I love reading because...

I love reading for many reasons. One is that reading is an act of empathy; through reading we inhabit other skins and see the world through other eyes. The value of this cannot be underestimated. Our ability to understand each other, and to look beyond our own surroundings in doing so, is one of the core aspects of humanity. 

Great art ‘opens the door of our bodies and allows our souls to step out into the world and make friends.’ (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being). 

Great writing - indeed, great art - changes us from the inside out, and thus changes the world person by person. ‘Thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires…civilisation is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanise life with their fables.’ (Mario Vargas Llosa - Nobel Prize winning lecture).

Book Review: Ignorance by Milan Kundera

Translated by Linda Asher.

There was a time in my early twenties when I consumed Milan Kundera novels. The infatuation began at the end of my first year of university, on holiday in Menorca reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera expanded my horizons of what was possible in a novel: I think I was a little overawed. When I got back I typed up a passage and blue-tacked it to my wall.

"He considered music a liberating force. It liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library. It opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world and make friends."

Nearly a decade later I still know this quote word for word. It hung for years next to one from Nelson Mandela and another by someone else I can not now remember. Kundera offered everything I wanted at the time in a novel: lyrical prose, Eastern European communist settings, intellectual fodder. The flow of words, images poking through the prose, invocation of emotions I, in my youth, found impossibly romantic. All suited me.

From there I progressed quickly. Through The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with its stunning first page and a half anecdote about the capacity for history to forget those who once stood centre stage, and Immortality with its post-modern concept of the creation of a character. Then came Ignorance and finally Life is Elsewhere and Xavier. Xavier seemed like a stroke of genius, at once liberating the protagonist, Jaromil, from his earthly station and allowing the novel to float across borders and under curtains. Xavier the exquisite metaphor for the majesty of freedom: freedom to drift from one story to another, one reality dissolving into the next. And Jaromil, full of romantic suffering, allowing Kundera to discuss the shape death gives life.

Kundera is a young mans’ novelist. And I loved him for it. But towards the end of these the familiar style grew a little repetitive. At the same time a vast array of other authors were unfurling before my eyes and I moved on to new territory.

I hadn’t read another Kundera in at least 5 years. So when the one of the book clubs I’m in – incidentally led by someone currently writing his PhD on Kundera – decided to read Ignorance, I was excited. And yet I almost didn’t re-read it. I was afraid, I think, deep down, that I had outgrown Kundera, that his work would no longer have the same impact on me as it once did.

By the end of page five these fears had been dispelled. The smooth prose once more captivated me, with psychology, philosophy, linguistics and more entwining around and through the story, explaining and advancing it,  Where some novelists seem to use fiction only as a sounding board for their musings, Kundera knits his into the fabric of the story, enlightening and entertaining alongside a worthwhile plot.

The genesis of Ignorance is an interesting one. Having published just one novel, The Joke, in 1967, Kundera left Czechoslovakia in 1975, to settle in France. For many years he published his most famous novels from abroad. Then, in the late 1990s, while others were returning to their homelands, Kundera chose to stay in France, and switched from writing in Czech to French. His three French novels, to which Ignorance belongs, are shorter than his Czech novels. Of them, Ignorance is perhaps the most biographically similar to Kundera’s own life, a response to the Diaspora that left Communist Block countries in the 50s, 60s and 70s to settle in Western Europe. It is a love story for home. But what home is, and whether it can change as one’s life does, is not certain. It’s a love story for memory and nostalgia and all the complex emotions precipitated by emigration. Guilt and jealousy and superiority and happiness and sadness and longing.

Having emigrated in the 1970s, Irena settled in Paris with her husband and young family. Though life proved difficult after her husband died, she battled through, and feels strong and independent for it. Josef left Czechoslovakia and found love and happiness in Denmark. When they meet, by chance, on a long put off homecoming, they pick up the shreds of a love that was abandoned years earlier, before it had chance to blossom. Each adrift in their homeland, culturally disconnected from their former peers and with the language sounding strange to their ears, they find solace in each other, connected by memories of who they were and uncertainty about who they have become. But memory is unreliable: do they remember the past in the same way? And what of Milada, a lonely woman scarred by a traumatic event in her teens? As their stories and experiences converge, Kundera poses the major question of the book: what of identity and memory when we are ignorant of our true selves?

Interspersed with this story, Kundera muses on Homer’s Odyssey and Odysseus’s experience of homecoming, drawing parallels with those of Irena and Josef. One of the great things about Kundera is that he eschews glib answers in favour of mess and uncertainty. There are no simple truths, only a mishmash of contradiction. My copies often end up full of notes on passages that I underline to return to:

“All predictions are wrong, that’s one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about the future but about their experience of the present moment.”

Nostalgia is a concern Kundera returns to regularly. Jonathan Safran Foer took the title of his debut, Everything is Illuminated from a quote about nostalgia from The Unbearable Lightness of Being – “in the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine”. This quote could almost act as a summery for Ignorance. What if, on returning home, you find your nostalgic memories of the past have become wrong? What if nostalgia has been deceiving you all along?

Kundera critiques his characters, explores them in a way that is more akin to psychoanalysis than fiction. It’s hard not to use hackneyed phrases such as tour-de-force when describing his approach to storytelling. However, something that struck me on this reading that I hadn’t fully voiced before, was the flaw in his understanding of human beings. He intellectualises rather than empathises, and as a result discounts the influence that compassion, generosity and kindness play as impulses to human behaviour. As a result his characters feel cold and unapproachable. As separate individuals, they are fine, but as a fictional landscape populated by invented characters, they do not convince.

Returning to Milan Kundera after a few years off was a wonderful experience, though it probably had less effect on my now than it once did. But then, I’m not sure how many books there are that have as great an impact on my now as when I was younger. Everyone should read Kundera at some point in the life, preferably when their young. All authors have the weaknesses, but few possess as many knockout strengths as he.

Ignorance was first published by Faber and Faber in 2003. ISBN: 9780571215515. 208pp

Book Review: Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day 7 it is a chance to relive Everything is Illuminated.

Read: January 2008

Everything is Illuminated in one tweet-sized chunk:

Vast in scope and iridescent in execution, not to mention fearlessly inventive, Everything is Illuminated left me wondering when I would read a novel quite this good again.

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Any novel which takes its title from a Milan Kundera novel has a lot to live up to. And sometimes, in this startlingly original and diverse debut, Jonathan Safran Foer exceeds even an optimistic readers wildest dreams. Such is the dexterity and invention of his writing that one gets the impression there are no challenges to which he couldn’t rise.

I barely remember the last time I savoured every word of an entire novel. From the hilarious opening pages in which Alex introduces himself in his uniquely translated English – “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” – to the inevitable conclusion to their “very rigid search,” this is a novel that engages the reader throughout, eliciting an emotional response of one sort or another on almost every page.

The plot is multifarious, but essentially follows a character named Jonathan as he arrives in Ukraine to investigate his family history. He hires a local tour agency and sets off in search of the village of Trachimbrod and the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s fifty years before. Accompanied by his translator, Alex – America obsessed and speaking English as though he has swallowed a thesaurus, - his ‘blind’ grandfather, and their ‘seeing-eye bitch’ Sammy Davis Jnr, Jnr, their journey into the heart of rural Ukraine takes them into a past hidden from view by fifty years of concerted and deliberate forgetting. You could say this is a novel about the holocaust, but it is not. Like Art Spiegleman’s exquisite graphic novel, Maus, it is about how the past effects the present, and how we are defined by the ways in which we remember and deal with the horrors of the past.

There are three concurrent plot lines woven together, each illuminating and offering commentary on the others. First we have the actual journey, recounted in his beautifully mangled English by Alex, hilarious, shot through with peculiarly profound descriptions and eye for the heart of the matter. Then there is Jonathan’s family history novel of Trachimbrod, brilliantly imagined, full of bizarre magical realist twists, religious writings and intense, slightly otherworldly characters. Finally there are Alex’s letters to Jonathan, now back in America, commenting upon each of their novels, offering oversight to the work as a whole and a pleasing post-script to the main action of the plot.

Brought together by Foer's amazing ability to hold multiple themes in the air and bring them together seamlessly, Everything is Illuminated is a beautifully written, hilarious and moving novel which will illuminate the reading of anyone who chooses to pick it up.

The oft used criticism for Everything is Illuminated is that the author is being too clever: that his invention and wit and conceptual scope are the results of a smart-alec show-off, the kind of intellectual posturing which fiction can do without. But when on earth did being clever become such a faux pas? There is nothing more commendable than an author willing to experiment with their writing, to reach for the stars and try and say as much in as meaningful a way as possible. Perhaps it is because the prose is so eminently readable that his intellect conflicts with some. Because it is when the simple meets the profound that this novel really illuminates the room. I read much of this in the bath and frequently wanted to jump up, suddenly enlivened with a phrase or idea, and shout ‘eureka!’ For suddenly the world was that little bit clearer. There are some beautiful phrases, beautiful in how they relate to the themes of the novel, the characters and the plot. They are not easily recreated because they do not exist in and of themselves, but are made great by the novel in its entirety, every single word and phrase eventually draws together, circular and profound. From the slow evolution of Alex’s language to the subtle fissions forming along the fault lines of history, Everything is Illuminated replicates itself throughout. The tone fits the events, the characters evolutionary arc delineates the emotional heart of the novel, the humour makes possible the tragedy.

Indeed it is the relationship between humour and tragedy that sums up all that takes place. Not only does humour make it possible to glance at the tragedies of the holocaust but those self same tragedies demonstrate just how hollow and fragile the humour can be. Nothing is set in stone, ideas evolve and develop with the intense experience of the characters, and the reader is invited along for the duration. For example, early on, in his letters Alex writes:

“I know that you asked me not to alter the mistakes because they sound humorous, and humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story, but I think I will alter them.”

Then, later in the novel, Jonathan offers the other interpretation:

“I used to think that humour was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is…but now I think it’s the opposite. Humour is a way of shrinking from that wonderful world”

What begins as a very funny, witty and irreverent novel is slowly overtaken by a gloomy appreciation of history and the characters are transformed in ways that can never be reversed.

“‘There is time for all of them,’ I told him, because remember where we are in our story, Jonathan. We still thought we possessed time.”

A celebration of the writing process throughout, each of the characters takes up their pen to try and shed light upon the experiences of the past, and it is the process of writing which makes them stare right at it, to understand their lives through the process of writing them. As Alex says: “With writing, we have second chances.” And echoed in history comes the repeated phrase from Trachimbrod, “We are writing, we are writing, we are writing.” Conserving the past so as to live in the present.

One thing Everything is Illuminated cannot be accused of is understatement. Very little is left to the imagination of the reader, or to speak for itself without having its purpose comprehensively enunciated. But, though this usually annoys me, here the vast, brash, luridly grandiose intentions of the author come shining through. It is a novel that could only be written by a young writer, vast and iridescent, fearlessly inventive, it left me wondering when I would read a novel as good again. I have spent the last week flicking through the pages, desperately trying to assimilate it all, reminding myself of an event here, a phrase there. Perhaps I will even read the book again, immediately, afraid to forget a single detail.

For in a novel which is all about memory, the one thing I can say for certain is that I shall not forget it in a hurry. It is a book which gets under your skin and they are characters you take to heart. As Alex sums up at the culmination of the excellent movie adaptation:

“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out.”

10 out of 10

My Reading Mojo

This was written as a response to an article on Vulpes Libris charting the evolution of someone's reading habits over the years. I found it fascinating and decided to do the same...

Up until about age 14 I read all the time. It started with reading with my dad at bedtime to practice my reading but soon I had proved that I could read and got to sit back while he read to me. We read all sorts of environmentally friendly children's adventure books: the likes of Michael Morpurgo, the Greenwatch series, books about whaling by someone with the surname Smith. I remember regularly reading late into the night, particularly Matilda by Roald Dahl which I must have read 4 or 5 times. I read to escape, not because my childhood was hard but because the other worlds in those books were so fantastically exciting. The books helped me understand the world, learn what it was I most valued, and ultimately have a mighty great time doing it.

My big Eureka! moment also came with Lord of the Rings when I was 10 or 11. I had started it with my dad but soon the one chapter a night got too slow for me so I began taking it to school and reading on wet lunch breaks and the like. I flew though the last 400 pages or so and loved every single minute of it.

This sort of thing continued for the first year or two of secondary school before being overtaken by computer games (football management games proved the death of reading for me) and staring inanely at sport on the TV. I wasn't a particularly sociable teenager so it wasn't girls or alcohol which was responsible for this, probably just the overriding sense that reading wasn't the cool thing to be doing. Still, I had a 25 minute train journey to school every morning which had to be filled with something and I occasionally read during this (Christian Jacques Ramses series and a few others) but reading was more to fill time than anything else.

During GCSE's and A-Levels revision I read my set texts again and again. I must have read Lord of the Flies and Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence 4 or 5 times so that come the exams I loved them in an intellectual sense even if I didn't in an emotional sense. And all this enforced reading took its toll. When it came to university I didn't want to be told to read any more classics so I applied to study history.

A month before I started university I was sitting around home quite bored and decided to give Harry Potter a go. 6 days later I had read the first 4 books in a haze of adventurous excitement and for the next year or two everything I read was overshadowed by love of those books. Not that I remember successfully reading much else, other than a complete re-reading of Lord of the Rings, that is. I had a tough time personally and remember going to the campus bookshop one morning when I hadn't been able to sleep all night and buying the boxset which I then went back to my room and read one after the other again in about 8 days. I would read fansites and get breathlessly excited just discussing what might happen next, watched the movies slightly obsessively, and even used to buy the candy. (Yes, I was 19 or 20 at the time!)

That summer I had the reading, and life experience (I met the wonderful woman who later became my wife), which changed me. Having found another amazing fantasy world through Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials I read Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being and found intellectual, post-modernist, adult fiction which made my mind swim with ideas.

I would talk with Megan about the books we liked for hours. She had been a complete bibliophile as a child and read all the classics which I hadn't so she was like a beacon of the person I wanted to become. She opened my mind to all sorts of new reading possibilities and I hungrily devoured them. But as university got closer to the end, and then through my masters, I found that I was reading too many history texts to think about fiction. The longer this went on, the more I looked forward to finishing with education so that I could read for pleasure once more. For about 6 months I spent my time planning what I would read when I had free choice once more.

And then, the day I handed in my masters dissertation I sat in the union bar and looked out the window to see that Waterstone's was seeking temporary booksellers. I applied, was interviewed, was not chosen. Not at first anyway. But after the first, second, and possibly third candidates turned it down they offered it to me and I jumped at the opportunity.

The 4 years I spent at Waterstone's were a veritable roller-coaster of literary discovery. Being surrounded everyday by so many wonderful books is an experience I shall never forget. But it ended in February of this year when I got a new office job and since then my reading mojo has definitely taken a downturn. This saddens me greatly, but I don't know to get it back.

Whether at the very heart of my life or simmering quietly on the back burner, reading has always been at the heart of my life and it is something I am incredibly grateful for.

Life is Elsewhere - Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera is an author whose style is so unique and idiosyncratic that you will either love him or hate him. I am firmly in the first category. The psychological examination which he puts his characters through dissects their personas to such a magnificent extent as to believe they are real people. In this novel, one of his lesser known early books, Kundera examines the life of a poet, from the time of his conception, to his untimely death. Against the backdrop of Czechoslovakia’s struggle with Communism, the young poet searches for a way to fit into this ever changing world. But in this book it is the poet’s alter-ego Xavier - a chameleonic character who emerges from one dream into another, never waking to the awful struggles of reality - who is the touch of genius, living the fantasy life that the poet can only dream of. If you love Milan Kundera then search this little gem out, you will find few better examinations of the literary psyche.

8 out of 10

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is not one single story, but a series of short stories with common themes, all revolving around the notion of forgetting, of how history is edited and rewritten to suit the needs of the present. The first page tells an enthralling tale about two Czech Communist leaders, which sums up the pages which follow.

“In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square…Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head. The propaganda section made hundred of thousands of copies of the photograph…every child knew that photograph from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums. Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”

I love that story. It is so evocative, powerful. It sets the tone so perfectly. It is a story that seems to sum up political history. History is written by the winner and the rest made to forget what once they knew as certainly as night follows day. Since time immemorial it has been so. And sometimes, the only thing to do is laugh at the brazen ridiculousness of it all. What else can you do? Mere mortals cannot rewrite history.

If you like Milan Kundera, then many consider this to be the pinnacle of his writing to date. Perhaps it is not the best place to start with his work, but if you love The Unbearable Lightness of Being then reading this is an absolute must.

7 out of 10

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

Read July 2002

I first read The Unbearable Lightness of Being when I was nineteen and on holiday in Menorca. I had just finished the third book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and didn’t think anything I read would compare to it. Little did I realise the genius of Milan Kundera. Within ten pages I was stuck by the certainty that what I was reading was absolutely nothing like anything I had ever read before. Milan Kundera has a style which is truly unique. Instead of constructing a linear plot with characters illuminated by the things they experience, Kundera subjects his characters to psychoanalysis, completely gets into their minds to elucidate everything about them. When you read a Milan Kundera book you are suddenly aware of how complex and fascinating individuals are, and how they fit into wider philosophical ideas. As he explains their actions and thoughts you get to know them in a intensely intimate manner, not as a friend or lover or colleague but as someone who you have almost been, someone whose mind you have actually lived in. You begin to think as they do, consider the world through their eyes, understand what makes them tick.

Kundera’s writing is like the lecture you always wanted to listen to: enlightening, funny, and full of personal significance. When you read Kundera, you don’t only learn something of the world around you, but something of yourself as well. Reading your first Milan Kundera novel, like your first kiss, first day of university, or the day you first realised how great music could be, is an experience that will remain with you throughout your life.

In this, his most celebrated work, Kundera subjects life in newly Communist Prague to the post-modern novels favourite topics: love, sex, politics and philosophy. There are two couples, Tomas and Tereza, Sabina and Franz. It is 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, artists and intellectuals are suddenly free. Then, a few months later, the Soviet army has moved in and crushed the revolution. The book centres on this freedom, this lightness of being, and how it is paralleled in our everyday experience of life. Since we are all, ultimately, insignificant, existence is unencumbered by weighty decisions which could transform life forever. It is light, airy, irrelevant. But this is not an easily bearable idea to accompany life. Emotions, desires, beauty all get in the way, making our lives feel heavy even through this lightness. Hence the title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Like much European literature, Kundera’s work is rife with real sexuality, not pornographic but intimate, natural, enjoyable and fun. It is erotic in a relatable way, down-to-earth and human. And the same is true of other sensory concepts. A love of music dances throughout this novel, wafting on the breeze of the character’s obsession. How often do you find a stave and written music in a novel? Indeed one of the most sumptuous of all lines I have read in literature comes from this fabulous novel on the subject of music:

“He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends.”

As Kundera says, “a song is a beautiful lie.” If the same is true for fiction, then this is one of the most beautiful of lies ever told. And there are many, many other such quotes. But I will limit myself to just one, the sentence which inspired Jonathan Safran Foer’s equally resplendent novel, Everything is Illuminated.

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

It would be so easy to write a review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being as a list of glorious quotes. You can open the book at any page and find one staring back at you. It is difficult to stop the sort of chin-on-the-floor type dazed amazement from infiltrating this writing. You absolutely have to read this book. Just put down whatever you were about to read and buy this instead. You will not be disappointed.

10 out of 10

Influential Authors

Tough one, this.

I take the idea from Shelf Life. Which authors have influenced my thoughts on books, or writing. They are not necessarily my favourite writers, or those I most admire, but those who have influenced me in some way or another.

Over the years many authors have moulded and shaped my mind as a reader, and often radically transformed what I think about when I think about writing (haha, see what I did there?) Here are just a few of them.

1. Russell Hoban - Taught me that the only limit to writing is the extent of our imagination.
2. Haruki Murakami - Demonstrated how Magical Realism, well done, can express emotional upheaval through metaphor far more effectively than any amount of weeping realism ever has.
   He has also become my 'go-to' writer. Whenever I have become stuck with a book and struggled or not enjoyed finishing it, I go back to a Murakami novel and remember exactly why I love fiction.
3. Milan Kundera - Offered my first foray into fearsomely intelligent, intellectual writing. Enlivened my mind to the possibilities of what a novel can do.
4. Roald Dahl - Helped my fall in love with storybooks. I remember staying up late at night, huddled under the covers, when I was only about 7, desperately scrabbling through Matilda, totally unable to put it down.
5. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings was the first adult book I read to myself, when I was 10 years old. I started off reading it with my Dad but got bored of waiting for our evening reading so decided to read it on my own and from then on I never looked back.
6. J.M. Coetzee - Demonstrated that great writing does not have to be complex or fancy, that what is most important is creating an atmosphere and telling a story and that the simpler you do that the better. Also demonstrates how unappetising sex scenes can be in fiction.
7. Charles Palliser - Reminded me that for all the great ideas you have, the story will always be paramount. If a reader cannot put a book down then that is the greatest achievement you can ever hope for.
8. Don Delillo - Offers a masterclass in the simplicity of good dialogue.
9. Toni Morrison - Taught me that you cannot judge a writer by their agent! No matter how infuriating, rude, or disrespectful an agent/publicist might be bears no correlation with how charming, and amusing the writer will be.
10. Kazuo Ishiguro - Showed me that writing is best when an author has the confidence to let their characters and events speak for themselves. That authorial commentary is best left to an absolute minimum.
11. Olga Grushin - HER STYLE IS DECEPTIVELY LIKE MINE! Gave me a sense that perhaps I can be a good writer.
12. Iris Murdoch - Ah, the unreliable narrator. Showed just how much you can do in the first person even if the narrator is delusional, confused and utterly unreliable.
13. Salman Rushdie - Where to begin? Inspires with every sentence. Demonstrates how mythology can bring a novel alive and create a colour palate of vivid imagination which works in counterpoint to the main plot. His lively, jumpy, excitable prose is an absolute pleasure to read. And he ties together ancient mythology with contemporary culture in a way few authors can.
14. Stephane Audeguy - Merges biography with fiction and fiction with biography in a way I have not seen done by anyone else.
15. Michelle De Kretser, Martin Amis and many others. How unbelievably unreadable and turgid some work can be. This is a very good lesson to learn.
16. Charlotte Bronte - The power of the narrator to carry a plot on their shoulders alone. If you have a great narrative, then I will read on forever, no matter what is happening in the plot.
17. G.K. Chesterton - The king of witty thoughts on writing. Argues that the simpler the prose is, the more you can convey. Less is definitely more.