hungry. Fame is an illusion in the mirror, fame is just a play on tomorrow’s no longer the audience. You say fame is a person’s life, then what is life? Death makes everything go up in smoke. It is time to eliminate the contradiction between the dream state and the actual state, between poetry and life, between action and thought. Jaromir and Xavier have disappeared. Death makes the end is the best end. The mirror of fame was broken, Jaromir could not live, so he had to die.
There are times that need to be subverted, and Kundera subverted that era and destroyed that world. He gave the world to eat a gentle poison, and then the people of that world quietly killed, exterminated.
Life, I think, is not only in the poet’s poetry, but also in the real life, between the unreal and the existence, the reality of the world no one can deny. We can dream, but we also have to accept the truth after the dream.
