Milan Kundera, a dissident writer in communist Czechoslovakia who became an exiled totalitarian satirist, has passed away in Paris at the age of 94, Czech media reported on Wednesday.
The acclaimed book 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' by Milan Kundera begins heartbreakingly with Soviet tanks rolling through Prague, the Czech capital where the author lived before emigrating to France in 1975.
Kundera's novel received high praise for fusing together themes of love and exile, politics, and the intensely personal. This helped him gain a large following among Westerners, who embraced both his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism woven throughout many of his works, according to CBS News.
"If someone had told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn't possibly imagine. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life," Kundera told the author Philip Roth in a New York Times interview in 1980, the year before he became a naturalised French citizen.
Kundera wrote in French and Czech, resulting in revised French translations. His books were banned in Czechoslovakia due to government censorship, which persisted until the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
Here is a collection of some of the best books written by the revolutionary Milan Kundera that every book-lover must-read, according to Medium.
Milan Kundera's 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is a novel about a young woman in love with a man who is torn between his love and his mistresses.
The novel features geographically distant places, playful reflections, and various styles, making it a significant achievement for Kundera.
The film adaptation, directed by Philip Kaufman, features Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin, and Stellan Skarsgard.
Kundera's first significant international success came with the publication of ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ in the late 1970s. The book is rich in stories, characters, and imaginative depth.
Like all of his work, it is significant for reasons other than just how it relates to history. Different facets of human existence are emphasised and downplayed, rearranged and examined, and given fresh examination, analysis, and experience in seven masterfully integrated parts.
This outstanding novel of thwarted love and retaliation has far too frequently been read for its political undertones.
Though it is now simpler to put such implications into perspective in favour of appreciating the book (and all of Kundera's work) for what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the timeless themes of human existence, a quarter century after 'The Joke' was first published and a number of years after the fall of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime.
'Immortality,' which is divided into seven parts, centres on Agnes, her sister Laura, her husband Paul, and themselves.
In this breathtaking, resonant examination of human nature, Kundera continues to search for the meaning of life while maintaining his razor-sharp sense of humour. It is one of those outstanding, uncategorizable masterpieces that only emerge about every twenty years.
'Laughable Loves' is a collection of seven stories written by Milan Kundera, published in Prague before 1968 but later banned.
The stories explore love and the complex erotic games and stratagems used by women and men to cope with their needs and impulses. Sexual attraction is depicted as a sour game that can lead to pain, uncertainty, panic, vanity, and a constant need for reassurance.
The stories depict various characters, such as a young couple on holiday, middle-aged men searching for girls, an older woman feeling humiliated, and an elderly doctor using his wife to increase his attraction. Kundera's mastery of fiction's most graceful illusions and surprises is evident in Laughable Loves.
In their home country, which they had left behind when they decided to become exiles 20 years prior, a man and a woman by chance cross paths. Will they be able to resume the thread of their odd love story, which was abruptly ended and then lost in the ebb and flow of time?
In reality, "their memories no longer match" after such a prolonged absence. We constantly think that we share the same memories as the person we love and that our experiences are identical. However, this is only a delusion. But what can we really expect from a memory that is so poor?
Nobody understands why it is this bit and not any other bit; it only captures "a tiny, insignificant particle" of the past. We refuse to acknowledge the fact that we are deeply buried in forgetting.
Only those who come back after twenty years, like Odysseus, who came back to Ithaca, can be dazzled and amazed by seeing the goddess of ignorance for themselves.
Originally, Kundera planned to call this book The Lyrical Age. According to Kundera, youth is the lyrical age, and this book is foremost an epic of adolescence. It is an ironic epic that tenderly undermines sacred values like motherhood, poetry, revolution, and even childhood.
Jaromil is a poet, after all. His mother helped him become a poet and was there for him on his deathbed and in his love bed, respectively. Jaromil is a truly poetic figure who is simultaneously absurd and moving, horrifying and completely innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!).
Unlike some creeps, he is Rimbaud. In a sombre farce, Rimbaud is caught up in the communist revolution.
A young nurse with whom Klima, a well-known jazz trumpeter, spent a single night at a fertility spa, has become pregnant, Klima learns via phone. She is made up her mind that he is the father. This is the start of a comedy in which things happen at an increasingly rapid pace over the course of five crazy days.
Similar to A Midsummer Night's Dream, this black comedy also features Klima's beautiful, envious wife, the nurse's equally envious boyfriend, a fanatical gynaecologist, a rich American who is both Don Juan and a saint, and an elderly political prisoner who is hosting a farewell party at the spa just before leaving the country.
As per usual, Milan Kundera raises important issues with a mocking irreverence that helps us realise that the modern world has robbed us of our right to tragedy.
