Milan Kundera’s first novel “The Joke” was a work of dark humor.
Paris:
Milan Kundera, author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” whose dark, evocative novels delve into the enigma of the human condition, has died, a spokesman for the Milan Kundera Library in his native city of Brno said Wednesday. He was 94 years old.
“Unfortunately I can confirm that Mr Milan Kundera passed away yesterday (Tuesday) after a long illness,” she told AFP.
Kundera died in his apartment in Paris, France, his adopted country, where he had lived since emigrating from communist-ruled Czechoslovakia in 1975.
“Not only Czech literature, but also world literature has lost one of the greatest contemporary authors and one of the most translated,” Tomasz Kubicek, director of the Kundera Library, told public Czech TV.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said that Kundera was able to “attract entire generations of readers from all continents” with his work.
Kundera was often seen as a strong contender to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he never claimed the prestigious honor.
Through his characteristic satire and poetic prose, Kundera sought to express everything that was compelling and absurd about life, drawing on his own experiences of being stripped of his Czech nationality for dissent.
In his critical work “The Art of the Novel” (1986), he said, “Life is a trap we have always known: we are born without asking, locked in a body we never chose, and die.” fixed.”
young rebel
Kundera was born on April 1, 1929 in the city of Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia. His father was a renowned pianist.
He studied in Prague, where he joined the Communist Party, translated the French poet Apollinaire, and wrote his own poetry.
He also taught at a film school where his students included future Oscar-winning director Milos Forman.
Although he claimed loyalty to communism, the free spirit of Kundera’s writings soon got him into trouble.
He was expelled from the party in 1950, rejoined the party in 1956, and was expelled a second time in 1970 after the Prague Spring reform movement – in which he played a role – was crushed.
locked out
Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke”, a work of dark humor about the one-party state published in 1967, led to a ban on his writing in Czechoslovakia, while also making him famous in his homeland.
In 1975, he and his wife Vera went into exile in France, where he worked for four years as an assistant professor at the University of Rennes. In 1979 he was stripped of his Czech nationality.
In his adopted home, where he became a citizen in 1981, his reputation and success grew when translations of his novels appeared, such as Life Is Elsewhere (1973), about a poet trapped by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. .
“The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1979) playfully explores politics, history, and the nature of forgetting in daily life through seven interconnected stories.
The New York Times said in 1980, “The novel was brilliant and original, written with a purity and intelligence that invites us straight in; it is also strange, with an awkwardness that creeps us out.”
The Times critic, John Updike, said Kundera was a writer who “seduces sex and moves abruptly, if gracefully, into autobiography, abstract musings and recent Czech history.”
By far her most famous work, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was published in 1984 and turned into a film in 1987 starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis.
The novel is a morality tale about freedom and passion on both an individual and collective level, set against the consequences of the Prague Spring and its exile.
no going back?
Kundera’s critics say that after his exile in France and the decision to ban the translation of his French books into Czech, he turned his back on fellow Czechs and dissidents.
In 2008, a Czech magazine accused him of being a police informer under the Communist regime, which he denied as “pure lies”.
In 2013, Kundera published his first novel after a gap of 13 years.
“The Festival of Insignificance”, about five friends in Paris, received mixed reviews, with The Atlantic noting its “almost-impenetrable irony” and The Guardian deeming it “stinking”.
The New York Times said, “From what Kundera has told us, it seems less relevant.” “You can’t help wondering how he might have developed if he had stayed in Czechoslovakia, or lived longer. “
In 2019, the Czech Republic restored his nationality and in 2023 the Milan Kundera Library was opened in his hometown of Brno.
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