from Politics by Adam Thirlwell

I recently read this first novel by the young British writer Adam Thirlwell. I thought it was a pretty good book. It's written in a fairly breezy style that allows for serious moments without being the least bit heavy-handed. It also has some of the most graphic writing about sex that I've read in quite some time, but that's not exactly why I'm interested in it. What interested me most were a couple of authorial asides about another author, Milan Kundera, including this:

My mother's Czech friend, Petra, disliked Milan Kundera. She thought he should not have left his country. She thought that he was selfish.

I own a weird French edition of Milan Kundera's second novel Farewell Waltz. This edition was published in 1979. It has a fake-red cover, with a fake gold embossed pattern printed on it. As an introduction, there is an interview with Milan Kundera. I am going to quote you one sentence from this interview. 'No one can suspect what it cost me to leave my country: my hair turned grey,' said Milan.

I think we should remember some dates here. Kundera was born in 1929. When he left Czechoslovakia in 1975 he was, therefore, forty-six. That is quite an old age to leave your country. And he left only after seven years of living, under surveillance, in the forest near Brno, unpublished and isolated. Seven years is a long time to stay somewhere in isolation.

I do not think people are very intelligent about selfishness. I do not think they see how moral it can be. Because it is moral, refusing to be self-destructive. It is a perfectly moral position.

Of course this doesn't make as much sense, ripped from the novel as it is here, without the characters and incidents which this passage does so much to illuminate. So you should read the book. Although digressions such as this one - in true, Kundera-like, Diderot-like, Sterne-like fashion - are some of the best parts of the novel.

But what about this? Is Thirlwell on to something here? It seems to me that he is, although I'm not sure how well this can be squared with what I understand about our inherited Christian morality, within which (as I understand it) one can only do more when it comes to becoming unselfish. And then do more. I'm not being sly here; this is the only morality I'm invested in. Selfishness is practically a given, after all. Can it also be good? The lesser evil? I suppose so, but I also think the intersection between selfishness and self-preservation isn't one we frequent all that often, and the choice not often very confusing.