How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph), with the exception of Part V, which runs (Part#. "Short Title". Paragraph). Part V has no numbered chapters—only title headings.
Quote #7
For Tamina is adrift on a raft and looking back, looking only back. Her entire being contains only what she sees there, far behind her. Just as her past contracts, disintegrates, dissolves, so Tamina is shrinking and losing her contours. (IV.5.9)
This is the problem of living in the past: you make nothing of your present life. For Tamina, the tragedy of her husband's death is also a loss of her own life, at least in part. She's so invested in the life that's now gone that she sees no future for herself and no purpose in the present. It's a desperate place to be, and it drives Tamina to some pretty questionable behavior.
Quote #8
The time of Kafka's novel is the time of a humanity that has lost its continuity with humanity, of a humanity that no longer knows anything and no longer remembers anything and lives in cities without names where the streets are without names or with names different from those they had yesterday, because a name is continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name. (VI.1.4)
Hence the term "Kafkaesque": disorienting, nightmarish, senseless. Kundera identifies with Kafka precisely because Prague is the city that inspires this feeling in both of them. It's a place that suffers under the tyranny of people who want to erase the city's past and its culture.
Why would anyone want to do this, you ask? In order to dominate the people who live there. It's really easy to control something once you take hold of its identity and shape it for your own purposes. And this is the reality of Kundera's life in Prague under the Communist regime.
Quote #9
"You begin to liquidate a people," Hübl said, "by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was." (VI.2.4)
Kundera's historian friend Milan Hübl understands that there's power in owning the identity and past of an entire people. If you can erase or modify what people think they know about themselves, you can make them think anything—about themselves, about you, about everything. It's an insidious power, but it's way effective.